The Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, has been visiting west Africa, and was pictured meeting both the King of the Ashanti (above) and visiting the sites of slave trading, in particular the embarkation points for the Transatlantic slave trade, where she was clearly personally moved.
I noticed this comment from Father Richard Woods, a retired parish priest in Canterbury Diocese which I thought worth sharing more widely:
Why I despair at the hierarchy of the Church of England.
Today in the CofE and in our Eucharist we observed the Lesser Festival of William Wilberforce, Social Reformer, Olaudah Equiano and Thomas Clarkson, Anti-Slavery Campaigners, 1833, 1797 and 1846.
These Church members worked unremittingly to call the church and country to oppose the West African trade in humans and abolish slavery. (There is much information online about all three.)
I recall reading about Thomas Clarkson as boy. In 1785 he entered a Latin essay competition at Cambridge university that was to set him on the course for most of the remainder of his life. The topic of the essay, set by the vice-chancellor, was “Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare” (“is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?”), and it led him to consider the question of the slave trade. He read everything he could on the subject, including first-hand accounts of the African slave trade. He also researched the topic by meeting and interviewing those who had personal experience of the slave trade and of slavery. This had such a profound effect on him that he devoted his life to abolition. His essay was translated into English and published, causing widespread interest. In the abolition cause, he supported, researched, and lectured, whilst Wm Wilberforce was working in Parliament.
Olaudah Equiano was born in (now) South Nigeria, to a father who owned many slaves. He and his sister were kidnapped and sold to slave traders when he was 11. He was taken to Barbados, thence to the colony of Virgina. One of his owners sent him England to be taught to read and write; he became a Christian and was baptised in 1759 at St Margaret Westminster. He was returned to the Caribbean and sold to a Quaker merchant, from whom he purchased his freedom for £40. He worked at sea, and as a plantation manager, eventually returning to England and becoming involved with the Abolitionist Movement. His published memoirs, “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African”(1789) gained widespread international interest. He married an English woman and settled in Soham, travelling and lecturing about the slave trade. During the American War of Independence, Britain had recruited black people to fight with it by offering freedom to those who left rebel masters, it also freed women and children. When British troops were evacuated at the end of the war, their officers also evacuated these former American slaves. They were resettled in the Caribbean, in Nova Scotia, in Sierra Leone in Africa, and in London. Britain refused to return the slaves, to United States in peace negotiations. In 1783, following the US gaining independence, Equiano became involved in helping the black poor of London, who were mostly those former African-American slaves freed during and after the American Revolution by the British. There were also some freed slaves from the Caribbean, and some who had been brought by their owners to England and freed later after the decision that Britain had no basis in Common Law for slavery. He was involved in resettling Africans in Sierra Leone.
William Wilberforce pursued a hedonistic life at university, and became independently wealthy through inheritance. He had discussed politics at university with Wm. Pitt, and became an independent MP at 21, whilst still at university. He continued his active social life, but although remaining convivial, amended his habits after conversion to a serious Christian faith. He was encouraged to remain in politics. He began to work for abolition after reading Thos. Clarksons essay and meeting him. The Act to abolish the Slave Trade was passed in 1806. He died just as the Act to abolish the trade in the British Empire was passed.
In 1808 the Preventative, or West Africa, squadron of the Royal Navy was formed to intercept slave vessels and free the enslaved. Since Portugal at the time was the largest slave trader, and allied with Britain in the Napoleonic wars progress was at first slow, but the Squadron seized approximately 1,600 ships involved in the slave trade and freed 150,000 slaves who were on board between 1807 and 1860. It has been called “the most expensive international humanitarian intervention in modern history.”
Of course slavery did not end there: across Africa the 1,000yrs of the Arab trade continued, from West Africa, and from Zanzibar. Throughout the 19thC both Christians like David Livingstone and British forces worked and fought to end the trade in human slaves. The RN intercepted slaving dhows off E Africa throughout the 1960s. But it was a foul practice in which Britain led the way in ending, at a great cost in lives and money.
Yet today Dame Sarah, Archbishop of Canterbury, stood at Cape Coast Castle, to which Africans (like Olaudah’s father) and Arabs brought slaves to sell, and placed the blame on the shoulders of English Christians, and said that the CofE had profited; which has been shown to be a misinterpretation of known facts and a lie. The church whose members had led the campaign to end slavery, and whose followers had given themselves and their lives to eradicate it, is to pay £millions to the descendants both of those who profited from it (like Benin) and of those who suffered, but who themselves have only benefitted from the vision and generosity of the only country to expend a substantial portion of its wealth in combatting slavery; out of funds generously given to share the Good News of freedom bought on the Cross.
