The Double Standards of Slavery
by Peter Harris, The New Conservative:
In 1849, a British sea captain called Frederick Forbes arrived in the West African kingdom of Dahomey. He had been sent by the British government to persuade King Ghezo to cease selling his fellow Africans whom he had captured in war to European slave traders. The British had banned slave trading in their empire in 1807, and were using their naval might to intercept slave ships bound for the Americas. Their approach to African nations engaged in the trade was initially diplomatic in order to avoid war. Conflict with Dahomey over its human trafficking would have been especially costly as it was the region’s great power. So highly militarised was it that the Europeans who had visited nicknamed it ‘Black Sparta’. As for Forbes, he was not optimistic about his mission’s success.
According to his published autobiography, Six Months’ Service in the African Blockade, even if an African monarch were persuaded that slave trading was immoral, he could not be induced to abandon the lucrative trade because his subjects who benefited from it would have conspired with the Europeans who bought the slaves to assassinate him. It was for that reason that Forbes knew all previous attempts to persuade Ghezo had come to nothing. The King had cordially received every embassy from the British, put on for each occasion a welcoming yet menacing display of his wealth and military power, and then immovably refused to give up the trade. Nevertheless, Forbes pressed on with his grim mission. What else could he do: he was under his government’s orders. The display of recently decapitated human heads still oozing with blood as he passed through Ghezo’s palace courtyard must have seemed to him failure’s gruesome portends.
During his audience with Ghezo, Forbes endeavoured to persuade him with what was becoming the stock argument against the slave trade when in dialogue with African kings: that if slaves were not sold but employed to cultivate wild land, the nation would become great and rich. To bolster his case, Forbes presented Ghezo with a letter from Queen Victoria in which she expressed her opposition to the slave trade alongside gifts of silks and cloths. But the King was in no mood to listen. As he pointed out to Forbes, had the British not been the most prolific participants, ‘the first of white men,’ as he put it, in the trade?
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