Anthea Jeffery: Why is SA denying Britain's critical role in abolishing slavery? - Biznews

Anthea Jeffery

South Africa’s draft history curriculum ignores 5,000 years of African enslavement and focuses instead on the roughly 300 years of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. It also excludes Britain’s enormous achievements in abolishing that trade and ending slavery in many parts of Africa and elsewhere.

If the draft curriculum remains unchanged, its skewed focus will grossly mislead future history pupils. It will also buttress the General Assembly’s March 2026 resolution singling out Western democracies for blame and demanding that they pay massive reparations for “the trafficking of enslaved Africans”. Since President Cyril Ramaphosa has endorsed this flawed resolution, this makes it all the more important that the historical record should be set straight.

Britain’s abolitionist movement

The British were actively involved in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade for some 150 years. However, it was also in Britain that an increasingly powerful abolitionist movement took root in the 18th century. This movement was primarily fuelled by a strong Christian belief that no person could own other human beings, as if they were no different from “sheep or oxen”. Rather, said the abolitionists, “liberty is the right of every human creature… and no human law can deprive him of that right”.

The movement gained further strength in 1787, when the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was established in London. In 1791, moreover, some 30 per cent of adult males in Britain signed petitions against slavery. Persistent campaigning by William Wilberforce and many others finally bore fruit in 1807, when the Westminster Parliament prohibited trading in slaves across the British Empire under the Slave Trade Act.

In 1833 the British Parliament followed up by passing the Slavery Abolition Act, which came into effect 12 months later. On 1 August 1834, thus, some 800,000 slaves throughout the British Empire were formally emancipated. To help counter resistance to the statute – and avoid expropriation without compensation – Britain paid out £20 million to slave owners for the loss of their property via some 45,000 awards.

A world-wide endeavour

Despite these achievements and the substantial costs already incurred, British abolitionists pressed on. Soon, as Nigel Biggar writes in Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt, they persuaded “the imperial government to adopt a permanent policy of trying to suppress both the trade and the institution worldwide”. 

In 1808 the Royal Navy established the West Africa Squadron to patrol the Atlantic Ocean and some 3,200 kilometres of West African coastline. Writes Martin Plaut in Unbroken Chains: A 5,000-Year History of African Enslavement: “By the end of the 1840s, Britain had 35 warships off the West African coast. The patrols were expensive, frustrating and dangerous.”  They nevertheless succeeded in releasing almost 199,000 Africans from slave ships in the Atlantic from 1808 to 1863.

The costs to Britain in lives and treasure were high. Thousands of British sailors serving in the West Africa Squadron died in action or from disease: some 17,000 men over a period of 52 years, or roughly “one sailor for every nine slaves freed”.  At its peak in the 1840s and 1850s, the squadron alone absorbed about half of all Britain’s naval spending. Its total costs amounted to some £2 billion in today’s money.

Britain also put great effort into negotiating treaties with other countries to prohibit slave trading. It reached agreements to this effect with Spain in 1817 and 1835, and with Brazil in 1826. In the 1820s it concluded a treaty with the Merina Kingdom in Madagascar and enforced it via Royal Navy patrols of the island’s coastline. In the 1830s, France began suppressing the trade in its colonies, while Portugal abolished slave trading in 1836.

The US Navy began deploying warships to the West African coast in 1820. In 1842 it established a permanent Africa Squadron, which it soon made more effective by expanding the fleet and negotiating a reciprocal right to search both British and American vessels. Special courts, presided over by American and British judges, were established in New York, Sierra Leone and the Cape of Good Hope.  In 1862 “Captain Nathaniel Gordon of the slave ship Erie was hanged in New York for his role in the crime”, as Plaut records.  

