Slavery - still relevant?

 

Houses designed by Decimus Burton, Saint Leonards-on-Sea

 

 

There seems to have been a recurring theme of slavery in my reading matter recently.  It started with my reading André Brink's fine novel Phylida, based on an episode in his family's past.  It is set in South Africa in the 1830s, when slavery was about to be abolished.  André Brink is an author I admire in any event, and this novel was longlisted for the Man Booker prize, so I read it as part of an exercise in ploughing through the longlisted novels as a whole.  It is a fine book: Phylida is a slave who dares to say no.  The final part of the novel has some of the grandeur of myth.

 

Phylida's ability to resist oppression was based in part on the legal framework being put in place for the emancipation of slaves.  I am not sure that the same advantage was available to the twenty-five slaves who were the subject of a legal transfer I came across a week or so ago, dating back to 1791, and executed by one of my mother's forebears as part of a marriage settlement in the West Indian island of Guyana.  I had no idea that my great-great-grandfather had employed slaves - but had I given some thought to the fact that he had plantations in the West Indies I suppose it would have been obvious.  It made me wonder how much prosperity in nineteenth century England derived from this source.

 

We would all like to think that slavery is something not only barbaric but remote from our existence.  However, a newspaper article yesterday highlighted new forms of slavery that are causing concern in the present day, on our doorstep: forced labour of immigrants and people with learning difficulties.

 

Thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that the attitude of mind that enables people to exploit their fellow human beings as slaves is only an extreme form of the attitude of superiority adopted by many human beings towards their fellows.  This reminded me, on a lighter note, of a story I heard recently of an incident some forty years ago, involving a wealthy couple who were having some major building work undertaken on their house.  Tea was sent out to the builders in jam jars, on a tray.  Outraged, one of the builders took the tray back and said to the mistress of the house "You folk may drink your tea from jam jars but where we come from we use cups so we'll go off and have our tea down the caff".  Collapse of stout party...as in the case of André Brink's Phylida, it takes courage to say no. 

 

Antony Mair