An inhuman trade abolished: Ghana anniversary revives memories of slavery.

The year 2007 came with a double anniversary in Ghana. The West African nation, formerly known as Gold Coast, celebrated half a century of independence from Britain on March 6, 2007. In addition, many descendants of previous inhabitants of the region (as well as of other parts of Africa) paused there to remember the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain in 1807. Several groups of black Americans, including some from Canada, made a sad pilgrimage to a "slave-castle" on the coast of Ghana in which their ancestors had passed their last days in their own continent before facing the traumatic voyage to the Americas and the cruel life of slavery that awaited them there.

The passing of the Slave Trade Act by the British parliament in 1807 was commemorated on March 24 this year by a penitential processional led by the Archbishop of Canterbury. (The actual slave trade itself did not end in Britain until 1865 because of problems with practical enforcement.) Certainly, many nominal Christians were profitably involved in this trade. However, it was owing to the efforts of an evangelical Christian, William Wilberforce, a Member of Parliament and friend of the Prime Minister, William Pitt, that the Act was finally passed into law.

Origins

Slavery predates the beginning of recorded history; it was just a way of life in all ancient civilizations and quite accepted in society when Jesus founded his Church 2000 years ago. The population of the Roman Empire consisted of 80 per cent slaves at the time. With the message of the Gospel came revolutionary concepts. Saint Paul calls Philemon "no longer a slave, but a brother" (Phil. 16). In Colossians 3:11 we read that there is no slave or freeman, but that Christ is in all. Many early Christians were slaves, others were nobles, but these have always been given equal veneration, as in the case of Sts. Perpetua and Felicity in the third century, one a noblewoman, the other her slave. That the Church promoted the humanity and dignity of slaves, and opposed the vile nature of the practice, is evident in the words and deeds of saints, bishops and kings from the fourth century when Christianity was recognized, through to the Renaissance. In 1436, six decades prior to the discovery of the New World, the Catholic Church in the person of Pope Eugene IV condemned the slavery of black natives in the Canary Islands by the Spanish. The Spanish ignored his explicit command to set the slaves free. Pope Pius II denounced slavery as "an enormous crime" in 1462.

One noted example in modern times came at the canonization of St. Peter Claver in 1888 when Leo XIII referred to the trade as a "supreme villainy." Between 1198-1787 it is estimated that the religious orders of the Trinitarians and Mercedarians, as well as the work of people like St. Vincent de Paul, sacrificed their liberty and life for the freedom of more that 1.4 million slaves.

Contemporary situation

Everyone knows that Abraham Lincoln brought about the emancipation of black slaves in the U.S.A. Some Canadians are also aware of the Underground Railroad through which many slaves escaped into Canada in the decades before the American Civil War (1861-1865). Given this background, there is a tendency to consider slavery as an issue of historical study. This ought not to be so. There is an ascendant Islamic culture which endorses the enslavement of "infidels." The real-life nature of this problem can be seen in the modern perpetuation of this bondage system in the little-known northwest African nation of Mauritania (Toronto Star, April 8, 2007). In Sudan, thousands of people, many from Christian tribes, are regularly kidnapped by Muslim Arabs and sold as slaves in Asia or in wealthier parts of Africa.

Slavery has taken on an older form again, and this is the modern scourge of human trafficking--often referred to as "white slavery"--in which women and children are transported out of their own home countries for purposes of sexual exploitation. Pope Benedict XVI has called the trafficking in humans "a scourge" and compared the sexual trafficking of women and children to a form of slavery. Sr. Eugenia heads a team of over 250 nuns in Rome who work full-time with victims of sexual slavery in prostitution.

Recently, Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, papal nuncio to Egypt and the Arab League, addressed a London conference commemorating the 1807 Act. He urged all Christians to emulate those like Wilberforce and mobilize "to combat this evil" by campaigning for legislation to fight it.