The Assiento was a treaty between England and Spain by which the latter granted the former a monopoly of the Spanish colonial slave-trade for thirty years, and England engaged to supply the colonies within that time with at least 144,000 slaves, at the rate of 4, 800 per year. England was also to advance Spain 200,000 crowns, and to pay a duty of 33 and half crowns for each slave imported. The Kings of Spain and England were each to receive one-fourth of the profits of the trade, and the Royal African Company were authorized to import as many slaves as they wished above the specified number in the first twenty-five years, and to sell them, except in three ports, and at any price they could get. (W.E.B. DuBois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870)
Profits, profits, and more profits! The US Empire is the world's guardian of the "ports" as well as the "omissions" of truth. Grandin: "That's the thing about American slavery: it never was just about slavery."
I put off reading The Empire of Necessity. But rather than rely on book reviews or even author interviews, I felt I had to at least hold it in my hands, read the flap, and back cover. I knew of Grandin's work. This book would be worth the read; that is, its subject, slavery, would not receive a coating of cheap white paint.
My dissertation examined mega-narratives of violence. What I did not want to do and what I have been avoiding since I left the classroom and academia almost four years ago was to read yet another book restricted to how the enslaved suffered then, in the past. Now, the enslaved are free. A black man is the president of the US! Isn't democracy great!
Although the plantation ball-and-chain enslavement of black Americans is supposedly forbidden, the continuing inequities, racially and economically, such as the murdering of black youth and the incarceration of blacks begs to differ with the Emancipation Proclamation.
I cannot read about the 12 million... the brutality and the callousness, the suffering while yet another young black man with hands up is gunned down by two officers, one white and one black. Shot! Dead! And the US Empire is waging a global war against terrorism and terrorists while exempting itself from any scrutiny. Over twenty million black and brown in prison in the US, black and brown young unarmed men and women shot dead every 28 hours...
The newest version of the white supremacy's narrative pits "enemy combatants" or "terrorists" against the "free" and "democratic." Americans in brown camouflage fatigues, young, agile, and willing, believe in the invincibility of the American spirit, the "Dream" and aspirations of millions of Americans. And what do we have here--in this foreign land, usually occupied by black or brown people? Or indigenous people? Korean? Vietnamese? What do we have when the Euro-American encounters racial difference? We usually have hatred, always hatred or indifference. Silence. And we have profits. Follow the money! The racially or religiously different is often characterized as the "enemy combatant," the "monster," the "evil doer" or the contamination to be exterminated from a genetically and a morally superior society.
I lifted the book from my to-read stack with the intent of returning it to library once and for all, unread. I opened the book, turned to the first chapter, read the first paragraph:
In early January 1804, a one-armed French pirate cruised into Montevideo's harbor. The Spaniards in his multinational crew had trouble saying his name, so they called him Captain Manco--manco being the Spanish word for cripple. Francois-de-Paule Hippolyte Mordeille didn't mind the nickname. It was the rank he didn't like.
"Montevideo's harbor." I had never read anywhere about this harbor near the middle of Argentina! Enslaved Africans arriving at this harbor? This far from the Caribbean islands? What were these European "travelers" or "explorers" men thinking? Why were so many driven by the power of indifference to all life?
I am thinking of those powerless mothers forced to endure the wretched conditions of countless ship's hulls. Did they give up and die when, in their mind's eyes, the precious children left behind appeared to them? All the mothers of yesterday in Hiroshima and in Nagasaki, and all those mothers today in Palestine. Did they give up? The mother of Emmett Till and the mother of Renisha McBride and the mother of Andi Lopez and mother of Oscar Grant and all the inhabitants of those lands marked on Mordeille's map met with the violence of indifference. Material goods outweigh compassion toward our own species.
Grandin refers to Mordeille as a "privateer" and not as a "pirate." To think of a pirate these days is to think of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean or to recall Errol Flynn in Seahawk. Steal the cargo for the Queen, mates! But Grandin would prefer that his readers see Mordeillo as the careerist, the business man, with a future in making money. In his day, he was making an honest living! Of course in our era, hedge-fund managers have made the same claims to honesty. Bankers making billions and CEOs receiving millions in bonuses--honest, too!
A privateer, who is inventive and changes the way business is done--that's our guy Mordeille. So on the January day when he is at Bonny Island aboard his ship Hope, his crew spots the 343-ton, Liverpool slave ship, Neptune. How fortunate for Mordeille, the business man with ambitions! He orders his crew to overtake and capture the Neptune.
History remembers the daring of Mordeille.
Just a bit of back story here: Privateers, Grandin reminds us, aim for the "rigging" rather than the hull when they pursue to capture a ship at sea. This is important. You do not want to "harm" the cargo in the hull!
Mordeille is an opportunist per excellence! Aboard the Neptune, its captain, Phillips, surrenders. Thievery is okay. There is a "gentleman's agreement" of sorts. Mordeillo makes history not because he captures the Neptune. No, he does not make history because he captures a ship whose hull is filled with some "four hundred Africans," including a number of women and children. Kidnapping is okay too. Pillaging is fine. Institutionalized now. No, Mordeillo makes history because he drives his crew to continue sailing, full-speed ahead from Bonny Island all the way to Rio de la Plata, the tip of South America. That single line running some five thousand miles from Bonny Island!
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