An Essay on Violence, Tradition and Modernity

Rafael Leyre ( Rafael_Leyre@yahoo.com)       Third Edition - February 2007

Slavery

Commonness of slavery

Slavery is prevalent in labouring societies, in all times and on all continents. It existed in Africa, Asia and the Americas long before Europeans arrived. It was prominent in the classical world and persisted among Jews, Christians and Muslims.

To make slaves means more than to force people to work against their will. The victim must be dehumanised, alienated from the governing society, and framed in a world-image of infallible social order. A whole structure of ritual terror, torture, punishment and humiliation is necessary to keep the institute of forced labour in existence. Violence is the necessary ritual of disparity: the whip is not only a tool to regulate work speed, it is also a defining, clarifying instrument. Even when slave traders in all times could have made more money by treating their cargo more carefully, they rather took the loss of large numbers dying on transport and on the workplace, than to risk bigger damage by tolerating the faintest doubt on the slave’s nature and status. All world religions emerged in societies based on genuine slavery and endorsed the institution.

A slave is a human body, and his master has the right to handle this body as he pleases. Therefore a slave is a sexual object as such. In the ancient Middle East, international trade in young girls was as important as the trade in oil and wine, and the Ptolemaic Pharaohs imported large numbers of children for prostitution. The Roman word for slave merchant, ‘Leno’, is still used in modern Italian for ‘pimp’. The Koran learns that intercourse with married women is forbidden, ‘except such as your right hands possess’, meaning slaves.232 When Satyakama wanted to become a Brahman, he needed to know his cast and asked his mother from what family he was. She answered:

in my youth, I was poor and served many masters, and then I had thee: I therefore do not know of what family thou art…233

In the confinement of the household, secrecy indeed boosts the sexual liberty of the master of the house. It is this demand for secrecy that we know as cultural chastity. Public indecent behaviour of a woman scares and humiliates her husband, not only because his goods are smudged before his eyes, but even more because the secrets of his mind are publicly exposed.

Generations of bible readers must have sensed the imagery of the forbidden three of knowledge as the shameful secrecy of their own household. Eve was punished with shame before other things: ‘the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked’. Yet she was only a very young girl lured by a sweet fruit, and as often happens, behind the sweet raised a huge snake, the father’s terrifying penis.

The Victorian age was the pinnacle of Christian piety, of slavery and of clandestine sexuality all at once. The triad declined since in the West, but gains ground again: today Islam, in Asian and African countries, succeeds side by side with suppression and abuse of children and women, and with public rage against sexual tolerance.

Because of those sexual implications, medieval texts and paintings report little on the existence of slaves in Christian Europe. We sometimes perceive a glance however, as when in a stage play, cited by Burke, a character blames his mother of taking a black man in her home after her husband died, or in a painting as the Garden of delights, a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch at the Prado in Madrid. Captured in the obligate religious setting, the main panel presents a garden filled with extravagant flowers, birds, fountains and gazebos. In this scenery elegant naked youngsters, blacks and whites, are strolling, chatting, laughing, swimming or making love.

Slavery is alienating, because a person performs the acts of someone else; the slave is a despicable body for a hostile soul. This alienation increases further when slaves are taken away from their land, where friends could have helped to escape and provide cover, and are conveyed to live in a strange and hostile community. The very first long distance trade was marked by slave routes, along the African west coast to Mesopotamia, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, along the North-African oases, and finally across the Atlantic Ocean. Celtic chiefs sold their subjects to the Romans, as African chiefs sold their subjects to Christians and Muslims. Assyrian law allowed a husband to sell his wife or child in slavery. Indians in both Americas hunted other Indians for slaves, a number of them to be ritually tortured, killed and devoured - hence the Slave Indians and the Slave Lakes. In the nineteenth century CE, Cherokees, Choctaws and Creeks together owned about ten thousand black slaves.234

Native slaves are often alienated by social death instead of deportation. In Europe, one ritual inflicting social death was the court of justice, and rulers repeatedly pressed the courts, with success, to provide more working forces. As their appearance did not differ from their masters, the slaves needed to be distinguished with a lifelong mark. In France, Russia and the Unites states, branding was practised until the nineteenth century.

