The Peculiar Institution, pt. 1

The diversity of slavery in the ancient world

Happy New Year, everybody. My “vacation” is over, and I am back on the grind, so let’s get to it.

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Most of the people reading this will have lived all of their lives in an era when high-resolution satellite imagery has extended the power of the human eye over every point on the planet, so it’s sometimes surprising to be reminded of how recently large swaths of the globe were completely unknown to us. In 1862, with the American Civil War entering its second year, the British explorers John Hanning Speke and Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton became the first Europeans to encounter the African kingdom of Buganda while on an expedition to discover the source of the Nile River. Speke and Burton were not mere amateur adventurers. They’d tried the expedition twice before, and yet, even with the accumulated experience of previous journeys, it took their party sixteen months to walk the 800 miles from coastal Zanzibar to the northern shore of Lake Victoria where the kingdom of Buganda was based. This series of essays is about slavery and the lead-up to the US Civil War, but you guys don’t pay me $5 a month to stay strictly on topic, so let’s linger in Buganda for a bit.

Although Arab traders had been in contact with the kingdom of Buganda for some time, it had developed independently of meaningful outside contact for four or five centuries before the Arabs arrived. During that time, it had developed its own indigenous complex institutions and traditions that were not mere imitations of those learned from more developed powers. It was said that the king - the kabaka, in their language - briefly flirted with converting, along with his subjects, to Islam, but, at the time of the Europeans’ first arrival, the Baganda¹ were still ancestor-worshiping pagans. Speke and Burton soon departed carrying word of the newly-discovered kingdom back to Britain, and it would be another twelve years before another European returned.

Kabaka Mutesa and his dog

When Henry Morton Stanley arrived in 1875, Buganda society was still pagan and, though influenced by contact with the Arabs, largely held to its traditional ways. Stanley sent a telegram back to England reporting that the kabaka had requested that Christian missionaries visit his court, and within two years the first Protestants were on the ground. Two years after that (1879), a Catholic mission (from France) was established. As so often occurred when Christian missionaries entered societies at an earlier stage of development, the initial trickle of conversions soon became a flood. By 1886, Christianity presented such a threat to the traditional society that the new kabaka (son of the one met by Speke and Burton) carried out a campaign of persecution against the converts, even burning several hundred Bagandan Christians alive. The new competition increased the urgency of Muslim missionaries as well, and, try as he might, the kabaka was powerless to stop the flood of conversions. In 1888, barely a decade after the first missionaries arrived, the newly-converted Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims combined forces to drive the kabaka out of the country. The converts, following the lead of their European and Arab teachers, then went to war with each other. Islam first gained the upper hand and briefly drove the Christians out of the country. The combined Protestant and Catholic forces soon returned the favor, and then, with military assistance from the British Empire, the Catholics were forced out as well. It was 1892. Two years later, the British established the Uganda Protectorate, and that’s how things stood until Uganda became an independent state in 1962.

The reason the Kingdom of Buganda offers such a rich vein for anthropological study is that it is one of the few states-in-formation of which we have much data. Popular histories often portray the emergence of early civilizations - Sumerian, Egyptian, Harappan, Chinese, Mesoamerican - as if they sprung out of primitive society fully formed. Historians don’t actually think that, but the massive discontinuity in the amount of data available before and after the “birth” of these civilizations often means the history books read as if they do. In reality, of course, civilizations did not pop up overnight, but were the result of a long developmental process that broke down traditional clan and tribal authority in favor of the impersonal authority of the state. The kingdom of Buganda seems to provide an example of a people still in the process of developing from a tribal society into a civilization, and helps us fill the gap between primitive and civilized slavery.

Primitive Slavery

Purely economic explanations for slavery fail to provide much insight into the institution as it existed among primitives. Hunter-gatherers and primitive horticulturists have little useful work for slaves that would justify their care and feeding, let alone the effort necessary to monitor and control them. Very often, when primitive tribes warred against each other, every male of the losing side who could be gotten hold of was killed in battle or executed in the aftermath. There were no prisons or POW camps, and it was simply too dangerous to keep them around, especially when their wives and children were kept alive and assimilated into the victorious tribe. Nevertheless, there are examples of very primitive societies sparing enemy males to keep them as slaves.

