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Ed Webb

An introduction to the Indian Ocean slave trade - Media Diversified - 0 views

mediadiversified.org/...o-the-indian-ocean-slave-trade

Africa history slavery Asia MENA trade

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • The Indian Ocean slave trade encompassed Africa, Asia and the Middle East, with people from these areas involved as both captors and captives.
  • There are other contemporary reverberations of the Indian Ocean slave trade – and continuing practices of enslavement in parts of north Africa, including in Mauritania. Enslavement of “African” populations by the “Arab” Sudanese ruling class in Sudan was one of the key reasons for the breakup of the Republic of Sudan and the secession of South Sudan. Even today, being darker-skinned African is synonymous with being called abd/abeed (slave) by Arabs. This includes Arab people who have been born and have lived all of their lives in western Europe and north America. (The Twitter hashtag #abeed will show you how prevalent and contemporary the epithet is.)
  • Words like “coolie” and “kaffir”, often associated with the Asian indentured labour system prevalent under later European colonialism, had roots and common usage in the periods of Indian Ocean slavery from the 1600s onwards.
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  • an ongoing series on slavery across the Indian Ocean (#IndianOceanSlavery). The articles will have most of their starting points in South Africa, which was one of the epicentres of the Indian Ocean slave trade, with the country importing slaves as part of its colonisation process.
Ed Webb

NEIL MACKAY'S BIG READ: 'Scotland didn't have empire done to it, Scotland did empire to... - 0 views