The most alienated slave might be the eunuch. Literally cut off from his kinship, stinking because of incontinence, mocked for his weight and fatuous walk, he has no one left but his master. This made him a valued servant in palaces in Imperial China, in Christian Byzantium and in many Muslim Caliphates.

Commonness of slave revolts

Although slavery has been common most of history, it was never normal.

Wherever records allow a closer study, one finds that bondage always led to revolts. Masters always tried to conceal insurrections to avoid imitation: slaves must believe that, in Aristotle’s words, they were slaves by nature. But no human ever submitted definitively to a master, and slavery was never a given and indubitable institution, firmly locked in the so-called spirit of the age.

Chronicles from ancient Mesopotamia talk about insurrections of slaves in the marshlands of the Tigris delta, and numerous revolts in China led, since the eighteenth century CE, to the restriction of slavery to women only. The Romans had to withdraw a decision to impose uniform clothing on all slaves out of fear for mass rallies.

Rome

In the second century BCE a slave revolt broke out in Sicily when a master named Damophilus abused his slaves to excess

and his wife Megallis vied even with her husband in punishing the slaves and in her general inhumanity towards them. The slaves, reduced by this degrading treatment to the level of brutes, conspired to revolt and to murder their masters.235

Lead by a fire-eater named Eunus some four hundred slaves marched to the city of Enna and killed everyone on their way. Their masters were discovered in a hideout and dragged into the city’s theatre. Damophilus was executed; his wife Megallis was given to her maidservants ‘to deal with as they might wish’. She was tortured and thrown off a cliff. The rebels only showed mercy to their daughter

and this was because of her kindly nature, in that to the extent of her power she was always compassionate and ready to succour the slaves. Thereby it was demonstrated that the others were treated as they were, not because of some natural savagery of slaves, but rather in revenge for wrongs previously received.236

As the revolt spread, Eunus assumed kingship and appointed a council; in a few days the crowd grew to twenty thousand rebels, of which six thousand got armed. Soon they repelled an attack by eight thousand Roman soldiers. The revolt expanded throughout central and southern Sicily. It took the Roman consul three years to defeat the slave army, by then already seventy thousand men strong:

Many armies were cut to pieces by the rebels, until Rupilius, the Roman commander, recovered Tauromenium for the Romans by placing it under strict siege and confining the rebels under conditions of unspeakable duress and famine: conditions such that, beginning by eating the children, they progressed to the women, and did not altogether abstain even from eating one another.237

Eunus was captured and died in prison ‘where his flesh disintegrated into a mass of lice’. Many followed his example. At Minturnae four hundred and fifty slaves were crucified, and at Sinuessa four thousand rebels were crushed by the Roman army. In the Athenian mines an uprising was broken, and another uprising was crushed by the citizens of Delos.238 At Nuceria thirty slaves formed a conspiracy and were promptly punished; at Capua two hundred rose in insurrection and were crushed. Then a Roman knight named Titus Minucius fell in love with a slave girl. As he could not pay for her freedom, he chose the side of the slaves and organized a revolt of four thousand infantry and four hundred cavalry.239

In 104 BCE the Cimbri, fleeing overpopulated Denmark, threatened the Roman borders. Suffering from a shortage of soldiers, the Senate decreed to free enslaved citizens in order to be drafted. After the liberation of eight hundred slaves in Sicily, impatience and hope flared a new revolt. Thousands of slaves, this time joined by pauperised freemen, ravaged the country. After four years of Roman onslaughts, ten thousand rebels were decimated to a thousand, who eventually surrendered and were taken to Rome to fight with wild animals. This however never happened:

They avoided combat with the beasts and cut one another down at the public altars, [their leader] Satyrus himself slaying the last man. Then he, as the final survivor, died heroically by his own hand. Such was the dramatic conclusion of the Sicilian Slave War...240

In 73 BC some seventy gladiators, Gauls and Thracians, escaped, seized weaponry and took cover on the hill slopes of mount Vesuvius. Their leader was a Thracian slave from a nomad tribe. His name, Spartacus, would become a revolutionary symbol.