Slavery scholar Orlando Patterson has often referred to the practice among the Tupinamba people of Brazil as “slavery in its most elementary form.” Economic motives were wholly absent from the Tupinambas’ considerations. Food was plentiful without overworking the Tupinamba themselves, and they did not use their slaves to augment or replace their own hunters and horticulturists. The Tupinamba took slaves as the bounty of war with their neighbors, which was virtually continuous. Depending on what day you chose to visit, you might think the Tupinamba treated their slaves remarkably well. They were given food, clothing, sometimes even temporary Tupinamba wives (an indication, notes historian David Brion Davis, of the station held by women in Tupinamba society). A casual observer might not even be able to distinguish between slave and free in Tupinamba society, if not for the slaves’ required habit of bowing and groveling to even the lowest-status Tupinamba. They were treated as virtual members of the tribe, for months, years, sometimes decades, until right before they reached the end of the road.

Tupinamba ritually prepare the cannibal feast

Patterson calls this “slavery in its most elementary form” because, stripped of economic motivations, it provides a glimpse at the psychological underpinnings of the institution. While Tupinamba slaves were not used much for menial labor, they were made to perform defiling ritual work, such as handling dead bodies. For example, when a Tupinamba warrior died, his weapons were meant to be passed down to his son, but transactions between the living and the dead are dangerous affairs, leaving the living descendant open to corrupting forces from beyond the grave. The Tupinamba solution was to have their slaves take hold of the dead man’s weapons, use them for a while in hunting or warfare, and then, when it was judged that he had absorbed the weapons’ defiling influence, they were passed on cleanly to the son. The purpose of slaves in Tupinamba society was not economic, but simply to occupy the lowest place in their social order. It augmented social solidarity among Tupinamba by giving all of them, from lowest to highest, someone to collectively look down upon.

All Tupinamba slaves knew they would eventually be killed, and the attitude of the tribe changed toward the captive as his end approached. After months or years of generally good treatment, the slave was now subject to constant verbal and physical abuse from every member of the tribe. He was humiliated, made to denounce his relatives and tribe in the most vile terms, and was often used in cat-and-mouse games by briefly allowing their “escape” in order for the Tupinamba men to hunt and recapture them for sport. The slave was then tortured and killed in an elaborate ritual, and finally he was roasted and eaten.

Civilized Slavery

Very often in ancient societies, the practice of slavery was so diverse that it would be a stretch to refer to them as one coherent institution. In ancient Rome, for example, a rich man might own a Greek slave who tutors the rich man’s children and acts as his agent in financial affairs. Some slaves were, by all appearances, free men, with homes, families, and businesses, only they were required to pay their masters a portion of the income they generated. That same rich man may also own hundreds of slaves who are worked to the bone in his fields, and whose freedom of action and life prospects were narrow to the point of vanishing. The same rich man might have interest in a silver mine in which slaves were routinely worked to death. Or, the great Muslim empires were famous for using slaves (often eunuchs) as administrators and high officials, while using others as galley slaves who were treated as disposable pieces of machinery until they were used up and replaced. If we are going to call all of these things “slavery,” we need a working definition of slavery that encompasses this diversity.

The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution affirms that “Neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” It seems pretty straightforward until someone starts asking for definitions or looking for loopholes. If the definition of a slave has to do with coerced labor, then the prisoner compelled to do forced labor while confined under armed guard certainly resembles one. The enterprising and unscrupulous immediately saw the potential contained in the 13th Amendment’s carveout for duly convicted criminals, and before long there was a minor industry based on arresting and imprisoning blacks on minor, unproven, or trumped up charges to be rented out by the prison authorities to private farms and mines looking for cheap labor. It’s hard to find any space between that practice and slavery, but most people would argue, I think, that there is a difference (if only to avoid admitting that slavery is enshrined in the Constitution). If slavery merely has to do with coercive control over someone else’s labor, then one might argue that parents enslave their children by requiring them to do chores in order to avoid confinement (grounding) or more serious punishment. If that seems like a stretch today, remember that throughout much of history, parents could mutilate (e.g., cutting off part of a finger to punish stealing), sell into slavery, and even kill their children without running afoul of any law. I have heard libertarians argue that the military draft is a form of slavery. Yet few people today, and no one back then, speaks of children or conscripts as slaves.