The East Coast of Africa

In 1858 Britain began despatching the Royal Navy to the Indian Ocean to enforce anti-slavery treaties along the East Coast of Africa too. These patrols were just as difficult to mount as the ones off West Africa. The dhows transporting slaves were nimbler than Britain’s war ships and could easily escape into shallow coastal waters or rivers. Nevertheless, writes Plaut, “between 1860 and 1890, the navy seized 1,000 dhows and released approximately 12,000 slaves from their Arab captors”.  Britain also deployed its war ships to the Red Sea to further curtail the persistent Arab demand for black slaves.

In addition, the British brought sustained diplomatic pressure to bear on the Sultanate of Zanzibar. Zanzibar was the main port used for the extensive Great Lakes slave trade, but it also depended on the Royal Navy to protect its shipping from pirates in the Indian Ocean. This gave Britain leverage. In 1822 an initial treaty banned the trading of slaves from Zanzibar to the Americas. In 1845 a similar agreement was concluded to halt the even more extensive slave trade to the Persian Gulf. In 1873 the Sultan finally agreed to halt the export of slaves from the African mainland altogether and the slave market was “shut down once and for all”, as Biggar writes. Domestic slavery nevertheless persisted until 1890, when Zanzibar became a British protectorate.

The African hinterland

Suppressing slavery across the African continent was even more difficult to achieve, if only because it required control over vast areas and would cause major economic disruption. Britain thus came to believe that the best way to end African enslavement was to promote alternative types of legitimate trade. In Biggar’s words: “This led to the setting up of trading posts in West Africa and then, when the merchants complained of the lack of security, a more assertive colonial presence on land.” In 1851 the British attacked Lagos and destroyed its slaving facilities, having tried in vain to persuade its ruler to terminate the commerce in slaves. “In 1861, when an attempt was made to revive the trade, they annexed Lagos as a colony.”

The humanitarian aim to suppress slavery remained a key factor in Britain’s imperial endeavours in Africa from the late 19th century into the 20th. Writes Biggar: “It caused the British government to lean upon the khedive of Egypt to sign the Anglo-Egyptian Slave Trade Convention in 1877. It propelled General Charles Gordon into the Sudan in the same year. It found expression in the principles of the Imperial British East Africa Company, which was founded in 1888. It featured among the reasons for establishing a British protectorate in Nyasaland in 1891.” It was also a key reason for Frederick Lugard’s 1903 invasion of the Sokoto Caliphate (now in northern Nigeria), where some 2 million slaves remained in captivity.

Other European countries often also saw the suppression of slavery as “a founding rationale for colonialism”, as RW Johnson writes. “Western countries would survey parts of Africa, find they already had a thriving slave trade, something which they viewed as pure pillage, and then they would cite the need to suppress the slave trade as a motive for colonisation which, they argued, ought to lead to proper development of these territories.”

Several African countries resisted the pressure for abolition and continued with slavery. Hence, as Johnson adds, slavery ended “only in 1902 in Cameroun, in 1903 in Mali, in 1919 in Tanganyika, in 1922 in Morocco, in 1924 in Sudan, in 1928 in Sierra Leone, in 1935 in Ethiopia and in 1981 in Mauritania”.

Setting the record straight

The figures being demanded as reparations for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade are enormous, ranging from $33 trillion to $777 trillion (as a Truth and Reconciliation Conference in Ghana proposed in 1999). Even if the amounts envisaged were a fraction of these totals, the polarising impact of demanding reparations from Western democracies alone is sure to be acute. The record must thus be set straight – both in South Africa’s draft history curriculum and to counter a persistent propaganda campaign intended to demonise, demoralise and weaken the West.

Dr Anthea Jeffery holds law degrees from Wits, Cambridge and London universities, and is the Head of Policy Research at the IRR. She has authored 12 books, including Countdown to Socialism - The National Democratic Revolution in South Africa since 1994, People’s War: New Light on the Struggle for South Africa and BEE: Helping or Hurting? She has also written extensively on property rights, land reform, the mining sector, the proposed National Health Insurance (NHI) system, and a growth-focused alternative to BEE

https://www.biznews.com/rational-perspective/anthea-jeffery-britains-role-abolishing-slavery

This article was first published on the Daily Friend.