Slavery ‘ancient and modern’:Old wine in new bottles!

Rastafarians gather at Jamaica conference to hash over slavery reparations...,’ read the banner headline to an Associated Press story published in Kingston, Jamaica, on August 14, 2013. My, my, my...

They never give up, do they? Dozens of the dread-locked followers of former Ethiopia Emperor Haile Selassie (1892-1975; known as Ras Tafari: 1916-30) gathered at the Jamaican campus of the University of West Indies to once again revive their long-standing pursuit for reparations from Britain and other practitioners of the slave trade of yore!

Rastafarians are members of a religious sect of Jamaican origin which regards Blacks as a/the chosen people, and Ras Tafari/Haile Selassie as (their) Messiah! They’re the product of the trans-Atlantic slave trade which raged from the 16th to the 19th century CE, playing havoc with hapless Africans.

‘Slavery’ is the state of one bound in servitude as the property of a slaveholder or household, usually working under hard conditions and in subjection (and under subjugation). [The American Heritage Dictionary].

In practice, slave traffickers, dealers and drivers from the West and ‘Arabia’ sailed to Africa, raided the continent and captured Africans in raging battles, and/or ‘bought’ them from corrupt chieftains, paying in trinkets and cloth.

These were then sold into slavery in the Americas – where they forcibly worked on sugarcane, cotton and other plantations – or Arabia where they were household slaves and camel herders.

They generally weren’t paid for their labour. Working and living conditions were sub-human to the point of being outright inhuman!

This reminds me of our Old Moshi Secondary School History Master, Saidi Dunda, whose lectures on the (African) Slave Trade routinely brought tears to 19-year old boys who were old enough to marry, get married and vote in general elections!

Mwalimu Dunda would painstakingly and graphically describe how sickly/weakened natives trekking their enslaved way from the interior to the coast would be ‘wasted’ in the bundu, bludgeoned to death using a blunt instrument, or relatively mercifully finished off with the cut and thrust of an Arab sword or dagger!

No need to waste live ammo on the fellow, the teacher would bemoan, rubbing salt into the wound by revealing that what a loss to the slaver became a feast for hyenas and other carrion scavengers in the middle of nowhere!

That kind of slave trade was ostensibly abolished. But, if I say so myself, slavery has never been vanquished from Mother Earth... It’s like old wine in a new bottle!

As Robert Ingersoll said on cannibalism – which has humans eating fellow humans – we may have stopped barbecuing each other for dinner; but we’ve never stopped living on and off fellow humans, dependent as we are (in Tanzania, anyway) on alms, aid/donations and other forms of budgetary support...

Slavery? I practically ‘slaved’ for the government for 29 years, and am still waiting for my full terminal benefits relating to my stint with the original East Africa Community 36 years after it collapsed in 1977!

May be the Rastafarians do have a point, after all, hammering away for slavery reparations 206 years after the 1807 UK Act to abolish slave trade was passed! Cheers!