For “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).
The irony is, in seeing the splendour of the throne of the King of Ashanti, that the wealth of his kingdom was historically built on slavery. The Ashanti Empire (also spelled Asante) became one of the wealthiest states in West Africa through a combination of gold, trade, tribute, and slavery. Slavery was central to its economy; its largest source of wealth was gold, but the use of slaves in mining that gold, and slavery as trade were vital to its economy.
From the late 17th century into the early 19th century, the Ashanti kingdom expanded through warfare against neighbouring states. These wars produced captives who were sold to European slave traders on the Gold Coast, captives retained as slaves within Ashanti society to work in agriculture, mining, households, and the royal administration, tribute from conquered peoples, which often included slaves. Tens of thousands of captives were exported from territories under Ashanti control during the height of the Atlantic slave trade.
There is no surviving Ashanti treasury account, so it is impossible to know precisely how much this was worth. A healthy enslaved adult sold on the Gold Coast in the eighteenth century might be exchanged for European goods worth roughly £20–£50 sterling in contemporary British prices. So, for example, 50,000 people were exported over several decades, the trade would have been worth around £1-2.5 million in eighteenth-century values. Measured in today’s purchasing power, that would amount to hundreds of millions of pounds, and if measured by relative economic importance or share of GDP, the equivalent would run into many billions of pounds.
I don’t expect that any of this was raised by the Archbishop in conversation.
Alistair Parker offers an outline of the situation, and the role of the British in ending slavery, on the History Reclaimed website.
The early 17th century slave trading included the Portuguese buying slaves from other parts of West Africa, particularly from Benin, and then selling them in Ghana for gold, a practice also followed by the Dutch and the Danes. In the northern region there were four main slave markets: Salaga, Yendi, Bole and Wa, with Salaga being the most famous and most important market in Ghana for both the trans-Atlantic and trans-Sahara trades. According to the German researcher Heinrich Klose in 1899, in Salaga ‘in former times, it was estimated by older travellers, there was a turnover of 15,000 slaves annually’.
The Asante empire emerged in 1696 with King (Asantehene) Osei Tutu taking the crown in his capital Kumasi. After the Asante invasion and conquest of Gonja in 1732 and Dagomba in 1744, those states were required to pay annual tribute to their overlords which they did by raiding lesser clans like the Kasena, Sisala, Kusasi, Builsa and Frafra to make the tribute of some 1000 – 1500 slaves per division or chieftainship per year.[12] The slaves were moved along four main slaving routes from the northern territories to Kumasi. These included the route from Wa and Bole to the Asante capital and then to the coast…
The 1874 Treaty of Fommanah (Fomena), ending the Third Anglo-Asante War, required the Asante to end slave tributes and human sacrifices and accept free trade. The unforeseen consequences from the collapse of the Asante regime were secession attempts by members of the Asante federation, independence declarations from conquered states like Gonja, Asante moves to regain territory, and the emergence of new warlords in the north taken to slave raiding. All this led to constant and endemic warfare and further enslavement. This period witnessed a tremendous surge in the ‘domestic’ use of slave labour as the economy transitioned from exporting slaves to exporting other commodities…
Ongoing concern was stoked by British Commissioner Reginald Firminger, resident in Salaga in 1887-89, who critically reported that ‘From the evidence given by the King and Chiefs which I verified by numerous independent inquiries, it appears that about 20,000 slaves are disposed of in one way or another annually’. The pressure to suppress slavery continued and, having been long reluctant to extend control with greater expense and no material gain, the British began to expand control outside the Colony to the Asante and the Northern Territories, partly to suppress slave raiding, partly to secure free trade to improve the Colony’s viability, and partly to keep out the French and Germans.
The Governor sent the civil servant George Ferguson to secure friendship treaties in the Northern Territories in the period 1890-95 with various rulers including the chiefs of Bole, Daboya, Yendi, Bimbilla, Wa and Gambaga but ‘he took it upon himself to persuade local communities in the Northern Territories that treaties of friendship with the British offered protection against slave-raiding, and that they should not engage in the slave trade themselves.’ By 1902, the Governor reported that ‘In the Northern Territories … slave raiding has been completely stamped out, but slave dealing is prevalent’ and the practice did not die out until after the 1928 Abolition of Slavery ordinance.
Parker also notes the historical irony of the current debate:
After 1806 British imperialism largely aimed at abolishing the African slave trade, securing free trade, and forestalling the Germans and French in Africa in general. It now stands condemned by a Ghanaian leadership whose own ancestors fought against the prevention of slavery. President Mahama blames the colonialists and refuses to join the British and other Europeans in the league of infamy he has constructed. The truth is clear, however: Mahama’s royal ancestors were slaveholders and slave traders long before, and also long after, Europeans came to the coasts to collect and transport slaves.