When he first came to be sold at Rome, they say a snake coiled itself upon his face as he lay asleep, and his wife, who at this latter time also accompanied him in his flight, his country- woman, a kind of prophetess, and one of those possessed with the bacchanal frenzy, declared that it was a sign portending great and formidable power to him with no happy event.241

Slaves and impoverished people from everywhere joined the rebels who grew to nearly a hundred thousand and spread all over Southern Italy. While Spartacus made plans to reach Sicily to rekindle there the recent slave war, Roman armies were called back from the Spanish and Thracian borders to assist in battle. All but a few thousand of the rebels were slain. The remaining were crucified along the road from Capua to Rome, but the Romans realized that the largest threat to Rome ever had not come from foreign armies, but from lowly slaves:

But the war raised by the efforts of Spartacus I know not by what name to call, for the soldiers in it were slaves, and the commanders gladiators; the former being persons of the meanest condition, and the latter men of the worst character, and adding to the calamity of their profession by its contemptibility 242

America

Fifty five rebellions of black slaves during their transport to America have been documented.

The Caribbean has known a continuous history of slave revolts from the sixteenth century CE on. In 1804 CE, through a revolt against Napoleon, Haiti was made the first black republic. Half a million slaves became free citizens.

Among Brazilian slaves the branding of runaways became a sign of honour - when the slave holders realized this, they replaced branding by cutting the Achilles heel. In the seventeenth century CE, Brazilian runaways founded free republics – quilombos - in the distant province of Alagoas. In those republics runaways lived as free men who captured slaves themselves. Palmares, a federation of ten quilimbos, could only be submitted by the Portuguese after fierce warfare.

In the USA, hundreds of uprisings were counted in the eighteenth and nineteenth century CE. In the summer of 1800 CE a rebellion of a thousand slaves ended with the hanging of thirty-seven of them, while another thirty-two were banned. In 1822 CE nine thousand slaves rebelled in South Carolina. In 1831 in Southampton, six slaves killed fifty-seven whites. They soon were joined by seventy more. All were chased for days by a posse of volunteers and were eventually killed. North American Indians like the Chickasaws made good money as runaway catchers. In 1842 CE more than twenty-five black slaves of Cherokee Indians locked their masters and overseers in their houses and headed toward Mexico. On the way slaves of the Creek Indians joined them, increasing the number to thirty-five men, women and children. Cherokees and Creeks organized a posse but returned empty-handed after two days of severe fighting. The blacks continued towards Mexico and killed two slave hunters – a white man and a Delaware Indian – on their way. After they freed eight more black slaves a new posse of a hundred men captured them all.243

Christianity and slavery

Aristotle, since the Middle Ages fully integrated in Christian ideology, and still valued highly today, regarded the slave as a part of his master’s body. His vision was of course rooted in the world order of his time:

[that] which can foresee by the exercise of mind is by nature intended to be lord and master, and that which can with its body give effect to such foresight is a subject, and by nature a slave.244

The bible recommends using violence towards slaves:

a slave cannot be corrected by words alone: he listens, but does not respond.245

And

if a man pampers his slave from youth, he will bring grief in the end.246

If the battered slave dies from this brutality after a few days of agony the chastising master is not to blame:

if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continues [living] a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money.247

Saint Paul, one of the first Christian leaders, had studied the bible as well as the work of Aristotle. He admonished Christian slaves to

be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart.248

And to

count their own masters worthy of all honour, that the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed.249

Whenever his missionaries became confronted with insubordination they were expected to

exhort servants to be obedient unto their own masters, and to please them well in all things; not answering again; not purloining, but shewing all good fidelity; that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things.250

Many Christians, convoked by the Roman authorities to bring an offer to the emperor, saved their soul by sending a slave. Peter of Alexandria, in the third century CE, urged to discipline those slaves anyway:

the slaves indeed as being in their master’s hands, and in a manner themselves also in the custody of their masters, and being threatened by them, and from their fear having come to this pass and having lapsed, shall during the year show forth the works of penitence.251

The Council of Gangra, in the fourth century CE, confirmed once more the official Christian viewpoint by condemning bishop Eustathius for criticizing slavery. The council ordained that

if any one shall teach a slave, under pretext of piety, to despise his master and to run away from his service, and not to serve his own master with good will and all honour, let him be anathema.

