THE SLAVE TRADE ACT MARCH 25 - 1807

 

THE SLAVE TRADE ACT MARCH 25 - 1807 

 

Murphy Browne © March 20-2021

On March 25, 1807, the British government abolished their trade in Africans from the African continent. The Slave Trade Act 1807, or An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, was an Act passed by Britain banning the slave trade in the British Empire. This “Act” did not abolish slavery, it prohibited the transportation of Africans from the African continent to other parts of the world. The abolition of slavery in the British Empire was 27 years later, on August 1, 1834. The Slave Trade Act 1807, made it illegal to engage in the slave trade throughout the British colonies, however, trafficking between the Caribbean islands continued. After March 25, 1807, it became illegal to carry “slaves” in British ships; from that date “all manner of dealing and reading in the purchase, sale, barter, or transfer of slaves or of persons intending to be sold, transferred, used, or dealt with as slaves, practiced or carried in, at, or from any part of the coast or countries of Africa shall be abolished, prohibited and declared to be unlawful.” The British then encouraged other European nations to abolish their slave trade. Britain had made a fortune in the slave trade by March 25, 1807 so could afford to adopt a self-righteous attitude to other countries still involved in the trade. According to White, British historian Martin Meredith, "In the decade between 1791 and 1800, British ships made about 1,340 voyages across the Atlantic, landing nearly 400,000 slaves. Between 1801 and 1807, they took a further 266,000. The slave trade remained one of Britain's most profitable businesses."  

Although the Act, “outlawed trans-Atlantic human trafficking,” British “entrepreneurs” continued enslaving Africans who were already in their possession; they were only restricted from importing any new ones from Africa. They could continue buying and selling enslaved Africans in/from any of the “colonies.” The Act did not have much effect on the British institution of slavery. Plantation owners were also able to maintain the volume of enslaved workers through the children born into slavery. Enslaved Africans in British colonies were bought and sold at will. 

 

Britain used its influence in pressuring other nations to end their slave trade after passing the 1807 Act. The United States adopted its “Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves” on January 1, 1808. Like the British, the American abolition of its Atlantic slave trade did not alter its internal trade in enslaved Africans. In 1810, Portugal agreed to restrict its trade through the Anglo-Portuguese treaty. In 1813, Sweden outlawed its slave trade through the Anglo-Swedish treaty. In 1814, France agreed with Britain that the slave trade was "repugnant to the principles of natural justice" and agreed to abolish the slave trade in five years by signing the Treaty of Paris. In 1814, through the Anglo-Dutch treaty the Dutch outlawed their slave trade. The 1817 Anglo-Spanish treaty called for Spain to abolish its trade by 1820. Under the 1817 treaty with Spain to abolish the slave trade, naval ships of both nations could seize any Spanish or British ships involved in the illegal trade in slaves, although many ships tried to evade the ban. 

 

The infamous “Amistad” debacle was an example of an attempt to evade the ban on importing Africans from the African continent after the Anglo-Spanish treaty was signed. In April 1839, several Africans were kidnapped and taken from Sierra Leone which was a British protectorate. After enduring a horrific journey and landing at Havana in the Spanish colony Cuba, the Africans were fraudulently classified as Cuban-born slaves (renamed with Spanish names) and sold at auction to Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montez, who planned to transport them to their plantations on another part of the island aboard the schooner “La Amistad.” 

 

The Africans on “La Amistad,” led by Sengbe Pieh, who had been renamed Joseph Cinque by the Spanish kidnappers, managed to free themselves and commandeer the slave ship. They tried to make their way back to Africa but ended up at Long Island, in the USA, where they were recaptured on August 26, 1839 by the crew of an American naval brig. Following a two-year legal battle in American courts where the Spanish government argued that America had no jurisdiction over Spanish subjects, the Africans were freed on March 9, 1841. The Supreme Court announced its decision based on the fact that Sengbe Pieh and his companions were "kidnapped Africans, who by the laws of Spain itself were entitled to their freedom." The ruling included a judge’s decision that the Africans were "born free" and had been kidnapped in violation of international law. 

