At the risk of being extremely wrong to say this in the modern era, and this is a logical blog, not personal, so this must be stated at the outset.
This short blog wishes to ask a few questions, justifiably it must be said. The new Archbishop of Canterbury has just returned from an historic visit to the Province of West Africa, to visit the Church in Cameroon and Ghana. This Province is not a Roman Province of classical times, like Roman Syria, Roman Egypt, but a more modern day imperial arrangement, that of the Archbishop of Canterbury being head of the worldwide Anglican Church. And worldwide is not exactly worldwide, and certainly not all humans on Earth (this spinning mass of rock in space, held by the gravity of Helios as Light of our world), and not Catholics either, but the Anglican Protestant Church.
The visit to West Africa was clearly stated to be for reparative justice, and that of course is about the historic slave trade. Over those centuries, British slave merchants moved West African people, mostly men, from the African coast over the Atlantic to the commercial plantations on the landmass the other side (such is geography), there to work in the white man’s plantations which made fortunes large and small for those owners.
This is not about the rightness or wrongness for the slave peoples to be moved across the ocean, it was desperate sailings and dislocation as never know before. Slaving, as a practice, is as old as the hills, with the ant species Formica Sanguinea as active slave traders for about 14 million years, and showing no signs of abolishing their trade, and all known human societies all over the ancient world, us Celts and Norse up here, the Greeks (they were tough slave owners), the Romans, the islands around Indonesia, all over Africa, the Gauls, the Arabs, all over the Middle East, and the currency up here was easy. Strong Celts were willingly exchanged by warring tribes for Roman wine (the more the merrier), and nothing more was thought of the fate of the new captive going off to foreign parts.
The Trans Atlantic slavery of course, no doubt about this, was on a different scale altogether. However, in logical terms, it is fair to ask a few questions. One is, native peoples from Eire were also transported to the plantations and worked as slaves, alongside the black skinned West Africans. Because slavery is now a black/white matter, it is only fair to ask if the new Archbishop will also pay a visit to Dublin and make a big apology there too. Probably that will not happen, because it is far too close to home, home being Canterbury in this instance, and British and Irish religious and political matters are way too tricky to draw attention to that.
The second question to ask is, under the Sale of Goods Act 1750, or equivalent, because there was no Sale of Goods Act 1750, but under the practices that went on, and not just the British, because the French and Portugese were also transporting native Africans across the Atlantic and that has been well forgotten now hasn’t it, the slaves were purchased and not raided. To purchase a slave in the ancient world meant going to the market where slaves were sold, and paying whatever the price was required. Pirates also stole people without paying all around the Mediterranean and then sold them in the regular slave markets, where money would be exchanged, but the markets were a bona fide (Latin for in good faith, genuine, honest legal transaction) business exchange.
It is a fact that western merchants sailed down the African coast and visited the existing slave markets. The existing slave activities were of African slaves taken by other Africans, they were already slaves, of African peoples. The merchants purchased them in the markets by an honest transaction, and the money stayed with the previous slave owners, the slave was put onto the ship in appalling conditions, and taken over with their new owner to work on the plantations. So this question is, what happened to all the money? Should not the Archbishop of Canterbury be asking for that money back, in return for the reparative justice of saying it was not a good few centuries? It is not really a fair contractual exchange if she makes an apology, but comes back without the money, is it? Otherwise those on the African side of the Atlantic are saying it was a good thing, because they got a lot of money, but a bad thing because the subject of the contract, the slaves themselves, were taken away on slave ships. But it can’t be both if a genuine and honest historic process is being made. Every marketplace ancient and modern has its laws and conditions, and that would have been no different. So in return for the very public visit of the senior person of the Anglican Church, especially when it was not a church matter but a State matter, but if she is representing the State, then all the money which exchanged hands should have been bagged up and returned with her on the plane, or by a separate ship if it was too heavy. Or if it has been spent, then the Deeds to all the property and lifestyle that it funded over the last few centuries.
The third question is one of true Reparative Justice, and that is within the British Isles, and Norse-lands, and Eire-land, and all of northern Europe, and all of France and Spain and Portugal, but especially Britain and Ireland where so much ‘Church history’ happened, please could we worshippers of the true gods have our properties back? Of course those are often now under a church, because what better way to supress the true beliefs than to put a small or large church building on it, and a churchyard under ecclesiastical law meaning no recovering of the previous sacred site is possible, and no way of acknowledging the many killed in northern Europe for refusing to bow down to the incoming power of monotheist religion.
If the Archbishop of Canterbury would see fit to make a small reparation to the restoration of the gods to their people, a donation of a church in each county of England, Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, Manx, Eire, and in Norse lands and whoever wanted one in western Europe, can be easily arranged by the ecclesiastical lawyers. As charity does and really should begin at home, this is a request to the new Archbishop of Canterbury to begin the true reparation process and allow restoration of the real alignment of humans on the land again.