Misery for Sale: Human Trafficking Then and Now
The past two years have been a busy time for historians and human rights workers. We have marked the 200th anniversary of Great Britain’s Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, commonly called the Wilberforce Act, and the U.S. Congress’ Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves. The film, Amazing Grace, the spirit of the events as it showed the work of William Wilberforce and other British abolitionists who were motivated by their faith, Anglican, Quaker, and Methodist, to bring an end to the enslavement of Africans.
The film shows the hard work done by people of conscience who pioneered the techniques of political organizing, most notably that of Thomas Clarkson, who interviewed thousands of merchant sailors about their experiences in the slave trade and who drew the now famous diagram of the British slave ship Brookes. The Brookes diagram presented to Britons a visceral image of the conditions aboard a slave ship. Suddenly, even people who had never been aboard any ship could imagine themselves chained in the hold of a hell like the Brookes.
One piece of the recent bicentennial celebrations was the14, 000 mile Atlantic Freedom Tour by the Freedom Schooner Amistad, in which I had the honor of participating as a deckhand and historical educator. The tour took Amistad to ports that had historical ties to the slave trade, including ports in Canada, Great Britain, Portugal, Sierra Leone, Cape Verde, Barbados, and the United States. The vessel is a recreation of the Cuban cargo schooner La Amistad, aboard which 53 African captives shed their chains in 1839. Captured by the American warship U.S.S. Washington, the Africans were charged with murder and piracy. American abolitionists, many of whom were Congregationalists and Quakers, rallied to defend the captives, with the case ultimately reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, where the Africans were successfully defended by former president John Quincy Adams.
Like their counterparts in Britain, the American abolitionists based their opposition to slavery upon Christian principles of justice and mercy. They cited texts like Micah 6:8 and argued from the concept of equality found in Galatians 3:28, that “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” They adopted the image of a chained, kneeling African man, with the motto “Am I not a man and a brother,” that had been used by London’s Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
As a crewmember for the Freedom Schooner Amistad, I often find myself involved in conversations about the legacy of the African slave trade in modern society. Usually, these discussions center on issues of institutional racism and society’s need to continue to address issues of racial inequality.
On occasion, those conversations move into issues of racial guilt and victimhood. It is easy for us to look back and blame whites for the enslavement of blacks, but the reality of slavery is much more complex. Historically, Africans enslaved other Africans. Europeans enslaved other Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Of course, when the opportunity presented itself, people of one racial group have always been more than willing to enslave those who were different from themselves, often justifying their act with religious explanations.
Whenever Europeans or European-Americans have enslaved others, there has been a Christian overlay to the enslavement. This has included monarchs claiming to rule over peasants by divine right and Conquistadores baptizing Incas as they set them to work in the silver mines of Potosí. It has stretched from Portuguese priests blessing Africans as they were taken through the gate of no return at El Mina castle in Ghana to American slaveholders who quoted scripture like Ephesians 6:5, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ.” Again and again, slavery has been justified through recourse to Christian scripture, values, and world view.
It seems shocking today to think that this market in human beings operated with the overt blessing of Christian churches. It seems almost inconceivable that the Christians who finally mobilized to end the institution of slavery were not only a minority within the culture, but were also a minority among Christians. Even people of faith, it seems, are not averse to participating in systems of oppression that would benefit their own self-interest, particularly if the Bible can be understood to support the status quo.
The greater problem, though, is apathy. Then, as now, many churchgoers were content to attend worship on Sunday without having the teachings of Jesus affect their daily lives any more than absolutely necessary. Pastors, more worried about jobs than about the demands of the Gospel, chose not to challenge the injustices of their society and, instead, focused on issues that would be popular with their congregations.
As I look back on my travels in Africa with Amistad, I am confronted with the images of slavery that remain. The ruins of the old slave fortress at Bunce Island in Sierra Leone are a stark reminder of the enslavement of millions of Africans. The Pelorinho, the public whipping post, in Cape Verde’s Cidade Velha, topped with a cross triumphant over a globe, is burned into my memory as a symbol of the Church’s collusion with oppression.
Even more troubling than those artifacts of slavery, though, is the evidence of modern slavery that I encountered. In Sierra Leone, it was not hard to find people who had been involved in the recent civil war, some of whom had been forced to serve as child soldiers by either the rebels or the government forces. In the nightclubs near Lumley Beach, very young prostitutes abound, many of whom have been lured into Freetown’s underworld by promises of legitimate employment. Others were sold to pimps by their own families upcountry or across the border in Liberia. In the Kono region, thousands of children work in the diamond mines. These victims of human trafficking largely go unnoticed by the Western public because nobody wants to talk about these things.
Sierra Leone is not alone in having a problem with human trafficking. Boys from Pakistan are sold to become camel jockeys in Dubai. Sumatran boys are bought from their families to work on dangerous offshore fishing platforms. Poor Indian girls are enslaved to work as housekeepers. The army of Myanmar has thousands of child soldiers. Vietnamese and Thai girls are taken from their villages to work as prostitutes in cities around Asia. Women from the former Soviet republics are lured into prostitution in Western Europe and the United States. Latin Americans are smuggled into the United States, where they are held against their will and forced to work in hazardous conditions.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that 2.5 million people become victims of human trafficking every year. When we compare that number with the 12 million Africans who were enslaved over the three-hundred year period during which the transatlantic slave trade was in operation, it seems hard to believe that Christians have not risen up and demanded that our governments do more to put a stop to this evil.
Why haven’t we? Are we concerned about what might happen if we tell our congregations that faith means more than singing hymns and feeling good about ourselves? Is it because we’re afraid of how people will react if we talk about issues like prostitution in church? Do we worry about what it really means that our country is one of the biggest destinations for trafficking victims?
Maybe we just need a new Wilberforce to organize the effort and convince the lawmakers. Maybe we need a new Clarkson who can capture the church’s imagination with modern media. Maybe we need preachers who can take the text from Isaiah and really preach that God sent us “to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God.” Maybe we’re waiting for you.
