New books on the history of slavery culture

Reading this narrow and, due to its sobriety, relentlessly illuminating overview book by Andreas Eckert on the history of slavery leaves bitterness and desolation in the end. Slavery has not only existed in the millennia since the so-called “Neolithic Revolution”, ie the settling down of people from around 10,000 BC. BC, common, it is also immediately present today. In more recent documents from the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva, there is talk of almost 40 million people worldwide in “modern slavery”, “mostly children and women”. Be it the unworthy conditions of seamstresses in Bangladesh, be it the forced labor camps in Russia, China and other countries, be it the inhumane conditions for foreign workers in Qatar, for example, or the continued child labor in many parts of the world. The list of today’s slave-like scoundrels can be continued at will.

Andreas Eckert, born in 1964 and professor for the history of Africa at the Humboldt University in Berlin, sums it up as follows: “The majority of the figures locate the majority of today’s slaves in the Asia-Pacific region, especially in India, then in African countries south of the Sahara. But according to some estimates, there are still 560,000 slaves in Europe. ” Their activities ranged from “extraction of raw materials, simple processing steps or services” to “sexual exploitation”. Those affected lived in poverty, low qualifications and a lack of prospects. Four roads led to slavery: “through captivity and kidnapping, selling children, deception and indebtedness. (…) Whatever the individual assessment of the dimensions of modern slavery, they are not the result of atavistic remnants of non-European societies, but take place in and with the structures of global capitalism. “

On Wall Street, slaves have long been accepted as collateral for loans and mortgages

Eckert traces the stages of slavery as keenly as briefly, beginning in ancient times with the Greeks and Romans, then in the Middle Ages. In ancient times it was “barbarians”, especially prisoners of war, then serfs or also “voluntary” slaves, who put themselves into total dependency, because otherwise they would only face misery and starvation. Nowadays the term slave is first associated with African people, because slave trade and slave ownership were and are racist in the two Americas. The Europeans in the Americas first enslaved the indigenous peoples and destroyed them by the thousands, also on racist grounds.

In the chapter “Trade with people from Africa” ​​Eckert describes that trade not only took place across the Atlantic to Brazil, the Caribbean and southern North America, but also within Africa through the Sahara and the Indian Ocean. He makes it unmistakably clear that the long, arduous and bloody attempts to escape from the various slaveries by no means always lead to happier freedom, but mostly to precarious work and poverty again. The term “free labor” should seem like a mockery of the brutal systems of exploitation and oppression with which racism, inequality and discrimination were and are maintained even after the official, but only supposed “end” of slavery.

The second bitter realization is the fact that societies in which philosophy, science, and the Enlightenment were cultivated slaves had to create prosperity. In ancient Greece, for example, which was also the cradle of democracy, in ancient Rome, whose power of civilization shaped all of Europe, in the Florence of the Renaissance when humanism flourished. Slaves were treated as possessions beyond any evocation of humanity or the proclamation of human rights. After all, in ancient Greece, and especially in Rome, one could be released or ransomed and then even become a Roman citizen. In addition, slaves were not only forced to do the lowest and hardest work, but could also work as craftsmen, goldsmiths, teachers and educators.

The example of North America shows otherwise: “On Wall Street, slaves have long been accepted as security for loans and mortgages. The rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, adorned with a bronze Statue of Liberty, was built by enslaved workers. Ten of the first twelve presidents owned slaves, as well like hundreds of congressmen and senators and at least two-thirds of the lawyers who served in the Supreme Court prior to 1865. ” The recent events surrounding the George Floyd case and the structural violence of the police show how permeated the United States is by the consequences of slavery, which have not yet been fully dealt with. And that’s just one strand of the inheritance.

Open detailed view

But other colonial rulers were and are no better. A classic of anti-colonialist literature, Anton de Kom’s “Wir Sklaven von Suriname”, published in 1934, but censored and circumcised, proves that especially in modern times religiously based orgies of punishment and cruelty of flogging, rape and also manslaughter cost hundreds of thousands of lives. De Kom, born in Suriname, is a central figure on the path to freedom for his country of birth. Living and agitating in the Netherlands since 1936, he was involved in the Dutch resistance against the German occupiers, was captured and ended up as a political prisoner in the Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme concentration camps before he died on the death march to the Sandbostel camp in April 1945 .

De Kom’s combat script inspires a literary momentum that can finally develop in the careful new translation by Birgit Erdmann into German. Everything that Eckert can only hint at in strict objectivity is described drastically in de Kom on the basis of the centuries in which the Dutch established an unparalleled regiment of terror in “their” colony since 1667. But even after slavery was abolished in Suriname in 1863, the so-called “free” workers had to continue to toil on the plantations for ten years as contract workers. The former owners were paid 300 guilders per slave for the “loss” by the Dutch state. It took another 100 years until independence. Women’s suffrage was introduced in 1948 and it wasn’t until 1975 that Suriname finally had its own state.

Anton de Kom reports on the bloody tyranny of the white masters and tells how the respective governors have distinguished themselves specifically in the torture of slaves throughout colonial history. At these points the text becomes the indictment. In contrast, there is the story of those men and women who rebelled, who fled from the unbearable conditions into the jungle and there repeatedly founded resistance groups that were quite able to stand up to their tormentors. But de Kom is also directed against the conditions of his time, which still meant nothing but exploitation, poverty and lack of freedom for the Surinamese population. It is not surprising that this writing only came out mutilated in the Netherlands, that de Kom was criticized and attacked as a communist. It was not until 1971 that the book, which must also be read as the founding text of a free Suriname, was published in uncensored form in the Netherlands.

Both books direct and clarify what is called slavery. In short: slavery always means the indescribable suffering and agony, but also, in order to escape them, the uprisings and struggles of real people of flesh and blood.