November 8, 2006
What's Wrong With Slavery?
K. Anthony Appiah
Laurence Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and University Center for Human Values at Princeton University
Minutes of the Ninth Meeting of the 65th Year
The ninth meeting of the 65th year was convened by President Giordmaine at 10:17 AM, owing to the speaker’s delayed arrival. About a hundred members attended. John Frederick read the minutes prepared by Claire Jacobus who was unable to attend.
Ben Colbert introduced his quest Charles Daves, while Bill Haynes introduced a visitor, his wife Aline, and Jim Harford presented his wife Millie as a visitor. The President said we were to have one more shot at identifying the elusive name of a member in the group photograph. Brooks Dyer called our attention to our member Thomas Hartmann who is to speak at the Memorial on Nassau Street on Veterans’ Day. A pair of spectacles is still seeking a claimant. David Dodge alerted us to next week’s speakers – a surprise to be introduced by George Hansen. David Dodge then introduced today’s speaker, K. Anthony Appiah, Lawrence Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy and of the University Centre for Human Values at Princeton. Born in London, he grew up in Ghana. His mother was a daughter of a one-time Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps. (This was of personal interest to me as I officiated at the marriage of the speaker’s cousin, also a grandson of Cripps, in England.) Having read for his B.A. and doctorate at Cambridge, he later taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke and Harvard, arriving at Princeton four years ago. In addition to his many prize-winning scholarly works, he has written novels and mysteries. Like his newest book’s title , Cosmopolitan, he truly is one.
What’s wrong with Slavery?” was his title. Drawing on his experience of Kumasi, the centre of the Ashanti region of Ghana, he sketched how the more-than-two-centuries-old Ashanti empire was the hub of a network of trade with gold, weapons acquired from the Danes, and a slave trade empowered in the eighteenth century by demand from the New World – so much so that by the beginning of that century two-thirds of the value of Ashanti trade came from those sales. One hundred thousand slaves a year were exported from West Africa through the forty-or-so British, Danish and Dutch forts along the Gold Coast. When the British banned the slave trade in the early 1800s, the Ashanti turned to trading in cola nuts but their economy declined and in the early twentieth century they were taken over by the British. In the absence of land as a saleable commodity, gold and slaves assumed dominant economic roles.
However, the picture was complicated by the fact that many types of slave could not be sold – they had a certain, if inferior, status as household servants where their owners bore recognized responsibilities towards them. Among their rights were maintenance and shelter, protection, and the right to marry. The word for slave was also used for a subject of a king or chief; and only a chief had the right to kill someone, and only for a criminal offence. Penalties for crime tended to be the same for slave and owner. Slaves could not be sent to work for someone else without their own consent or that of their families. Many slaves were hardly possessions because of the attendant restrictions on what they could or could not be ordered to do. Slaves included persons condemned to death for crimes, whose execution was often postponed for years until a time deemed auspicious, such as the need to accompany a recently-deceased king on his journey to the next world. War captives could be sold.
While slavery as an economic system was finally abolished by the British in 1908, inferior status was established by the way a slave or his forbears had entered slavery, and such status was not easily annulled. People who had been cared for in a household all their lives, and had never earned anything, were neither in a position to be independent, nor were they able to think themselves out of their embarrassing inferior status. Slavery carried the stigma of inherited inferiority.
What is wrong with it? If emancipators and slaves in America would point to violence, murder, cruelty and broken families, paternalist defences were invoked to say that such things were abuses of the system. But such justifications hardly wash, first because power over other people will lead to abuses, but even more because a dearth of self-respect is engendered making it impossible for the majority to rise above it. Blackness was coupled with slavery-potential to define inferior status and the demand for deference by slaves. The second major child of slavery is what he called “heteronomy”, the system where one does not make one’s own decisions about life goals because. even if one wants to, he or she is denied the opportunity. The slave is prevented from observing what John Stuart Mill saw about liberty: that my life decisions are not valuable because they are the best for me, but because they are mine.
A number of thoughtful questions followed. One related to the European-American part in the slave trade which deprived slaves of what rights they had previously enjoyed. Another asked, which came first - racist attitudes or economic realities creating a demand for convenient racist rationalizations. He favoured the latter explanation since early explorers often admired what they found in African society. His talk, marked throughout by clarity of thought and exposition, ended at 11.30.