 

In 2007 during the commemoration of the bicentenary of the abolition of the British Trans-Atlantic slave trade, it was not surprising that the British government attempted to make the year a celebration of White “abolitionists.” On March 27, 2007, in Westminster Abbey, British born, Pan-African activist, Toyin Agbetu challenged the British monarchy, church and government “at their public ritual of disrespect to the millions of African people lost during Maafa.” Agbetu was celebrated across the Pan-African world when he spoke out, in the spirit of freedom fighters like Nanny of the Maroons, Nana Yaa Asantewaa of the Ashanti, Bussa of Barbados and Kofi, Guyana’s National Hero who led the Berbice Revolution of 1763. During the year of commemoration, our community in Toronto, led by Dr. Afua Cooper and the members of the Committee to Commemorate and Memorialize the Abolition of the Slave Trade (CMAST,) recognized the role of the freedom fighters of Haiti in the British decision to end the slave trade and eventually slavery. 

Murphy Browne © March 20-2021

 

MARCH 25-1807 ABOLITION OF THE SLAVE TRADE ACT

MARCH 25-1807 ABOLITION OF THE SLAVE TRADE ACT 

 

Tomorrow, Thursday, March 25, 2021 will mark 214 years since the British government passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act on March 25, 1807. The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act received its royal assent, abolishing the slave trade in the British colonies and making it illegal to carry Africans from the African continent in British ships to be enslaved elsewhere, but did not abolish slavery. The enslavement of Africans in the British Empire was abolished 27 years later, on August 1, 1834. For 400 years, Europeans from various countries forced Africans onto slave ships and transported them across the Atlantic Ocean. The first European nation to engage in the Transatlantic Slave Trade was Portugal in the mid to late 1400's. British captain John Hawkins made the first known English slaving voyage to Africa, in 1562, during the reign of the British monarch Elizabeth 1. Hawkins made three such journeys over a period of six years. He captured over 1200 Africans and sold them as goods in the Spanish colonies in the Americas. At first, British traders supplied Africans to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean islands. However, as British settlements in the Americas and the Caribbean islands were established, often through wars with European countries such as Holland, Spain and France, British slave traders increasingly supplied British colonies with captured Africans. The exact number of British ships that took part in the Slave Trade is not known, however, in the 245 years between Hawkins’ first voyage and the abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807, there were approximately 10,000 voyages from Britain to Africa for the express purpose of capturing and trading in African men, women and children to enslave. It is estimated that “entrepreneurs” from other parts of the British Empire (including British North America/Canada) perhaps fitted out a further 1,150 voyages. In the 1660s, the number of Africans taken from the African continent in British ships averaged 6,700 per year. By the 1760s, Britain was the foremost European country engaged in the Slave Trade. Of the 80,000 Africans chained and shackled and transported across to the Americas each year, 42,000 were carried by British slave ships. Reportedly, only the Portuguese, who carried on the trade for almost 50 years after Britain had abolished its Slave Trade, carried more enslaved Africans to the Americas than the British. White British historian, Professor David Richardson, (the UK’s expert on the slave trade) has calculated that British ships carried 3.4 million or more enslaved Africans to the Americas. Based on records of voyages in the archives of port customs and maritime insurance records, it is estimated that the total number of Africans transported and enslaved by European traders, was at least 12 million people. The first record of enslaved Africans being landed in the British colony of Virginia was 1619. Barbados was the first British settlement in the Caribbean in 1625 and the British took control of Jamaica in 1655. The establishment of the Royal African Company in 1672 formalised the Slave Trade under a royal charter and gave a monopoly to the port of London. The ports of Bristol and Liverpool, lobbied to have the charter changed and, in 1698, the monopoly was taken away. 

The profits gained from chattel slavery helped to finance the Industrial Revolution and the Caribbean islands became the hub of the British Empire. The sugar colonies were Britain's most valuable colonies. By the end of the eighteenth century, four million pounds came into Britain from its Caribbean island plantations, compared with one million from the rest of the British Empire. The ports of Bristol and Liverpool in the UK became major ports through fitting out slave ships and handling the cargoes they brought back. Between 1700 and 1800, Liverpool's population rose from 5000 to 78,000. The Transatlantic Slave Trade provided many jobs for white people back in Britain. Every white person in Britain benefitted from the enslavement of Africans and their coerced, unpaid labour. Some worked in factories that had been set up with money made from the Slave Trade. Many trades-people bought a share in a slave ship. The coerced, unpaid labour of enslaved Africans also made goods, such as sugar, more affordable for people living in Britain.  

 

When the Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle spoke of her experience with racism in the now famous interview of March 7, 2021, she was vilified by many who doubted her lived experience as a “woman of colour” in the UK. Perhaps those people do not know the history of the British monarchy’s involvement with the enslavement of millions of men, women and children who looked like Meghan Markle (enslaved people who were the products of African women and white men.) Perhaps those people do not know of the more recent (20^th and 21^st centuries) New Cross House Fire in southeast London on Sunday January 18, 1981, Brixton Riots of April 1981 brought about as resistance to the racist sus laws, the murder of Stephen Lawrence on April 22, 1993 or the Windrush Scandal of 2018. 

