ANC Today

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Volume 7, No. 25, 29 June - 5 July 2007

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THIS WEEK:

* Letter from the President: The ANC remains a true agent for change 
* An ancient institution with modern consequences Previous issues 

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LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT

The ANC remains a true agent for change

[Editor’s Note: Below we publish an edited version of the Address of President
Thabo Mbeki at the Opening of the ANC Policy Conference on June 27. We carry the
full text of the Address on this website.]

We will be meeting over the next four days to carry out a vital task. That task
is to try to define what the future of our country will be during the five-year
period leading to the Centenary of our movement in 2012. That task is to try to
define what the quality of life of the masses of our people will be when we
celebrate the historic 100th birthday of the African National Congress. 

The decisions we take at this Policy Conference will be finalised at our 52nd
National Conference in December, our last Ordinary National Conference before we
celebrate our Centenary on January 8th 2012 and participate in the 2009 General
Elections. Before I proceed any further, I would like to say something about the
African National Congress I have known for over 50 years. 

What I know of the ANC is that it is a people’s movement. It is not, and has
never been a movement that was formed 95 years ago merely to represent the
interest of its members and its leaders. The African National Congress is and
has always been a parliament of the people.

It was not formed to be, and has never been an instrument to advance the
personal interests of its members, regardless of the positions within the
organisation that any of its members might occupy. It has always asked of every
important decision it has adopted, and all actions it has taken – do these bring
the masses of our people closer to the realisation of their dreams! 

I have spoken as I have because over the recent past all of us, loyal members of
the African National Congress, have been subjected to a sustained barrage of
propaganda that has suggested that we remain members of the ANC because we are
determined to gain positions of power at the various levels of government, and
thus to use these positions of power to accumulate wealth for ourselves and
secure our positions of power by a mercenary dispensation of patronage.

Even as we prepared for this Policy Conference, that has absolutely nothing to
do with who is or will be a leader of the African National Congress, by virtue
of election by our membership, those responsible for the propaganda to which I
have referred, have made it a point to assert that what we will do over the next
four days is centrally driven by what they describe as “the leadership
succession”.

The African National Congress was formed 95 years ago to liberate our people
from colonial oppression and white minority domination. The colonial and
apartheid power saw as the objects of its racist policies, all the black
oppressed, regardless of race, gender and class, and sought to bribe the white
working people to accept both subservience to the colonial and racist power and
an obligation to cooperate in the subjugation of the black majority.

It is out of this reality that the ANC was born. It was formed to advance the
national interests of all the oppressed, regardless of distinctions of race,
class and gender. At the same time, our movement knew that the democratic
revolution would also serve the fundamental interests of the white working
people.

An important document was issued in 1996, entitled “The State and Social
Transformation”, in which leaders of our broad movement said: “The most
important current defining feature of the South African democratic state is that
it champions the aspirations of the majority who have been disadvantaged by the
many decades of undemocratic rule. 

“However, there is a need to recognise that the South African democratic state
also has the responsibility to attend to the concerns of the rest of the
population which is not necessarily part of the majority defined above.

“To the extent that the democratic state is objectively interested in a stable
democracy, so it cannot avoid the responsibility to ensure the establishment of
a social order concerned with the genuine interests of the people as a whole,
regardless of their racial, national, gender and class differentiation. There
can be no stable democracy unless the democratic state attends to the concerns
of the people as a whole and takes responsibility for the evolution of the new
society.”

This defined the tasks of the ANC, and what we had to do to ensure that the
masses of our people benefited from the victory of the democratic revolution.

Even 13 years after the victory of the democratic revolution, its defence and
further entrenchment remain principal tasks of the National Democratic
Revolution.

In this regard I must say that unfortunately the Discussion Document,
“Legislature and Governance for a National Democratic Society” does not reflect
on some of the major issues we should discuss relating to the task to defend our
democratic gains and further deepen our democratic system, consistent with the
perspective that – the people shall govern!

