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The transatlantic trade in Africans was founded on a misguided interpretation of Christianity. Prince Henry of Portugal, “the Navigator” (1394-1460), put Europe’s aggressive and ruthless expeditions to Africa in motion.
It was during this period that the feudal European states began to unite. Henry taught men to sail down the west coast of Africa, attempting to push back against the Islamization of West Africa and to accelerate the spread of Christianity.
The Pope recognised Portuguese claims to Africa in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494). Henry was, in turn, directed to convert the Africans, but he saw no difference between conversion and enslavement (Russell, 2000).
But long before this fight between Christianity and Islam, Africans initiated the process of plant and food domestication. In this process, they contributed to transforming the food systems of semiarid India (Carney and Rosomoff, 2009, p32).
One European trader noted: “The Blacks have many foodstuffs such as (guinea) hens, husked rice, plenty of milk… thus everything necessary for human existence is found in this land in great plenty and sumptuousness.” (Carney and Rosomoff, 2009, p7).
Our modern-day products like Coca-Cola, Palmolive Soap and Snapple rely on plants domesticated in Africa by Africans. The Kola nut was used to keep the water on the slave ships in a drinkable manner.
The Papal mandate ignored the birth of Christianity in Africa and the contributions of its theologians. Among them were Origen, Athanasius, Tertullian, and Augustine, who shaped Christian thought and practice.
In 1485, the Kongo people accepted Catholicism (Carney and Rosomoff, 2009, p47). Many of the missionaries were of the Jesuits, Capuchins, and Franciscan religious orders.
By 1658, the Jesuit order, likely the largest holder of enslaved people (10,000 on 50 plantations) in Angola, was engaged in the provisioning of slave ships (Carney and Rosomoff, 2009, p51).
In a perverted interpretation of Jesus’ missional call to evangelise all nations (Matthew 28: 18 – 20), the enslavers saw their work as a religious duty.
(via The Standard.co.zw)
They were willing to use violence and trap millions of Africans into a lifetime of chattel slavery. They believed dominating the other nations would hasten the return of Christ (David Brion Davis, 2006).
White supremacy was the Trojan horse within organised Christianity, undermining and subverting the liberating news of the Gospel (Cannon, 2008). They used the Bible story of Ham, Noah’s son, to preach that the Africans were cursed, destined to be nothing more than “hewers of wood and carriers of water” (Joshua 9: 27).
Olaudah Equiano, narrating a tale about an enslaved person who attempted to escape, recalled that: “This Christian master immediately pinned the wretch to the ground, at each wrist and ankle, and then took some sticks of sealing wax, lighted them, and dropped it all over his back.”
The testimony of Frederick Douglass, a former enslaved person, asserts that: “The religion of the South (USA) is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes… Of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly of all others.”
Douglass was writing years after Equiano and was in a different country. Douglass was born into slavery, reputedly the child of a white master, while Equiano was kidnapped in Africa. Equiano described his people as “a nation of dancers, musicians and poets.”
The interesting fact about them is that they both had faith in Christ. They were not as concerned with a mere description of the material effects of slavery. They were more focused on trying to understand the motivations of their masters.
Why would these masters be so consumed with imposing total control over their enslaved people in a manner that the Maker did not? Why the obsession with violence?
Their positions are aligned with that of two theologians, Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker, who, in 1989, said: “Christianity has been a primary […] force in shaping our acceptance of abuse. The central image of Christ on the Cross […] communicates the message that suffering is redemptive…”
They were wrestling with the issue of suffering and the redemptive work of the Cross.
In the West Indies, the Englishmen accepted that there was virtue in enslaving Africans. They believed that through slavery, the enslaved would find Christ.
Such crass misrepresentation enabled traffickers to think that this highly respected, boomingly lucrative transatlantic commerce of embodied commodified labour violated neither divine nor natural law.
John Newton, the author of the hymn Amazing Grace, wrote in his autobiography: “During the time I was engaged in the slave trade, I never had the least scruple as to its lawfulness. I was, on the whole, satisfied with it, as the appointment Providence had worked out for me.
“[…] It was, indeed, accounted a genteel employment and usually very profitable, though to me it did not prove so, the Lord seeing that a large increase of wealth would not be good for me.”
However, the English held that freedom could not be gained through accepting Christianity. They wrote that into their slave code.