www.heraldscotland.com/...pt-fighting-decolonise-history

UK Britain history museum heritage Egypt orientalism empire

shared by Ed Webb on 04 May 22 - No Cached
  • Glasgow’s Dr Campbell Price is British TV’s go-to guy when it comes to ancient Egypt. But the study is riddled with racism and he wants to drag the world of mummies into the 21st century … and he doesn’t care if you call him ‘woke’.
  • Price is at the forefront of the fight to ‘decolonise’ the study of Ancient Egypt and drag it into the 21st century. He wants the discipline to confront its history of racism and empire, and he’s not shy about apportioning a fair amount of blame on Scotland and its own role in Britain’s colonial adventures.
  • the study of Ancient Egypt was founded by colonialists from Britain and France in the early 1800s and it still hasn’t shaken off the baggage of the past. There’s a lingering sense that Egyptians are considered unable or incapable of studying their own history without the assistance of white, western academics who are really the people best suited to the discipline. The whiff of racism and a “white saviour narrative” still hangs in the air, he feels.
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  • “There’s this conceit,” he says, “that archaeologists - gung-ho western, bearded, white, elite, cis-gendered, ostensibly heterosexual - go to Egypt and ‘discover’ Ancient Egypt because the people, ordinary Egyptians, are too stupid.” He adds: “Ancient Egypt was never ‘lost’.”
  • The “standard colonial narrative”, he says, portrays Egypt as “brilliant - a proto-British empire”. Egyptologists used terms like ‘empire’ and ‘viceroy’ to describe the government of the Pharaohs. Students were taught that “the Ancient Egyptians had a ‘Viceroy of Nubia’ - where the hell is the term ‘viceroy’ coming from?” Price asks. “It’s from the British experience of empire”. This explains why many British academics put Egypt on a pedestal as the greatest of all ancient civilisations.
  • in the imperial age when Britons were travelling to India they would go through the Suez Canal. “You might take a few days and go and visit Egypt. So it’s colonial high noon,”
  • British archaeologist Howard Carter led the dig that opened Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 - an event which turbo-charged interest in Egyptology and had a huge cultural impact on world, even leading to the creation of movies like The Mummy starring Boris Karloff in 1932. “Some early exhibitions quite literally feel like the spoils of empire,” says Price. “In some cases, it’s literally the spoils - like the Rosetta Stone which was seized from the French.”
  • Price has little time for the use of the word ‘woke’ as an insult, as to him it simply means trying to do the right thing professionally. He adds that he feels “fortunate” that Manchester Museum, where he works, is also having the same “conversations” about confronting the legacy of the past.
  • “the British and French cooked up a system” called ‘finds-division’ or ‘partage’. “Notionally,” he says, “the best 50% of things that come out of the ground go to the National Collection in Cairo, but then up to 50% of what is thought to be ‘surplus to requirements’ or duplicate can leave with archaeologists. So that’s how Manchester has 18,000 objects from Egypt and Sudan - mostly through finds-division.
  • It was legal between the 1880s and 1970s, but it was at a time when mostly the Egyptian government was controlled by the British and French, and the Egyptian government had to repay the massive debt of building the Suez Canal.
  • “some people will tell you, some well known Egyptologists, that you should burn copies of ‘A Thousand Miles Up the Nile’ because it contains racist material. But the society is actually working on a critical re-edition, where there’s a new introduction to put the book in context. I firmly believe, and the trustees firmly believe, you can’t just bury the past. You’ve got to try and face it and constructively critique it. I’m not arguing for cancelling anyone. I’m not arguing for trying to ignore it. I’m saying ‘let’s have a conversation’.”
  • Unlike many nations which had art looted by western powers, Egypt “isn’t particularly interested” in the repatriation debate except when it comes to “a few very exceptional objects like Nefertiti’s Bust and the Rosetta Stone”. Price adds: “Repatriation can sometimes be a bit of an echo chamber for western [people]. It doesn’t necessarily relate always to the concerns of indigenous groups, or people who live in places like Egypt.”
  • There’s a funny attitude, where Scots kind of distance themselves and say, ‘oh well, you know, we were colonised first. The English came in, and we’re the victims’. Based on my work on the history of colonialism in Egypt, Scottish people are more than well-represented. They are disproportionately represented in the cogs of the imperial project with Scottish diplomats, engineers and soldiers … There’s a sense that empire was ‘done to’ Scotland, when in fact Scotland ‘did’ empire to other people … We put this stuff on the English and say it was the English … Scots appear surprisingly commonly in the imperial machinery in Egypt.
  • Price is chair of the board of trustees with the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) - an organisation, he says, which is “doing a lot of work of self-criticism, self-reflection and self-critique”. The EES, which was established in 1882 at the height of empire and just prior to the British invasion, is now “attempting to unpack colonialism in Egypt”.
  • British egyptology is “more open” to change, Price says than most other western nations with a history of the discipline. “We’re on the winning side of the argument. The tide has turned. You cannot pretend you can enjoy your secluded cocktail terrace in the middle of Cairo and not expect to hear critical evaluation of colonial experiences.”
  • Most of the workers who built the pyramids weren’t slaves - they were paid for their efforts, he points out. The slave stories of the Bible, though, lead to “another form of colonialism - Orientalism”, which depicts the rulers of the east as either exotic and mysterious or brutal and cruel. The notion of “the Oriental despot comes from the Bible: Pharaoh as a despot … The way in the Bible, that the pharaoh is cast as a baddie, reverberates”.
  • Price is also incensed by the current pseudo-science trend for conspiracy theories claiming that aliens built the pyramids - the type of unfounded material aired on over-the-top documentaries like ‘Ancient Aliens’. “It’s racist,” he says, “very racist.” He notes that there’s a hashtag on Twitter called ‘CancelAncientAliens’. The wild alien theory is “based on the assumption that ancient people were too stupid to have [built the pyramids] themselves and so it had to be some outside force. So to be clear in the interests of global parity and justice: the ancient Egyptians were an African people who built absolutely stunning monuments. Get over it.”
  • There is no simple answer, or history - and I think we insult museum audiences if we assume they want an overly simplified story. ‘Ancient Egypt’ is undoubtedly one of the most popular parts of a museum. By asking questions about how colonialism formed our idea of what ‘Ancient Egypt’ was, not just how it got to be in cities like Glasgow and Manchester, I think we can begin to address questions of global inequality.
  • “Egypt more than Greece, Rome or other parts of the world, has existed as both ‘Oriental other’ and ‘western ancestor’ - that is why the colonial dialogue is so intense - and Egyptology is, in a sense, the exemplary ‘colonial discipline’, just as the British Consul Lord Cromer [consul-general in Egypt from 1883] said Egypt should be the exemplary colony.
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