PUNCH
The Church of England says it will soon start spending £100m in disadvantaged Black communities in the United Kingdom. The church was involved in the transatlantic slave trade so this was how it wanted to restitute. Note that Africans were the victims. There’s a way restitution is done, and there is a way Africans conduct restitution. Neither of these two does the Church of England show signs it is bothered about. For it’s obvious the church goes about this gory matter in a garnished, dainty manner. Everything about its approach has the air of wanting to be politically correct and this is disturbing. I shall explain. But first I present brief gory details of slave trade and how the church was involved in what it now appears to be glossing over.
It is a horrifying issue of monumental disaster, a tragedy epic in proportion, one never seen on this scale before in human experience, that the Church of England is dealing with in the manner it does. As The New York Times notes, in 1619 a Portuguese slave ship travelled across the Atlantic Ocean with human cargo. These were captive Africans from Angola in southwestern Africa. The men, women and children were bound for a life of enslavement in Mexico. Almost half the captives had died by the time the ship was seized by two English pirate ships; the remaining Africans were taken to Point Comfort, a port near Jamestown, the capital of the English colony of Virginia, which the Virginia Company of London had established more than a decade earlier. The colonist John Rolfe wrote to the Virginia Company that in August 1619, a “Dutch man of war” arrived in the colony and “brought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes, which the governor and cape merchant bought for victuals.” These Africans were thought to have been put to work in the tobacco fields that were newly established in the area.
As The New York Times further explained, Africans and Europeans had been trading goods and people across the Mediterranean for centuries — but enslavement had not been based on race. The transatlantic slave trade that began in the 15th century introduced a system that was commercialised, racialised and inherited. Enslaved people were regarded as commodities to be bought, sold and exploited. Though people of African descent – free and enslaved – were present in North America as early as the 1500s, the sale of the “20 and odd” Africans began what would become slavery in the United States. The church played a role from the outset. In the 15th century, the Roman Catholic Church divided the world in half, giving Portugal a monopoly on trade in West Africa. Spain got the right to colonise the New World. Pope Nicholas V further helped the Portuguese as he issued the Romanus Pontifex of 1455. This affirmed Portugal’s exclusive rights to territories it claimed along the West African coast and the trade from those areas.
Through this, the church granted the right to invade, plunder and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” Queen Isabella sponsored Christopher Columbus’s exploration in order to increase her wealth. She rejected the enslavement of Native Americans on the basis that they were Spanish subjects. Spain established contract that authorised the direct shipment of captive Africans for trade as human commodities in the Spanish colonies in the Americas. Other European nations such as the Netherlands, France, Denmark and England joined in the trade, exchanging goods and people with leaders along the West African coast. These nations competed to colonise the New World. With these efforts, a new form of slavery came into being endorsed by the European nation-states based on race.
his resulted in the largest forced migration in the world. Enslaved black people came from regions and ethnic groups throughout Africa. Some 12.5 million men, women and children were forced into the transatlantic slave trade. The forced migration is known as the Middle Passage. As Olaudah Equiano, the formerly enslaved author who lived in the UK (and of Nigerian origin), remembered, “I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything. I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me.” Overheating, thirst, starvation and violence were common aboard slave ships, and roughly 15 per cent of each ship’s enslaved population died.
The slave trade provided political power, social standing and wealth for the church, European nation-states, New World colonies and individuals. Men made money by trading the commodities produced by slavery globally — among the North American colonies, the Caribbean and South America. This allowed such men to secure political positions. The use of enslaved labourers was affirmed and its continual growth was promoted through the creation of a Virginia law in 1662 that decreed that the status of the child followed the status of the mother. This meant that enslaved women gave birth to generations of children of African descent who were now seen as commodities. The law also secured wealth for European colonists and generations of their descendants, even as free black people could be legally prohibited from bequeathing their wealth to their children.
Before cotton dominated American agriculture, sugar drove the slave trade throughout the Caribbean and Spanish Americas. Sugar cane was a brutal crop that required constant work six days a week, and it maimed, burnt and killed those involved in its cultivation. The lifespan of an enslaved person on a sugar plantation could be as little as seven years, The New York Times explained. Plantation owners worked their enslaved labourers to death. They prepared for this high “turnover” by ensuring that new enslaved people arrived on a regular basis. The British poet, William Cowper, captured this ethos when he wrote, “I pity them greatly, but I must be mum, for how could we do without sugar or rum?”
According to James Walvin of the University of York, England, who has written extensively on the slave trade and modern British social history, the British did not initiate, but they came to dominate the Atlantic slave trade. He noted that a few expressed moral or ethical doubts about slavery. The Anglican Church was directly involved in slavery. The British shipped more than three million Africans to the plantations, says Walvin. The suffering of the Africans on the ships and plantations was undeniable but raised barely a whimper. Through all this, the Church of England was, by turns, complicit and then transformed. By a quirk of inheritance, the Anglican SPCG (founded in 1701) had inherited plantations in 1710, mainly in Barbados from Christopher Codrington, a government official and planter. The plantations and their resident slaves were managed like any other absentee plantation, their sugar-based profits flowing back to their owners – the Church of England.
The slaves were branded and occasional concerns were expressed about their well-being. In 1760 the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote, “I have long worried and lamented that the Negroes in our plantations decrease. Surely this proceeds from some defect, both of humanity and even of good policy. But we must take things as they are at present.” This evil trade therefore continued, until full emancipation in 1833 when even the church was compensated to the tune of £8,823 for the loss of their slaves on Codrington. There was no sense that slave ownership was irreligious when it lasted. Anglican clergymen in the enslaved Caribbean weren’t bothered about the slaves, rather they served the planters and slave-owners. No serious attempt to minister to the enslaved emerged until missionaries led by Baptist and Methodist made major headway in the early 19th century.
Recently, the Church of England established a fund as part of efforts to reckon with its historic complicity in the trans atlantic slave trade. Before then the church commissioners who administered the church’s £10bn wealth fund hired some experts to search through the church’s archives. They were to establish the extent to which the church was culpable. These experts reported that the church’s huge wealth was inextricably rooted in Queen Anne’s Bounty linked to slave trade.
- To be continued
