[Copyright Cedric Pulford, 2007. This article may not be reprinted or distributed other than for individual and personal use, either electronically or on hard copy, without permission from the publisher]

As the world celebrates the ending of the transatlantic slave trade 200 years ago, Cedric Pulford describes how the struggle to build on that achievement lasted decades. Tragically, under other names slavery continues today

‘MAY Heaven’s rich blessing come down on every one, American, English, or Turk, who will help to heal this open sore of the world.’

The ‘open sore’ was slavery, and the quotation from the explorer, Dr David Livingstone, was placed on his memorial in Westminster Abbey.

What is striking is that the words were spoken in 1871 – more than six decades after Britain’s abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, being celebrated this year.

As we mark William Wilberforce’s parliamentary measure of 1807, we should reflect that, magnificent as his achievement was, it was only the beginning of a very long road.

Slavery was not abolished in 1833, when Wilberforce’s successor, Thomas Buxton, persuaded the British parliament to end slavery throughout the empire.

Slavery was not abolished in 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed slaves in America’s South to be free.

Nor was it abolished when Dr Livingstone’s pleas reached the outside world, although his message later brought about the tipping point in Africa.

Even into the 1890s slavery remained a reality in much of Africa. Slaves made the short crossing from the east coast to the Arabian peninsula while men, women and children were taken as slaves in inter-tribal warfare.

Uganda is a case in point. This beautiful East African nation straddles the equator. It is up country of Kenya, landlocked but bordering the vast inland sea of Lake Victoria. Thanks partly to the ruinous rule of Idi Amin in the 1970s – dramatically illustrated in the film The Last King of Scotland – it is little troubled by tourism compared with Kenya or even another neighbour, Tanzania.

In 1892 the ‘Uganda Question’ gripped the British nation in much the same was as Third World debt did a century later. The question was driven by slavery.

The issue was whether Britain should take over Uganda from the private company that had been awarded it as part of the ‘scramble for Africa’. A famous Punch cartoon of the time showed John Bull discovering a foundling marked ‘Uganda’ on his doorstep.

The Liberal government of the day was not keen on adding to Britain’s empire, but church groups were to the fore in demanding that it do so in order to suppress slavery.

Resolutions in favour of Britain staying in Uganda poured into the Foreign Office. Professor D.A. Low, a leading authority on the history of Uganda, found that 104 out of 174 of these submissions mentioned slavery. More than half of the resolutions came from church sources.

Paradoxically, the same sort of people who today apologise for colonialism were then urging the creation of the colonial state. Handing Uganda back to the well established indigenous kingdoms that existed there was certainly not seen as the answer!

David Rieff, an American, has said (in A Bed for the Night, 2002): “For Europeans of the time, not only was there no moral incompatibility between the antislavery project and the imperial enterprise, but the latter was seen widely as the guarantor of the former.”

John Bull did take up the foundling, and Britain ruled Uganda until 1964. It suppressed the trade in slaves, both external and internal, although imperialism’s many critics have claimed that the common practices of indentured labour and forced labour were not far short of slavery.

Slavery today has gone underground but it has not gone away. The London-based coalition Stop The Traffik (www.stopthetraffik.org) has gathered the most reliable statistics it can find on an illegal trade that does not produce annual reports:

• AT LEAST 12.3 MILLION PEOPLE ARE VICTIMS OF FORCED LABOUR WORLDWIDE (International Labour Organisation, 2005)
• 600,000-800,000 MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN ARE TRAFFICKED ACROSS INTERNATIONAL BORDERS EACH YEAR. FOUR-FIFTHS ARE WOMEN AND GIRLS. UP TO HALF ARE MINORS (US State Department, 2005)
• HUMAN TRAFFICKING IS THE THIRD LARGEST SOURCE OF INCOME FOR ORGANISED CRIME, GENERATING $7 BILLION PER YEAR IN CRIMINAL PROCEEDS. THIS IS EXCEEDED ONLY BY ARMS AND DRUGS TRAFFICKING (UN Office on Drugs and Crime)

So William Wilberforce did not end slavery at a stroke 200 years ago. Abolition was the work of many hands and many years – and still is.

Cedric Pulford is a veteran journalist with 25 years’ experience of Africa. He is the author of Eating Uganda and the newly published Casualty of Empire

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