Convenient untruths behind this drawing

The drawing used on the BBC website to illustrate BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time discussion on Slavery and Empire is a most interesting portrayal of a meeting between English officers and African natives. The interest lies in the dishonesty of the representation of the two groups of people, deliberately distorted to justify the subjugation of one group by the other.

Five smartly uniformed English officers have come ashore to offer a document to a group of Africans dressed in loin clothes, their ‘chief’ identified by a feather head piece and a cloth around his shoulders. In the background are some mud huts, while in the middle distance are a few palm trees and badly drawn elephants. Several of the Africans are in supplicant positions with two or three holding their hands as if in prayer and looking towards the heavens for salvation.

Disregarding the fact that the Englishmen wouldn’t have worn such uniforms in the heat, nor stayed immaculately dry having come ashore from a rowing boat, some deeper untruths are worth noting.

At this time in African history, most of the coastal settlements where European sailors, soldiers, traders and missionaries landed were well populated and developed towns containing craftsmen (African carpenters and blacksmiths were the most valued when they were sold at slave auctions), boat builders, shopkeepers, traders, teachers, artists, and places of entertainment and education. Most of these settlements were plundered and then rebuilt to be more acceptable to the European slavers. Their populations were taken by force or deception to slave stations where the young and fit were shipped in atrocious conditions across the Atlantic while the old and infirm were left to die.

It didn’t suit the narrative of the colonial system to convey Africa has being in any way developed or civilised. It was important though to portray Africans as believing in God, so that - as God’s children – He would understand and condone their suffering as ultimately their souls would go to heaven. Many slave ships included clergymen whose job included blessing those Africans who died on the journey or who were pushed overboard to save the vessel in part to allay the objection of the sailors at the callous murder of the Africans.

Portraying the Africans as believing in a divinity deliberately ignores the fact that for thousands of years virtually all Africans adopted animism, which attributes a living soul or spirit to plants, mountains, rivers and natural phenomena. This belief system encourages good behaviour so as not to annoy these living spirits, a very different type of religion that than those that tell adherents what to do and how to live. Animism encourages personal responsibility and working things out to best protect the environment, other living creatures and other human beings so that all share a peaceful and safe life as opposed to those religions which are predicated on a God who has created the world, given his subjects rules and who lives in a heaven or paradise which if we obey the rules we will reach. Sadly for countless thousands of Africans, the rules they were encouraged to accept once stripped of their animistic beliefs reinforced their servility as did the consolation of a better life in heaven if they accepted their place.

This is why the Africans in this picture are shown to have their hands clasped in prayer and their eyes towards God. The colonial enslavers were reassured that the Africans believed in God, and those Europeans seeing Africans for the first time in this illustration similarly understood that while the ‘natives’ might not be very developed, they were still God’s children who while their lives on earth might be of sheer toil and misery, they could look forward to eternal grace.

If any free Africans saw this contemporary illustration, it would rightly have filled them with horror.

Paul Hensby