 

Murphy Browne © Tuesday, December 29, 2009 

CMAST 

Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned; until the colour of a man's skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes; until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained; until all Africans stand and speak as free beings, equal in the eyes of all men, as they are in the eyes of Heaven; until that day, the African continent will not know peace. We Africans will fight, if necessary and we know that we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil. 

 

Excerpt from His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie I’s address to the United Nations in October 1963 (used by Bob Marley in his 1973 song “War”) 

 

When His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I spoke those now famous words immortalized in song by the Honourable Robert “Bob” Nesta Marley he was calling for world peace. We enter the year 2008 with some African nations destabilized by the machinations of greedy and unconscionable people who are not African but in many cases these non- Africans have manipulated and bolstered the regime of puppet leaders they have foisted on the people. These short sighted “leaders” do not seem to care that they are being used, as non- Africans loot and rape the resources of their countries in a manner reminiscent of years of the brutal slave trade when Africans were dragged out of the continent in shackles in the holds of filthy slave ships. The words of Selassie I still ring with confidence in our will to survive. We can take hope “that we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil.” As we enter this new year we can also take hope because our ancestors survived the middle passage and four hundred years of brutal enslavement. We are here as testament to their will to survive. During the year 2007 we commemorated the bicentenary of the abolition of the British Trans Atlantic slave trade. During the year of commemoration we were not surprised when the Canadian government ignored the bicentenary. We were not surprised that the British government tried to make the year a celebration of white so called abolitionists. We were ecstatic and proud when on March 27th in Westminster Abbey, our brother Toyin Agbetu called a halt to the British monarchy and government’s attempt to shirk their responsibility for the hundreds of years of brutal enslavement of Africans. He made them face their hypocrisy of celebrating their ancestors who had benefitted from the horrific slave trade as they refused to acknowledge the role that African freedom fighters played in the abolition of the slave trade. He was celebrated across the Pan-African world. Agbetu spoke out, in the spirit of freedom fighters like Nanny of the Maroons, Nana Yaa Asantewa of the Ashanti, Queen Nzingha of Angola and Kofi, Guyana’s National Hero who led the Berbice Revolution of 1763. During the year of commemoration our community in Toronto with the leadership of Dr. Afua Cooper and the members of the Committee to Commemorate and Memorialize the Abolition of the Slave Trade (CMAST) recognized the role of the freedom fighters of Haiti in the British decision to end the slave trade and eventually slavery. 

 

On January 1st 1804, formerly enslaved Africans living and toiling under French brutality in Haiti surprised the European world by defeating the combined armies of the USA several European nations and seizing their freedom. They became the first group of enslaved Africans to successfully overthrow their European enslavers. They founded an independent African controlled nation after a 13 year war in which several European nations and the USA tried to keep them enslaved. From 1791 to 1804, the Africans in Haiti united to launch such a massive, brilliantly executed war of liberation that the armies of France, Spain, England and the United States of America failed to defeat them. The Europeans were desperate to prevent the Africans from gaining their freedom and taking possession of the island where they (the Africans) had toiled to make it one of the most prized and coveted European possessions. Haiti at that time was the most prosperous colonial possession of any European power. The unpaid coerced labour of enslaved Africans had made France the envy of Europe. Famous for its prosperous plantations, by 1750 Haiti (Saint-Domingue) was the largest sugar producer in the world. Coffee, cotton, indigo, cocoa and ebony were also grown with slave labour and added to the profits the French used to build their elegant and extravagant palaces, chateaus and townhouses in France. The lucrative sugar cane industry also helped to make France the envy of other white nations and Haiti became the target of warring colonizing nations (Spain, France and Britain) who fought to own and control this “Pearl of the Antilles.” The enslaved Africans had been subjected to horrific unspeakable acts of terror and torture as France filled its coffers at the expense of African lives. The enslaved Africans were worked to their physical limit, literally worked to death, quickly replaced by other African bodies that would, in turn, be worked to death in an endless cycle of violence to body and spirit. It was because of these horrific and barbaric conditions that the Africans planned and executed the revolution which ended in success on January 1st 1804. 