Respectfully submitted,
John Frederick
Ben Colbert introduced his quest Charles Daves, while Bill Haynes introduced a visitor, his wife Aline, and Jim Harford presented his wife Millie as a visitor. The President said we were to have one more shot at identifying the elusive name of a member in the group photograph. Brooks Dyer called our attention to our member Thomas Hartmann who is to speak at the Memorial on Nassau Street on Veterans’ Day. A pair of spectacles is still seeking a claimant. David Dodge alerted us to next week’s speakers – a surprise to be introduced by George Hansen. David Dodge then introduced today’s speaker, K. Anthony Appiah, Lawrence Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy and of the University Centre for Human Values at Princeton. Born in London, he grew up in Ghana. His mother was a daughter of a one-time Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps. (This was of personal interest to me as I officiated at the marriage of the speaker’s cousin, also a grandson of Cripps, in England.) Having read for his B.A. and doctorate at Cambridge, he later taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke and Harvard, arriving at Princeton four years ago. In addition to his many prize-winning scholarly works, he has written novels and mysteries. Like his newest book’s title , Cosmopolitan, he truly is one.
What’s wrong with Slavery?” was his title. Drawing on his experience of Kumasi, the centre of the Ashanti region of Ghana, he sketched how the more-than-two-centuries-old Ashanti empire was the hub of a network of trade with gold, weapons acquired from the Danes, and a slave trade empowered in the eighteenth century by demand from the New World – so much so that by the beginning of that century two-thirds of the value of Ashanti trade came from those sales. One hundred thousand slaves a year were exported from West Africa through the forty-or-so British, Danish and Dutch forts along the Gold Coast. When the British banned the slave trade in the early 1800s, the Ashanti turned to trading in cola nuts but their economy declined and in the early twentieth century they were taken over by the British. In the absence of land as a saleable commodity, gold and slaves assumed dominant economic roles.
However, the picture was complicated by the fact that many types of slave could not be sold – they had a certain, if inferior, status as household servants where their owners bore recognized responsibilities towards them. Among their rights were maintenance and shelter, protection, and the right to marry. The word for slave was also used for a subject of a king or chief; and only a chief had the right to kill someone, and only for a criminal offence. Penalties for crime tended to be the same for slave and owner. Slaves could not be sent to work for someone else without their own consent or that of their families. Many slaves were hardly possessions because of the attendant restrictions on what they could or could not be ordered to do. Slaves included persons condemned to death for crimes, whose execution was often postponed for years until a time deemed auspicious, such as the need to accompany a recently-deceased king on his journey to the next world. War captives could be sold.
While slavery as an economic system was finally abolished by the British in 1908, inferior status was established by the way a slave or his forbears had entered slavery, and such status was not easily annulled. People who had been cared for in a household all their lives, and had never earned anything, were neither in a position to be independent, nor were they able to think themselves out of their embarrassing inferior status. Slavery carried the stigma of inherited inferiority.
What is wrong with it? If emancipators and slaves in America would point to violence, murder, cruelty and broken families, paternalist defences were invoked to say that such things were abuses of the system. But such justifications hardly wash, first because power over other people will lead to abuses, but even more because a dearth of self-respect is engendered making it impossible for the majority to rise above it. Blackness was coupled with slavery-potential to define inferior status and the demand for deference by slaves. The second major child of slavery is what he called “heteronomy”, the system where one does not make one’s own decisions about life goals because. even if one wants to, he or she is denied the opportunity. The slave is prevented from observing what John Stuart Mill saw about liberty: that my life decisions are not valuable because they are the best for me, but because they are mine.
A number of thoughtful questions followed. One related to the European-American part in the slave trade which deprived slaves of what rights they had previously enjoyed. Another asked, which came first - racist attitudes or economic realities creating a demand for convenient racist rationalizations. He favoured the latter explanation since early explorers often admired what they found in African society. His talk, marked throughout by clarity of thought and exposition, ended at 11.30.
Respectfully submitted,
John Frederick