Slaves in a feudal society are called serfs, and most literature on the subject emphasize that there is a big difference between ruthless unchristian slavery and the more ‘humane’ (Christian) serfdom.

One widespread hoax is that serfs lived under a social contract of ‘reciprocity under divine protection’. Priests prayed for the community, knights fought for the community, and serfs laboured for the community. In reality the serfs took little advantage of praying priests, and had a lot to suffer of fighting knights. Serfs were really plain slaves, and like other slaves they were owned, disdained, underfed, unprotected and abused, also sexually.

It is claimed that serfs, as opposed to other slaves, could have their own property. This is however based on a wrong presumption about slavery. Harvard sociology professor Patterson noted:

I know of no slave society in which slaves who could afford them were denied the purchase of slaves. The fact may be surprising at first, but on further reflection it ceases to be so. If slaves were the extension of a man’s person and honour, so were his slave’s slaves.252

The only difference between slaves and 'serfs' is the way slavery is carried out in a feudal economy and in a mercantile economy. Feudalism is based on land ownership, and slaves are normally sold with the land, but not always: in 755 CE the Bishop of Mains complained that a priest had traded a family of five serfs (or slaves) of the Church for a horse.253 His complaint was of course about the theft of slaves, not about their treatment. Mercantilism on the other hand is based on trade, and slaves are traded like other goods. In Europe and elsewhere, chattel slavery grew when serf slavery faded, but forced labour as a whole remained or grew. Anyhow, the difference between slaves and 'serfs' is less important than the difference between two slaves in any society. Slaves (including serfs) could have property, but their lives, their possessions and their positions remained always at the mercy of their master. In the European Middle Ages, all judicial and property documents were written in Latin, and the word ‘servus’ meant simply ‘slave’. The translation into ‘serf’ (for the Christian Middle Ages) or into ‘slave’ (for non-Christian societies) is at the discretion of the historian and depends on the picture he wants to draw.

In Medieval and Atlantic times, more than one out of six people living in Europe were slaves. Since Charlemagne Slavs were raided and sold through Venice and Sicily. Numbers are not available, but the brutality deployed by the Holy Roman empire and the fact that only the Slavs were not Christianized (it was forbidden to enslave Christians) suggests the worst.

When Christians regained territory from the Moors, as happened in 1287CE Majorca, captive Muslims were sold at the market place together with their former slaves. In 1438 CE, the Catholic queen of Aragon sent a letter to the Muslim king of Tunis requesting a tax-free passage for six black females. Since the queen had thousands of European men and women of all skills at her disposal, the writing suggests that the ancestors of Naomi Campbell were wanted as a luxurious erotic commodity – not surprising in a civilization that had always vilified the sexuality of its own population.

Slaves were exported from Spain to France and Italy. In 1454 CE Pope Nicolas V wrote a letter to King Alfonso of Portugal, expressing his enthusiasm that so many enemies of Christ were being enslaved. Among the slaves sold on a market of Barcelona in 1489 CE were an African and his two-year-old daughter.

When Eustace de la Fosse, a Flemish trader, moored at West African Malaquette in 1467 CE, he found his ship surrounded by prawns of natives offering their families for sale. The price for one woman and a child was a shaving basin and a few brass rings. Of course he accepted the offer, and sold the victims in Sao Jorge de Mina for gold washed from the Niger River. A few years later, African kings delivered their subjects directly to European sovereigns: the king of Senegal traded twelve slaves for one horse. From 1517 CE on, Charles I of Spain started shipping African slaves to America, where Indian slaves had died in great numbers of smallpox.

