Meet Africa’s first dictator. Sir Percy Anderson, the head of the British government’s insensitively-named Slave Trade department, wielded breathtaking power.
Published in New Nation, 22 October 2007
Sitting at a desk deep in the bowels of the Foreign Office, this mandarin masterminded Britain’s shift from slavery to empire while stripping Africa of its’ wealth. Sir Percy has been described as a shadowy figure who used his anonymity as a faceless civil servant to quietly turn the Slave Trade department into an agent for imperial expansion.
“The truth, I believe, is [that] he has begun to think of himself an African dictator, but a dictator concealed, who uses his power in secret, free of all responsibility.” These words, spoken by the explorer Sir John Kirk in 1894, came more than a decade after Sir Percy had quietly turned a department that was supposed to enforce anti-slave trade laws into a tool to carve up Africa. With his stroke of the pen, large slices of the continent were declared the white man’s, and so began Africa’s under-development.
Last week the imposing marble and brass of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s Grand Locarno Room was the setting for the launch of the Slavery in Diplomacy historical report, at a seminar called Whitehall and the Slave Trade: An Enduring Commitment to Human Rights. The seminar’s attendees had come to celebrate the story of how Britain ‘forsaking past sins and wary of foreign charges of hypocrisy’ bravely battled to stamp out the slave trade after the Abolition Acts of 1807 and 1833, the latter which formerly abolished slavery.
The hidden story, however, is how Westminster used this great apparatus of state first to support slavery, then to try to stop British and European slave traders from operating, and finally to spearhead the scramble for Africa.
The hero of the FCO’s report was James Bandinel, a former head of the Slave Trade department, who led navy efforts to nab rogue traders on the high seas. Yet it was Bandinel’s successor, Sir Percy, who is far more significant. For here was a man who, above others, set in motion the first moves to partition Africa, using many of the same civil servants who had earlier tried to enforce abolition.
It was Sir Percy’s aim, working under the guidance of Lord Salisbury, prime minister at the time, to prevent the French from getting too large a foothold on Africa. Slavery, which had massively enriched Britain’s elite at the cost of millions of African lives lost in the Middle Passage and beyond, was now giving way to the age of colonialism. The land Africans had been stolen from was now going to be ruled by the thieves, its’ mineral riches exploited to fuel Britain’s industrial expansion.
“They were replacing one system of domination and control with another”, says Dr Sulemana Abudulai, a visiting fellow at Cambridge University’s Centre for African Studies.
The trading systems that were first imposed to serve British business interests more than 100 years ago are still in evidence today. Africa’s reliance on cash crops is vulnerable to price drops, and its’ raw materials worth just a fraction of the value they attain once processed and packaged in the West.
“I don’t think there was an altruistic motive”, Dr Adudulai says. “This was not for the good of Africa at all. They imposed systems and structures that were alien to people used to tribal and religious groupings. The strength of a people is in its’ identity, and they had a false identity imposed on them along with foreign rulers.”
Today these British rulers can be accused of trying to rewrite history, or worse, of using the bicentenary of abolition to peddle a soft-focus story about how colonialism began out of goodwill. Slavery in Diplomacy, the FCO’s contribution to the bicentenary, certainly paints the onset of colonialism as a well-meaning exercise. Incursions into the heart of Africa were, according to the report, in order to ‘combat slavery at source’ by preventing Africans being captured by rogue slave traders.
However, the reality is that the race for Africa’s land began as soon as MPs had passed anti-slavery laws and voted to compensate slave owners generously.
Just seven years after the 1807 Act, the passing of which is being commemorated this year, the Brits had already begun laying the foundations of their empire by seizing the Cape Colony, in present-day South Africa, from the Dutch East India Company.
Sir Percy took control if the Foreign Office’s largest section, the Slave Trade department, in 1883 and renamed it the Africa Department. This marked a crucial turning point. The British had only just completed a bloody suppression of the Asante people to establish the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) in 1874. England was keen to arm themselves with as much land as possible ahead of the Berlin conference of 1885, where European nations haggled over trade routes.
Keith Hamilton, a retired historian and one of the authors of Slavery in Diplomacy, argues that the scramble for Africa was borne out of a desire to eradicate clandestine slave trading at source. Britain was ‘wedded to an essentially moral cause’, even as they claimed vast swathes of western, eastern and southern Africa as their own.
Hamilton insists imperialism was, at its’ birth at least, simply a means of promoting legitimate trade between African rulers and Britain, thereby removing the need to capture land and sell people. And territorial annexation of land was simply a means of offering protection against ship owners and their henchmen. He says the government was responding to the calls of the anti-slavery campaigners such as Thomas Buxton and Stephen Lushington to work in Africa to extinguish the trade in human lives.
This argument is contested by Baroness Lola Young, one of the leading lights behind the highly-praised exhibition Parliament and the Slave Trade. She said: “The empire in Africa did not happen through Britain’s goodwill. There were economic interests, and the details of Britain’s move into Africa would have been worked out at every level.”
They got how much?
The British parliament gave a whopping £20million in compensation to slave owners as they passed a law outlawing slavery in 1833. That’s a bank-busting £1.8 billion in today’s money.
When you add to that the estimated £1 billion profit made by British slavers (£89 billion today), and the untold riches made by English plantation owners on the bleeding backs of enslaved Africans, it becomes clear that the African holocaust was big business. Factor in the money made from slavery in North and South America, and the sheer scale of this ‘economy’ because clearer still.
The Bishop of Exeter, for example, was paid £12,729 (£2.4m in today’s money) as compensation for the loss of 665 slaves in 1833. Meanwhile, courts and institutions today continue to ignore calls for reparations. One bid in the US to sue large insurance companies for $1 billion fell flat, while other moves to seek compensation for the descendants of slaves have also come to nothing.
Follow me: @suttongoingon
cllrlesterholloway.wordpress.com 