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Slavery

My Lords, it really is a privilege to be among those speaking today. I am not quite sure where I begin, but I am more of a practical man, not influenced by intellectual arguments. I was brought up to believe that slavery was the systematic exploitation of labour for work and services or the ownership of people as property. I do not really believe that one should apologise for the past, or that you can live with the sins of your fathers unless you really go back into the past. I should explain my knowledge of this subject; fortunately, it is based on being involved in trade and its finance. I started to get interested when working with a research company that did a race relations study. It took us nearly a year to determine what questions we should ask, because we were facing prejudice—one of the worst evils in this world, when we are all people. The noble Lord, Lord Morris, raised something with me that I had got wrong. I wanted to know what a Rastafarian was; I tried to work out how the slaves from Ethiopia could possibly have got to Jamaica and made the dreadlocks. No, it was Emperor Haile Selassie who was called a Rastafari. He went to Jamaica in the 1930s, and they all followed him thereafter. That ultimately led to me getting involved with trying to help Bob Marley go off to Zimbabwe to give it its freedom. In my life, I have found that if you go back into time and are involved in trade, you might go back to 1750 BC. The Egyptians and Babylonians were the really great slave-drivers of that time; they were followed later by the Hittites, in the Mashreq as it is now, and later by the Chinese. But the route of slaves and the exploitation of labour were also linked to tribalism and the desire to gain territory. Most slavery followed certain patterns, many of which I have been along. It was the silk route in some part or, later, the route to Mecca. You might start at one end in what was known as the slave coast, in the Bight of Benin, near Mount Cameroon. Once, when I was down there, I remember having a wonderful discussion with a president who reminded me that the first slaves who sailed back to Africa from Jamaica arrived in Cameroon, and were so grateful to William Wilberforce that they named their town Victoria, after the great Queen. Then, the trade in the Barbary Coast followed—the Arab trade in the Maghreb countries of north Africa, where they sailed across to help the Roman Empire. Yet the Roman slaves came, of course, from the Dnieper or the Danube, which went into the Black Sea. They in fact created the Roman Empire; without slaves, there would have been no such empire, and without the exploitation or utilisation of people there would be no empires. Having rather enjoyed the Mediterranean, I also got involved in Middle East matters and thought I would see if I could follow the slave routes. Of course, they went across Africa and I was down working in many of those parts. I tried to work with the French, in francophone Africa, and realised that in general the French used their slaves for agricultural activity in west Africa. I found the old camel routes, as mygreat friend who was a member in the other place,Sir Douglas Dodds-Parker—who did 10 years on a camel—explained to me that camels went across Africa. So, down in the Goulamine market one day, I bought a camel. My son had told me this joke; at the age of three, it was his only joke. ““What do you call a camel with three humps? You call him Humphrey””. So, I called the camel Humphrey, gave it back to the man I bought it from and asked if it could send me a Christmas or birthday card as it went across Africa. It did that for about three or four years, following the slave routes. The Arab slavers were by far the greatest of all times. They had the slave routes that ran across Africa, through the Sahara and into the Mashreq countries—effectively, where the Hittites who were the greatest slave traders after the Babylonians and the Egyptians were. They traded with ships and, in those days, their Liverpool, Bristol and London were Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika—and Zanzibar, where the slaves stayed longer than anywhere else. That was with some approval, because Zanzibar’s main crop was cloves, and clove picking requires lots of human labour and dexterity. That was important in the spice trade. I followed all of these with some sort of interest until, having been in the Navy in the Mediterranean, I thought I would sail around it later. I realised then that the Greeks too had their Liverpool, Bristol and London in Corinth, Delos and Rhodes—and Athens itself. Delos was the most interesting, as in 176 BC it became a free trade port. Immediately, it cornered the slave market and up to 10,000 slaves were traded in the market there every day. I thought I would go to look at Delos, but I arrived too late in my sailing boat and it was shut. There was only one chap there, and this was one of the only times that I used the influence of your Lordships’ House. He said that he could not let anyone ashore after three o’clock without authorisation, so I signed my own to confirm who I was—and I was allowed ashore. I spent a fascinating four hours being given the complete history of the slave trade, which had effectively spread from Delos throughout the world. The only thing was that when he came back for a drink on the boat, he smelt to high heaven; he had the smelliest feet of all. He said, ““I am so sorry about my feet, but there is nothing I can do as we have no water””. He explained that water had been one of the biggest problems for the slave trade—how to enable people to clean themselves, and how many had died of disease. These sorts of things stuck in my mind, and I asked myself how that exploitation of labour continued. When we look at slavery in Africa, when we colonised we were short of labour. So, there were 12 million who went to the Americas and the Caribbean from west Africa, but at the same time there were 17 million who were enslaved in the Arab world, or in Africa itself. The figures are quite interesting. We, the British, are down on record—although nobody knows, as many of the records are no longer there—as having shipped about 2.6 million slaves over to the Americas and the Caribbean with slavers. The Portuguese were the biggest. They shipped 4.6 million slaves, mainly to Brazil. The right reverend Prelate referred to the sad situation in Brazil, where the Pope is at the moment. It is interesting that Brazil has the biggest concentration of Catholics in the world. The Spanish shipped fewer slaves, around 1.6 million. The French also shipped smaller numbers, but they used a lot of slaves in their African colonies. In addition to the 12 million slaves who went to the Americas and the Caribbean, a further 17 million people were enslaved in Africa itself and by the Arab world, which still believed in trade in people. We were involved in building the railway in Gabon and other countries. The saddest thing for me was that when you talked to people, they talked about their historic tribes who, in general, were wiped out in war and the populations were enslaved. In the old-fashioned stories, the host took the field and there were no survivors, but that did not mean that there were no survivors. Every man over the age of 17 and under the age of 50 would have been killed and the wives, children and others would have been taken into bondage or slavery or were indentured. We used to do that with apprentices in the United Kingdom. They would be indentured, in fact, be enslaved in some form. It was rather like indebtedness now. People who are brought into this country fleeing the poverty of their own countries find that with slave masters or gang masters they are required to pay to get in and when they are here they are required to continue to work virtually for free because their wages are taken in order to pay interest rates that are often published in documentation similar to that that you see on APRs on credit cards. They can never get out of that debt. Across the world, we follow these sad occasions, but they are still there. I have been given the latest figures but I always take everybody’s figures with a pinch of salt—which is one of the greatest value commodities for trade, but we are told not to use it any more. I wonder how many people are enslaved today. The noble Baroness, Lady Cox, said 27 million. I think it is a substantially greater number if you look at those people who are effectively in economic bondage. However, worse is to come with the question of the exploitation of children, which has gone on throughout history. The latest Joseph Rowntree Foundation report, which was referred to in the Independent, stated that something like 5,000 children are brought here every year, 50,000 women and children are taken to the United States and more than 1 million people are trafficked worldwide. We cannot do anything to change the past, and nor should we apologise for it, but an apology is an understanding and knowledge of it. Slavery does not just go back to the 19th century. It goes back to other areas and beyond. We can look at the way we recruited people for the Navy by using press gangs or at the way that we would take into the British Army those wonderful people, the Sudanese, who had a great country, the most honest of all. An officer would be sent down with a commissioner to a village to ask for young men to serve in the Army. He would pay the village 80 per cent of their wages and 20 per cent would be given to the soldiers, but if they did not perform properly or were dishonest, the village lost its money. The exploitation of labour is ultimately an economic issue, as is the destruction of tribes and communities by war where people want to gain territory. We can say that it is all about gain, and there is no glory, but I am afraid it is going on today.