Towards the midst of the nineteenth century CE, when the Abolishment Movement rose, some five million slaves were owned by Christians in the USA alone. In Britain and the USA the established churches severely attacked the movement while citing the Holy Scriptures in their support. Opponents like William Wilberforce and Thomas Paine were savagely attacked by the churches for intending to outsmart the Bible.254 Ministers of the Christian faith wrote half of all defences of slavery published in America.255

Slavery in the twenty first century

Today at least 27 million people, coming from all continents, live in slavery. This is more than twice the number of all the blacks trafficked to the Americas.256

More than two million women and children are trafficked each year across international borders. Some, often only seven years of age, are forced to labour in sex industries where they suffer physical and mental abuse and are exposed to disease, including infection by the HIV virus, or work as household slaves for ten to seventeen hours a day, and in the remaining time are sexually abused and mutilated.

Destitute families frequently hire out or sell their children, who may then be forced into prostitution. Very often, the young girl is handed over as a domestic worker, in which case her masters will physically and sexually exploit her.

In Haiti the number of restaviks, little children sold by their parents as household slaves, is estimated two hundred and fifty thousand. The motivation for hiring restaviks as young as four to ten years old, is that they can easily be intimidated and trained to be particularly docile – an asset valued above the work efficiency of somewhat older servants.

In West Africa – from Senegal to Nigeria – tens of thousands of children of destitute families are reportedly sent to the Middle East each year, many of them ending up as prostitutes. Children are stolen or purchased from their parents for about fifty dollars, and sold for a tenfold as sex and household slaves. On a market in Abidjan (Ivory Coast), investigators of the BBC magazine Today discovered a “maid market” - a ramshackle, corrugated iron and wood shack where human beings were bought and sold. Teenage girls, posing serenely on long benches, can be bought for less than ten dollars. The trafficking of children from English-speaking West African states, such as Nigeria, was on an even greater scale.

Victoria Climbié, who was taken from Abidjan to Britain by her aunt at the age of eight, was tied up and forced to lie naked in a freezing cold bath in winter and was beaten and burned. When she died, after seven months of torture, she had one hundred and twenty eight injuries on her body. Ten thousand other West African children are living with strangers in the United Kingdom. One was brought to Britain from Benin by a stranger at the age of ten and worked seventeen hours a day for ten years. She was regularly beaten and starved, sometimes for days on end. When she asked why she had been brought to Britain, she was told it was “business” - meaning the woman could claim child benefits. An African boy of thirteen was taken by a white friend of his father to Italy. For three years he was a sex slave to the man and his paedophile friends. He was beaten daily and forced to eat cat food.

Traffickers lure people from China, the Philippines, Bangladesh and other nations to the Northern Mariana Islands, a USA territory promising lucrative work. Instead, many are forced into slave labour and prostitution.257

A press release by the Indian Concerned for Working Children of November 2001 CE proudly announced that a freed fifteen-year-old girl had received a compensation of a humiliating one thousand dollars. The unusual victory was due to the fact that the scars and burn marks on her body were undeniable.

Worldwide two hundred million children between the ages of five and fourteen are forced to work, and some fifty to sixty million between the ages of five and eleven are engaged in intolerable, hazardous forms of labour. Hundreds of thousands of girls, approximately ten per cent of the child labour force, work long days as domestic workers in an environment where beatings, insults and sexual harassment are all too common.

In South Africa, organized child prostitution is on the rise. In certain hill districts of Nepal, prostitution has become a traditional source of income. Women and girls are tricked or forced by their husbands and relatives into being trafficked to India for prostitution. In the impoverished areas of Thailand, where poverty has given rise to the phenomenon of debt bondage, it is regarded as the daughter’s duty to sacrifice her self for the well being of her family.

In many eastern Asiatic countries, children are kidnapped to serve Western clients of brothels in Thailand. After a few years some are sold to Western networks while others, whose youth did not withstand rape, maltreatment and hardship, are discarded in slums where no tourists dare to go. At slave markets in Pakistan girls are sold for sixteen dollars, boys for half that price. Many hundreds of thousands work as slaves in sex dens and the carpet industry. Their destiny is not all that different from the two hundred million children, from eight years on, that work for eighteen hours, under thread of flogging, in sweat shops to produce clothing sold on the European and US markets.