Respectable Trade (63 page)

If we skip forward to James VI’s court in Scotland, we come across a number of black court entertainers, including a drummer, a choreographer of the court dances and masques, a black knight, and a lady who was famed for her beauty: “A black lady—a skin that shone like soap. In her rich costume she gleamed as bright as a barrel of tar. When she was born the sun had to suffer an eclipse.”

All through the sixteenth century, in the records of English history, there were men and women arriving from Africa—and going home after a visit to England. In 1555, John Lok brought five Africans from Ghana to Britain to learn English. When they got home, they acted as interpreters to the growing trade
in ivory, spices, and gold. As the trade grew more important in the African economy, enterprising merchants and princes sent their sons to be educated in England so that they could develop commercial contacts. We know that there were African children educated in London, Bristol, and Liverpool, who came for their schooling and then went safely home again.

But the trade and these trading relationships changed. From 1570 onward, the slave trade developed. For more than two centuries, for generation after generation, ships sailed from British and European ports loaded with gold, trinkets, and, more than anything else, guns. They traded these goods along the African coast with African slavers who were commissioned and armed by the Europeans to go deep into the African countryside and hunt for slaves.

When the slave traders from the most popular west coast penetrated so deeply that they met the slavers from the east coast, there was no place safe for a black man in Africa. African slavers had been taking slaves for generations, but the scale of this was unprecedented: millions rather than thousands, a slavery that extended over generations so that their children would be born enslaved. And these people, enslaved and then taken overseas, would never see their homes again.

I don’t think that we will ever know how many men, women, and children were kidnapped from Africa and sold into slavery. Most historians think about fifteen or twenty million slaves were shipped across the Atlantic. We cannot know how many millions died in the slave wars that were an inevitable part of the slave trade; some people have estimated that it was as many as one hundred million. Of those who survived to be shipped to the colonies, it is thought that a quarter of them died on the voyage, a quarter on landing, and a further quarter within the first couple of years. That was why it was such a big business. The slave stocks had to be replenished constantly; the plantations were a death sentence for three-quarters of the enslaved.

As Josiah Cole says, “It is the greatest trade that the world has ever known. We all profit.” It was the first and the greatest global trade. It launched Britain as a maritime power, as an industrial power, and as a center for capitalism. Most of the British banks started as finance houses for the distant plantations. Lloyds of London insured the slave ships. Modern weapons designers started out as gunsmiths for the Africa trade; the industrial revolution would not have been possible without the massive injection of capital that came from the profits of slavery and the plantation goods. And the very fabric of eighteenth-century English society that we love to see now in stately homes and in historical dramas on television was built on the profits of slavery. In Jane Austen’s
Mansfield Park,
Sir Bertram is away from home because he has to go to his plantation. Sir Thomas Bertram is a slave owner, and dear little Fanny Price will find true happiness as the daughter-in-law of a slaver, her elegant life financed by terrible suffering.

A tiny fraction of this holocaust did not end their journey in the New World but were brought on to Britain. Some of them came as the ships’ captains’ perks—some captains liked to be served by a slave on board and brought their slaves home. Returning planters, accustomed to being waited on hand and foot, brought their house slaves back to Britain when they retired. Wealthy sugar planters on visits brought their slaves with them to show off. It was tremendously fashionable to have a little black page boy to carry a lady’s fan or her gloves or to stand behind her in a drawing room. Black horn players were employed at deluxe fox hunts; black footmen ran behind the richest carriages. Black laundresses starched white linen, and black prostitutes were brought in to serve white men. Black slaves were imported and sold in the newspaper columns, alongside advertisements for dogs and horses—as luxury items.

Many of these slaves did not stay with these masters and mistresses who bought them. Many of them took to their heels, and we meet them again in the lost-and-found columns as their
masters advertised in the newspapers for their return, sometimes remarking that they had run away again, sometimes identifying them as being scarred from previous beatings. Even now we must feel admiration for the young people—mostly young men—who survived the ordeal of kidnap, the horror of the two-month voyage across the Atlantic, the terror of the next two-month voyage to England, then sale to an English owner in a strange country, and still had the courage to run for it as soon as possible.

What is remarkable about their stories is that they found freedom, running away from white masters to hide among white working-class people. White people living in the roughest areas of towns saw that a black man enslaved by a cruel master was in the same situation as themselves—also working for cruel masters. The early struggle by white workers for their rights, the earliest associations and unions, were linked to the battle against slavery. They thought that their struggle was the same as the right of freedom for black slaves. And when black slaves ran to white working-class communities, they were welcomed and sheltered and hidden.

Of course, they all fell in love. One ex-slave, Ukasaw Gronisaw, wrote, “The morning after I came to my new lodgings, as I was at breakfast with the gentlewoman of the house, I heard the noise of some looms over our heads, and upon inquiring what it was, she told me that a person was weaving silk. I expressed a great desire to see it, and asked if I might. She told me that she would go up with me, for she was sure that I should be very welcome; and she was as good as her word. As soon as we entered the room, the person that was weaving looked about and smiled upon us, and I loved her from that moment.”