In England, two prominent lawyers, Yorke and Talbot, offered an influential Opinion in 1729 that underscored this position. Spiritual freedom was not the same as bodily freedom: “Being baptised did not result in a slave’s emancipation or any alteration in their status.”
This position was based on the following thinking:
“Africans and their descendants were seen as beasts of burden, liabilities to civilisation, infectious progenitors of sin, and carriers of the corruptive powers like the snake in the Garden of Eden.” (Cannon, 2008)
The Anglican Church was just as disinterested in spreading the Gospel in the colonies as in England. Their desire to serve political ends took precedence.
The laws that instructed plantation owners to teach and baptise their enslaved people were ignored. The rectors refused to recognise any conflict between slavery and the Church’s teaching.
The Anglican Church was firmly politically allied with the planter class. Its ministers engaged freely in slaveholding and politics as assemblymen or officials. No questions were asked.
The coming of the Baptists, the Methodists and other non-sectarian missionaries broke the hold of the Anglican Church–Planter alliance.
(Copyright Corbis)
Before they came, the Anglican Church sanctified the economic and social status quo. There was said to be a place in it for everyone, but everyone was supposed to know their place.
The Methodists, in particular, threatened social and spiritual revolution. These new preachers sought to preach that all men, including the enslaved, were God’s children.
When these new missionaries came to Jamaica, the planters offered the Anglican rectors a commission for converting their enslaved. The rectors were entitled to a fee of two shillings and sixpence for baptising, registering, and granting a certificate to each enslaved person made a member of the Church.
In Trinidad and Grenada, the Church of Scotland came to join the anti-slavery movement. Their General Assembly of 1792 produced a strongly worded statement that the slave trade was “incompatible with the great principles of religion and morality” and expressed “ardent wishes and earnest prayers that Parliament should speedily act to bring the trade to an end”.
A young Reverend Alexander Kennedy came to Trinidad and ‘built’ the Greyfriars and the St Ann’s churches. (Fun fact: it was the Portuguese exiles he had earlier helped who provided funds and labour to build the St Ann’s church.)
When the Church helps those in distress, they repay in gratitude. Is the Church now seeking to shortcut this method?
We must ask whether our local Church is so tightly bound to the elites that they cannot sound a clarion call for social justice. Can they speak clearly to power?
We must examine whether the Church sufficiently seeks to improve the lot of the impoverished among us. Do their budgets demonstrate care and concern for children, lifting the oppressed and marginalised?
Do our priests and ministers consort more with the elites rather than the folk of depressed areas? Are our church leaders still waging psychological abuse on their members in the name of Christ?
(Via News.gov.tt)
Do our practices indicate that some parishioners are more valuable and esteemed than others? Is that what Christ died for?
Do they believe that prayer changes things? Where are the fasting and special prayer meetings to help combat the crime wave?
Issuing press releases and holding conferences do not sound like Jesus.
In the appendix to his Narrative, Douglass distinguishes between “the slaveholding religion” and “Christianity proper”, or a Christian Providence. He says that “between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognise the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked.
“To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other.”
Like Frederick Douglass, may we recognise the difference. Read your Bible for yourself.
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‘Human Sĺavery’ amongst different tribes of early europeans and african tribes selfishly existed independently amongst themselves for centuries before the europeans and englisèh came to Africa…….and a very large percentage of the african slaves were captured and soĺd into sĺavery by victorious waring tribal african heads to other african tribes just for pròfit. This existed for centuŕies amongt native afro and euro indigenus tribes centuries before the trans Atlantic human slave trade began. I dare anyone to prove me wrong……
Across many cultures and time, there has been slavery. There is no dispute about that history. This series focuses on the unique nature of the Trans Atlantic version -chattel slavery whuch made humans property for their entire lifetime.
You are correct re the inter tribe wars but they did not result in chattel slavery. It is those wars that gave the Trans Atlantic trade its initial supply. However the Europeans accelerated these wars as the some coastal tribes decided that the European goods were worth capturing their neighbouring tribes. I dealt with that aspect in last week’s installment.
I for one query the purpose of this article. The writer himself has cited enough sources to show that the Church has historically exploited the downtrodden, not helped. So why the rheteroical questions now? As Richards Dawkins would say, we need to watch out for these militant religious nutters.
The intent of the questions is to have today’s Christian community answer for their part in modern life.
We should never give up hoping for the best in others to emerge.
Historically, the best has always come from the non-religious.