Justin Welby also stepped into this complexity in May 2024, when he visited Zanzibar, and in a sermon in Christ Church Cathedral criticised missionaries for treating Africans as inferior, and claimed that ‘we must repent and look at what we did in Zanzibar.’ Alexander Chula, who taught in Malawi for three years, commented:
I am curious to know who exactly the former Archbishop had in mind. [Anglican bishop John] Mackenzie’s successors gave everything they had to the region, and their graves litter Malawi, still venerated today. They committed to sharing the lives of local peoples and … approached their cultures with a curiosity and respect seldom matched by Western visitors today. The imputation that they treated Africans as inferior dishonours men who died precisely because they considered Africans as worthy of that sacrifice as anyone.
There is an even more direct link with the Church of England and abolition of slavery through Sir John Kirk, who was Consul from 1865. From the 1820s onwards, Britain sought to suppress the East African slave trade, particularly the export of enslaved people to Arabia, Persia, and elsewhere in the Indian Ocean. The Royal Navy’s East Africa Squadron intercepted slave ships, negotiated treaties with the Sultan of Zanzibar, and pressured him diplomatically. Important agreements included the 1822 Moresby Treaty, which restricted the slave trade in certain waters, the 1845 Hamerton Treaty, which tightened these restrictions, and the 1873 Anglo-Zanzibari Treaty, which effectively prohibited the export of slaves by sea and ordered the closure of Zanzibar’s famous slave market.
Kirk continued [his predecessor Henry Adrian] Churchill’s work on the slave trade and in June 1873 he received simultaneous contradictory instructions from London on the Zanzibar slave trade, one to issue an ultimatum to Sultan Bargash, under threat of blockade that the slave trade should be stopped and the slave market closed, and the other not to enforce a blockade which might be taken as an act of war pushing Zanzibar towards French protection. Kirk only showed the first instruction to Barghash, who capitulated within two weeks.
I wonder when leaders in the Church of England will talk about the role we played in eradicating slavery with confidence. There is no doubt that Britain, like other nations, was deeply entangled in the slave trade for a period. There is also no doubt that the Church of England (in the form of the Queen Anne’s Bounty, which became incorporated into the Church Commissioners) made no investment in this, and made no profit from it; the CC assets are not ‘tainted’. And there is no doubt either that Britain played a unique role in the abolition of the slaved trade around the world.
Britain’s anti-slavery campaign lasted for much of the nineteenth century and involved the Royal Navy, diplomatic missions, colonial administrations, and compensation to slave owners when slavery was abolished in the British Empire. There was (as always) a mixture of motivations in this, but a primary one was the moral repugnance at slavery.
Economic historian David Eltis has estimated that Britain spent approximately £250 million (nineteenth-century pounds) between 1807 and about 1867 on suppressing the Atlantic slave trade. In terms of consumer spending, that is around £30 billion today, but as a share of GDP, it is equivalent to perhaps £400 billion. Britain spend around 8% of its GDP on this project for much of the nineteenth century.
I find it very odd when church leaders talk of the need for repentance, as if we are the first generation to be horrified by slavery. I find it even stranger when they talk of ‘atoning for the sins of the past’ as if we can do that and as if there has not already been massive atoning action.
Gad Saad recently published Suicidal Empathy: dying to be kind. His thesis is that empathy can be enormously destructive when separated from facts. I think we are seeing just that being played out here in the Church of England.
Buy me a Coffee
I have noted an error in what I wrote: Wm Wilberforce died just as slavery, not the trade, was abolished in the Empire.
Thanks. I will revise.
This issue – along with many others at this present time! – simply reinforces the old adage attributed to John Haywood in 1546:
“Who is so deaf, or so blind, as is he, that wilfully will neither hear nor see.”
We are led in the Church of England by those who fit this description perfectly in their inability – even their unwillingness! – to listen to the truth in so many areas. Slavery reparation, church decline, financial collapse, morality – and, most worryingly, the authority of Scripture.
I have yet to experience an institution that, despite its “wokeness”, has appeared less “awake” than the Church of England.
“The path of the righteous is like the morning sun, shining ever brighter till the full light of day. But the way of the wicked is like deep darkness; they do not know what makes them stumble.” (Prov 4:18-19: NIVUK)
But please note: the C of E is not monolithic. There is a good deal more than 7,000 who remain faithful—and are seeing people come to living faith in Jesus.