Marriages between black men and white women produced children who, living in predominantly white communities, met and married white partners. The family’s skin grew paler with each generation, until after about four or five generations the
great-great-great-grandsons or -daughters might never know that their ancestor had been an enslaved black man. It is this disappearance that caused the loss of the story. Until very recently there were few historians researching the history of slaves in England, simply because people were not aware that there were significant numbers of them. But a London court case in the middle of the eighteenth century was told that there were more than fifteen thousand runaway slaves living freely in London. One contemporary commentator said that there was a black face in every village in England.

What is so surprising about the individual stories of individual slaves is their courage in going on to make lives that were worth living and were even filled with joy and love. The story of the slaves in England is a story of a crime against humanity, but it is also a story of triumph—of people who set themselves free and made new lives for themselves and sought their own happiness.

The history of these most courageous people can be read in a number of accessible books. I particularly enjoyed James Walvin’s
Black Ivory,
HarperCollins, 1992. For the long and honorable history of black Britons, I recommend Peter Fryer,
Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain,
Pluto Press, 1984. But the last word should be with the African peoples themselves, in an anthology edited by Paul Edwards and David Dabydeen,
Black Writers in Britain, 1760-1890,
Edinburgh University Press, 1991.

Philippa Gregory, England, 2005

T
EN YEARS AGO
I was in The Gambia, researching
A Respectable Trade,
which would become a book and also a four-part BBC drama serial. I met a headmaster, Ismaila Sisay, who showed me around his small country school and then asked me, would I consider making a contribution to his most important project—a well for the schoolyard? He told me that a garden in the schoolyard, watered by the well, would supplement the children’s diet of rice from the World Health Organization, would teach them sustainable agriculture, and might even make a small profit, which could be used to buy books and stationery for the school.

I decided to take a chance on this stranger and gave him the full cost of the well: £300. A fortnight later, when I was back in England, he sent me a fax to confirm the well was dug and filled with water, and the children were watering their garden. It seemed like a small, successful miracle of trust. Then he told me that the next-door school had asked, could they have a well, too? It seemed an utterly reasonable request, and I wrote an article in a women’s magazine, asking for donations. They poured in, in small and larger amounts, and Ismaila and I started a partnership that has now gone on for ten years, building wells in Gambian primary schools and community gardens.

We started in 1994, and we have, to date, dug more than sixty wells to provide water to irrigate school and community gardens. In the school gardens, the children learn the skills of
sustainable agriculture. The vegetables they grow supplement the rice dinner for the poorest children, who would otherwise have nothing to eat all day, the surplus produce is sold, and stationery and educational equipment is bought with the profit.

The gardens are planted rather like an English allotment. They grow all sorts of legumes, root and salad vegetables. Usually the school also plants citrus and walnut trees. Often pupils from the senior class of these primary schools will be made responsible for the health of their particular tree. They fence it to protect it from straying animals, and they water it every day from the well. It is wonderful to see the enthusiasm the children feel for their garden.

The wells are deliberately low-technology, low-budget. Basically they are circular holes dug down to the water table by a hired well digger. Usually we have to go down to about sixteen meters. When the soil is very dry, then the well has to be lined with concrete pipes. To keep the children safe, a small wall is built around the top, and a pulley, rope, and bucket are provided. Once the well is built and handed over, then the headmaster of the school and the school committee are responsible for its maintenance. We don’t put a well in a school without their enthusiastic support. For some schools the experience has been transformational. Some schools have financed adult-education programs with the surplus cash; others have started community businesses.

We are beginning to expand from schools to community projects. Two have been particularly successful. The first was a well we put into a women’s communal garden. The women were so successful in producing vegetables in the garden based around our well that the Gambian Agricultural Research Authority asked them to trial some rice strains. The women hand-dug earthworks around a massive forty acres, an extraordinary achievement, and used our well and the annual rains to flood the area to grow rice. They brought off a magnificent crop, and now they are responsible for the biggest paddy field in The
Gambia. They produce and sell good yields of early rice, they feed their own villages, and they distribute seeds to other farmers. It is a tremendous success story, and it started with one £300 well given by us.

The other great success story of this year is at the remote village of Njawarra, in the far north of the country. It took us nearly all day to drive to it, going almost cross-country on roads that are nothing more than sandy tracks. The farmers were aware that their lands were getting drier and their yields poorer. On their own initiative, they agreed that they should form an agricultural college and try to improve their farming. A few years ago, they asked us for a well. That was just the start of it. With our well at the center of their fields, they applied to the Canadian and European governments for aid. They now have a residential building for visiting trainees, a seed bank, a center for alternative technology, tutors, a restaurant, an orchard, a vegetable plot, an explosion of projects, and enthusiasm that is rolling out across the country—all based on our first little well.

Since my last visit to The Gambia, just before Christmas 2004, we have started a whole program of new wells, and I am determined that this project will go on. It has directly fed thousands of schoolchildren and taught them methods of farming that will make them and their own children safer from hunger in the future. I have seen how the benefits of one well can transform adult farming projects, too—the women’s rice field and the Njawarra agricultural college are major sources of change in this poor country. I foresee that we will continue to invest in schools and well-organized groups.