“Amazing Grace,” a movie showing locally, depicts the heroic 18-year drive by abolitionist William Wilberforce to end slavery.
Two hundred years ago, in 1807, Parliament abolished slavery in Britain. In 1833, all slaves in the British Empire were set free. It took a civil war, Abraham Lincoln and the 13th Amendment, passed in 1865, to end slavery in America.
Even though the British have been commemorating this auspicious occasion, there’s little remembrance of it in the places where African slaves came from: Sierra Leone, Senegal, Gambia, etc. Sadly, the African tribal enmities that made the slave trade possible have not disappeared. The tribes’ children, sold to the British, Americans and Portuguese slavers, are not commemorated in the lands where they were seized and forced into bondage.
Slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888 and a little later in other South American countries. But more than a century later, blacks still live in slave-like conditions all across South America or – at best – as second-class citizens.
Pernicious institutions are like debilitating diseases; even when “cured,” their evil influences live on. The structures that sustained the institution of slavery didn’t simply go away when slavery was abolished. Freedom was thus bittersweet for former slaves. They lacked the means of survival, so their former masters and the institutions that made slavery possible kept an iron grip on them. This was even truer in the U.S. than in the British Empire because, with or without slaves, the South had to have cheap farm labor to grow cotton and tobacco.
But if life has been painful for descendants of slaves in the U.S., it has been a nightmare for their counterparts in South America. That’s especially true in Brazil, where poverty and skin color are intimately interwoven – the darker one one is, the worse is one’s life.
The door is now open for black Americans to claim their place at the banquet table, to do everything the Constitution guarantees a citizen. On the other hand, in Brazil, slavery’s long leash continues to hold Afro-Brazilians down, marking time; mired in poverty and degradation in the favellas of Rio and other cities. Even though blacks are 50 percent of Brazil’s population, you’d be hard pressed to name a single black Brazilian in any position of power. The most prominent black Brazilians, Pele and Reynaldo, are soccer players.
Brazil may have produced a Pele, but the only chance for it to produce a Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice will be through an affirmative action-like move. But President Ignacio Lula da Silva’s proposed plan to help black Brazilians has encountered strong opposition, as similar efforts did in the U.S.
Since they don’t march, don’t protest and are not organized, slavery’s children in Latin America are invisible to us. They have few rights; no recourse, no higher power to lift them from the mud. Black America – distracted by so much trivia – has a role to play in saving former slaves’ children in South America and the Caribbean, including Haiti. The U.S., through inter-American institutions and the U.N., must be an advocate for the many who have been silent for so long.
When slavery is mentioned, our minds gravitate to Europe and America. But I must also mention the enslavement of black Africans by Arabs. Arabs have bought and sold blacks for a thousand years; and even though Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962, in reality, blacks are still traded and treated as chattel in most Arab countries, even at this late date in human history. There seems to be no international will to confront this Arab trade in human beings.
I urge everyone to see “Amazing Grace,” and become part of this commemoration of the end of slavery 200 years ago in the British Empire. This remembrance should also occasion a new call to revisit places where former slaves still have no voice and are treated no better than chattel.
Those free in America have an obligation to inform themselves of the fate of their brothers south of the border. If we care, there’s much we can do to help them.
Pius Kamau of Aurora is a thoracic and general surgeon. He was born and raised in Kenya and immigrated to the U.S. in 1971. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.