 

The government of the United States of America, in 1804 the only other independent nation in this hemisphere and one of the most notorious of the slave owning countries, refused to recognize the new nation of Haiti believing that recognizing Haiti's independence would threaten its own inhumane system of slavery. Regardless, the success of the Haitian revolution caused shock waves across the white world and was the beginning of the end of the enslavement of Africans. Fearing similar scenarios in their colonies, the British ended their Trans Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and the Americans in 1808. The end of the Trans Atlantic slave trade did not bring an immediate end to the enslavement of Africans in America, Canada or the Caribbean. Slavery in Canada ended on August 1st 1834, in the Caribbean on August 1, 1838 and in the USA on January 1st 1863. 

 

We are free people because many of our ancestors never gave up the struggle to be free during four hundred years of brutal and horrific chattel slavery. We can never understand what they endured regardless of how many books we read about their experience as enslaved people. Sitting in a cramped seat during an 11 hour flight across the Atlantic I thought about what my ancestors endured in the filthy holds of slave ships (for weeks and sometimes months) to satisfy the greed of Europeans and realized that we have a duty to continue fighting white supremacy and racism wherever it rears it ugly head. We owe this to the memory of our ancestors and the future of our people. As we continue the battle for the right to have our children educated in African centred schools we must keep in mind the struggles our ancestors waged to ensure our future. We have a responsibility to secure the future of our children by any means necessary including the right to attend schools where they can thrive in a culturally appropriate environment. We must not be silenced. 

 

In a 1944 book edited by African American historian and Pan-African activist Rayford W. Logan, Mary McLeod Bethune is quoted: "If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves and allow those responsible to salve their conscience by believing that they have our acceptance and concurrence. We should, therefore, protest openly everything...that smacks of discrimination or slander." 

(Mary McLeod Bethune, African American educator and activist, 1875 - 1955) 

 

Murphy Browne © Tuesday, December 29, 2009

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpypYcMe16I  THE GREAT INSURRECTION

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuwxZSIS__4  ELECTRIC AVENUE

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THE INTERNATIONAL DAY FOR THE ELIMINATION OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION 2021

 THE INTERNATIONAL DAY FOR THE ELIMINATION OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION 2021

 

 

Sunday, March 21, 2021 will be 61 years since a group of African men, women and children were killed and wounded by white police in Sharpeville, Azania (South Africa.) On 21 March 1960, in Sharpeville, Azania (South Africa) 69 Africans were killed and more than 300 were wounded (shot in the back) as they fled the murderous gunfire of white police. It will be 55 years (1966) since the United Nations (UN) passed a resolution to recognize March 21 as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

 

DR FRANCES CRESS WELSING INTERNATIONAL DAY FOR THE ELIMINATION OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION 2013

Murphy Browne © Wednesday, March 20, 2013

"Racism (White Supremacy) is the local and global power system and dynamic, structured and maintained by persons who classify themselves as white, whether consciously or subconsciously determined, which consists of patterns of perception, logic, symbol formation, thought, speech, action and emotional response, as conducted simultaneously in all areas of people activity (economics, education, entertainment, labor, law, politics, religion, sex and war), for the ultimate purpose of white genetic survival and to prevent white genetic annihilation on planet Earth - a planet upon which the vast majority of people are classified as nonwhite (black, brown, red and yellow) by white skinned people, and all of the nonwhite people are genetically dominant (in terms of skin coloration) compared to the genetic recessive white skin people."

From “The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors” by Dr Francis Cress Welsing

 

 

March 21 is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and Dr. Francis Cress Welsing is one of the recognized voices that has defined “racism.” She is an African American psychiatrist whose definition of racism has been explored and documented in “The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy)” published in 1970 and “The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors” published in 1990. Cress Welsing was born on March 18, 1935 during the time when African Americans were forced to live, study and work in a segregated USA. Even though she was born and raised in Chicago which was the destination of thousands of African Americans who fled the Jim Crow south, Cress Welsing would still have witnessed the racist practices of White America. Emmet Till the 14 year old African American child who was brutally beaten and lynched on August 28, 1955 (for supposedly whistling at a White woman in Money, Mississippi) was born and raised in Chicago. As a 20-year-old African American woman at that time Cress Welsing would have known about Till and the many other African Americans lynched by White Americans (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDCk4s0Cof4.) Just 15 years before she was born (July 27-August 3, 1919) White American mobs in Chicago lynched African Americans and destroyed their homes. In spite of the atrocities that White Americans committed against their African American compatriots for more than 400 years, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is hardly recognized in that country.

