The League of Nations Slavery Convention held in 1926 defined slavery as ‘the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.’
Slavery began when humans started the war. The victors grabbed the losers’ land and livestock and all other possessions. But what about the surviving losers and their women and children? Well, the winner took it all including the freedom of the defeated people, they were subjected to cruelty, forced labor, and sexual abuse – they were made slaves. According to various estimates by anthropologists and archeologists, this happened around 12,000 years ago. And it continued unabated throughout human history with changing colors.
Slaves were treated as properties, like livestock. As calves born from your cattle automatically become your property, so were the children of slaves. They were born slaves and owned by their parents’ masters. So, slavery persisted through the bloodline from generation to generation.
But it took on a new color in the mid-15th century when Europeans started the organized slave trade. These slaves were not products of war or slaves by birth. They were free people living a normal life in different areas of West Africa who were suddenly captured by force by the Europeans and their local agents and transported to North America and Europe. According to an article by Mary Elliott and Jazmine Hughes published in the New York Times Magazine in August 2019, around 12.5 million African men, women, and children were captured and sold like commodities in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
From the early 19th century different nations started to ban the slave trade but not slavery in general. However, a small Caribbean nation Haiti pioneered the complete abolition of slavery. As narrated by Dr. Julia Gaffield, a historian and academic at Georgia State University, in an article published on July 12, 2020, in the Washington Post, Haiti was a French colony where slave men, women, and children were put into forced labor under violent conditions. The death rate among these slaves was so high that the French constantly had to import new captives from Africa. The Haitian slaves produced sugar, coffee, and indigo that were sent to France. It was the most wealth-producing colony of France. In 1791 these slaves rose against the French in rebellion. After 13 years of struggle, they succeeded in liberating themselves. Haiti declared independence and abolition of slavery in 1804.
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This article was published in the Daily Sun on October 25, 2022. Please read the full article here or here.