 

 

The date March 21 was chosen to recognize and address the scourge of racism because of the massacre of Africans in South Africa during the apartheid era. On March 21, 1960 a group of Africans in Sharpeville, South Africa were peacefully demonstrating against the white supremacist apartheid "pass laws" when they were murdered by white police. The Sharpeville Massacre where 69 Africans were killed and almost 300 wounded (shot in the back as they fled the murderous police gunfire) led to worldwide condemnation of the white minority who had seized power in the African nation. The government in South Africa at the time was in power because Africans were denied the vote in their own country. In the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre where the white minority government declared a state of emergency and arrested more than 18,000 people even the very conservative United Nations (UN) was forced to take a stand and condemn the action of the state sanctioned massacre of peacefully protesting Africans.

 

 

In 1966 the General Assembly of the UN proclaimed March 21, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The UN called on the international community to redouble its efforts to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination. Although condemned by the UN many of the world powers continued to trade with the apartheid minority White supremacists who ruled and oppressed Africans in South Africa. American President Ronald Reagan had to be forced to sign the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 into law. He vetoed the Act which was sponsored by African American U.S. Representative Ron Dellums in 1972 with support from the Congressional Black Caucus and Representative Howard Wolpe, chair of the House Africa Subcommittee. Reagan’s veto of the law was overridden by Congress (the Senate 78 to 21 and the House 313 to 83.) The Canadian government and various institutions in Canada including Carleton University and the University of Toronto, colluded with the White supremacist apartheid government of South Africa by refusing to divest and continuing to trade with the government and South African companies long after the UN called for sanctions.

 

 

Africans in Canada whether they are the descendants of Africans who were enslaved by the French in the 1600s or by White United Empire Loyalists after 1776 or fled slavery in America and sought freedom in Canada or immigrated from the Caribbean beginning in the 1830s after slavery was abolished by Britain are subjected to a White supremacist culture. The African Canadian Legal Clinic (ACLC) in a report dated January 24, 2012 wrote as part of its submission to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD): “Canadian society is still affected by racism and racial discrimination. Because of its history, Canadian society, as in all the countries of Northand South America, carries a heavy legacy of racial discrimination, which was the ideological prop of trans-Atlantic slavery and of the colonial system. The ideological aspect of this legacy has given rise to an intellectual mindset which, through education, literature, art and the different channels of thought and creativity, has profoundly and lastingly permeated the system of values, feelings, mentalities, perceptions and behaviours, and hence the country’s culture. Racist stereotypes are the result but also the cause of racist practices. 

In the past, stereotypes of Black people were used to justify slavery and segregation. Today, they provide the basis for discriminatory policies and practices such as over-policing of African Canadian communities, police brutality, disparities in sentencing, disproportionate discipline of African Canadian students, and failure to implement equitable policies to address disparities in employment, economics, and education. These phenomena reveal a legislative, administrative and judicial focus on the perceived deviance of members of the African Canadian community and ignorance of their underlying socioeconomic and historic causes.”

Usually when the word “racism” is mentioned there are denials and excuses. Some of the more famous and ridiculous pronouncements: “I am not a racist. I have friends of all races. I treat everyone the same. I do not see colour.” Racism is more than one White person making derogatory comments about a racialized person or a group of racialized people. It is more than some random White person deciding not to give a job to a qualified racialized person. Racism is the White supremacist culture that allows and in many cases encourages White skin people to act out their prejudices and negatively affect the lives of racialized people. It is the power invested in White skin which allows the discrimination and the prejudice to cause harm to racialized people. In recent years there have even been White people who recognize and acknowledge the existence of White skin privilege and the scourge of racism. When Peggy McIntosh (https://susanarinderle.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/White-Privilege-Unpacking-the-Knapsack.pdf)  writes in her well-publicized piece “White Privilege; Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” about the unearned privileges of White skin colour she knows what she is writing about being one of the privileged. After listing all the unearned privileges of her White skin McIntosh writes: “Disapproving of the systems won't be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitudes. But a white skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate, but cannot end, these problems. To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these taboo subjects. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to be now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.”

 

 

Dr. Cress Welsing who will be speaking about her definition of racism at York University on Saturday March 30 as an African American who has lived in a racist White supremacist society her entire life says: “The system of Racism (White Supremacy) utililizes deceit and violence (inclusive of chemical warfare, biological warfare and psychological warfare), indeed Any Means Necessary, to achieve its ultimate goal objective of white genetic survival and to prevent white genetic annihilation on planet Earth. In the existing system of Racism (White Supremacy) when the term is undefined and poorly understood there is general confusion and chaos on the part of the victims of that system (local, national and global). It then becomes impossible for the victims of racism (White Supremacy) to effectively counter the global system of Racism (White Supremacy). The African enslavement, imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, fascism, etc., are all dimensions and aspects of Racism (White Supremacy.)”

 

Murphy Browne © Wednesday, March 20, 2013

CHLOE COOLEY MARCH 14-1793

 

CHLOE COOLEY MARCH 14-1793 

 

Murphy Browne © March 8-2021 

 

On March 14, 1793, Chloe Cooley an enslaved African woman in Ontario, made history when she fought for her freedom. Cooley was being sold and she vigorously resisted. Being tied up and sold was just one more incident in a lifetime of indignities. Cooley’s struggle for her freedom gave the lie to the myth of the happily enslaved African and led to an unsuccessful effort to end slavery in Upper Canada (Ontario.) During the four hundred years enslavement of Africans by Europeans there was a concerted effort to portray the enslaved Africans as being happy with their lot. The image of the fat, perpetually grinning desexualized mammy who loved the White family more than she loved her own life was used by White people to rationalize the inhumanity of slavery. To deal with the cognitive dissonance of holding other humans in captivity and exploiting their labour, White people had to convince themselves that enslaved Africans enjoyed being enslaved and loved the people who enslaved them. Members of White families would brutalize enslaved Africans daily and then on Sunday attend church, so they had to convince themselves that as good Christians their brutal treatment of the Africans they enslaved was justified. 

 

In the 1982 published book “The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World In The Old South” White American history professor Catherine Clinton wrote : “The Mammy was created by white Southerners to redeem the relationship between black women and white men within slave society in response to the antislavery attack from the North during the ante-bellum period. The Mammy was the positive emblem of familial relations between black and white. She existed as a counterpoint to the octoroon concubine the light skinned product of a ‘white man’s lust’ who was habitually victimized by slaveowners’ sexual appetites.” 

 

There is no evidence that Cooley was sexually exploited by her owner or his friends and relatives, but it is hardly likely that this would have been documented unlike the infamous slaveholder of the Jamaican plantation Egypt. In 1989 African Jamaican history professor Douglas Gordon Hall published the diary of British slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood where Thistlewood documented his rape of enslaved African women on his plantation. Thistlewood had the time to document those rapes because he did no work since he was the owner of a plantation and had enslaved Africans who were forced to do the work. In his 2007 published book “The Trader, The Owner, The Slave: Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery” White British historian James Walvin comments on the diary of Thistlewood: “Thomas Thistlewood left a 14,000 page diary. He details the daily life of a slave owner and the quite extraordinary levels of brutality he meters out to his slaves; the sexual brutality to the women, and the physical brutality to all of them.” Walvin also muses on the reasons given for the continued enslavement of Africans and the hypocritical reality: "One of the justifications for slavery put forward by the planters was that you could treat slaves like this because they were not like us: they were sub-human. But against that of course was the fact that all the planters had sex with their slaves, so if they're sub-human what were they doing have sex with them, and having children with them?” Enslaved African women in the Caribbean, Central, North or South America and Europe, suffered the same fate. 

 

Cooley’s documented struggle in Ontario, Canada also helps to explode the myth that there was no slavery in Canada. The popular stories of enslaved Africans fleeing slavery in the USA to find freedom in Canada continue into the 21st century. Documentation of slavery in Canada is not popular and the few books that have been published are not particularly popular even during February, African History Month. When Toronto celebrated 180 years since it was incorporated as the capital of Ontario on March 6, 1834, there was no mention of slavery. Yet the enslavement of Africans in this city and throughout this country ended on August 1, 1834. Coincidentally the same year (1793) that Cooley made a valiant effort to resist being sold is the same year Toronto (the home of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation) was occupied by the British. In an article published on March 6, 2014 commemorating Toronto’s 180th birthday this information was provided: “The British settlement formally began with John Simcoe, who renamed Toronto in 1793, proclaiming the town of York and centring around Fort York, which was located in the area around the present-day St. Lawrence Market. It would be 41 years and one five-day American invasion later that York would revert to its native name, Toronto, on March 6, 1834.” 

 

There was no mention of Chloe Cooley even though her struggle happened in 1793 and led to Simcoe passing the first legislation in the British colonies to restrict the slave trade and slavery ended in 1834. Apparently, Chloe Cooley’s Black life did not matter in 1793 nor did it matter during the celebration of Toronto’s history. 

 

Murphy Browne © March 8-2021