In this context I would like to mention such important issues as: the
responsibility of the members and structures of our movement and the broad
democratic movement to defend the democratic state and its institutions; respect
for the institutions of the democratic state by members and supporters of our
movement; respect for the institutions of the democratic state and public
property owned by the people as a whole, during the exercise of the entrenched
democratic right to engage in public demonstrations; the use of force during
public demonstrations and mass protests resulting in such unacceptable actions
as violent assaults against the people, intimidation in various forms, looting
and destruction of property; the deepening of popular participation in
governance through such interventions as the Ward Committee system and the
Izimbizo process; the constituency work of our public representatives at
national, provincial and local levels, and its relevance to the process of
democratisation; the place of civic street committees and similar structures, as
well as non-governmental and community based organisations in the process of
deepening our democracy; the concerns raised by the media about restrictions to
the freedom of the press, as well as issues that relate to the responsibility
and public accountability of the media; and the full integration of the
institution of traditional government within our democratic system of
governance.

The Policy Conference gives us an opportunity to raise and consider all these
and other important issues relating to our democratic system, which might
inadvertently have been left out of our discussion documents.

Yet another important strategic objective of the national democratic revolution
is the eradication of poverty and therefore the restoration of the dignity of
all our people of all ages, including the young, the elderly and the disabled,
by liberating them from the indignity of hunger and want.

Necessarily, therefore, the Policy Conference will have to assess the policy
positions that have informed our activities since 1994 focused on: the growth
and development of our economy; the more equitable sharing of the national
wealth; the reduction of the inherited and persisting racial, gender and class
disparities in the distribution of income and wealth; employment creation and
poverty eradication; and the provision of a comprehensive and sustainable social
security net.

Our movement and government have made it a point constantly to remind all our
people that we still have a long way to go before we achieve one of the central
goals of the national democratic revolution, the realisation of a better life
for all our people, on a sustainable basis. In this regard, we have pointed to
the challenge posed by unacceptably high levels of structural unemployment,
persisting endemic poverty, and underdevelopment that affects many of our urban
and rural areas. 

As we have done in the past, we must again examine our policies and programmes
to determine what we need to do to accelerate our progress towards the
resolution of these problems.

In addition to the issues I have raised, and as all the delegates know, the
strategic goals of the National Democratic Revolution, which also define this
revolution, include building a non-racial society, a non-sexist society, a
society that develops and empowers our people with disabilities, our youth and
our children.

This Policy Conference has an obligation to ask itself the critically important
questions – what progress have we made towards the realisation of these
objectives? Have we put in place the policies and programmes to achieve these
outcomes? What policies do we need to accelerate our advance towards building a
country defined by the perspective of a truly caring and people-centred society?

I am certain that all of us would like to see greater progress in the pursuit of
the important goal of the emancipation of women. 

I am equally certain that all of us would like to see greater progress in the
struggle to eradicate the legacy of racism which continues to manifest itself in
our society in thousands of ways.

Similar challenges continue to face us with regard to the development and
empowerment of the youth, the development and empowerment of people with
disabilities, and the effective protection of the rights of children.

Again I am certain the Policy Conference will address all these important
matters to empower our movement to accelerate our country’s advance towards the
realisation of the goal of an inclusive and people-centred society.

In this regard, I must state and restate this fundamental truth with absolutely
no hesitation, that objectively and practically, it is not possible to solve
problems that have accumulated over 350 years in the mere 13 years of our
democracy. 

The issue of the relationship between the national democratic and the socialist
revolutions has been raised once again. I hope that as we reflect on matters
raised in the Draft Strategy and Tactics document we will discuss this important
matter that our movement has grappled with for many decades. However, I must
restate some of the fundamental conclusions that have informed the functioning
of the broad movement for national liberation for many decades already, which
enabled this movement to achieve the historic democratic victory of 1994 as a
united and disciplined force for progressive change.

One of these conclusions is that there is a distinct, material and historically
determined difference between the national democratic and the socialist
revolutions. Objectively, and not by proclamation or conference resolutions, the
ANC necessarily serves as the leader of the forces committed to the victory of
the National Democratic Revolution, which struggle for the realisation of the
national democratic goals of the masses of our people.

For many decades already, our movement, the African National Congress, precisely
because it accepted and supported the right of our people to choose their path
of development, accepted the proposition that our ally, the SACP, and not the
ANC, would lead the forces and the struggle for the victory of the socialist
revolution.

Historically, the ANC has deeply appreciated the fact that over the decades, the
SACP has defined itself as an integral part of the national liberation movement,
of our movement committed to the victory of the National Democratic Revolution,
and therefore accepted that, objectively, the ANC must serve as the leader of
the NDR.

In this context, the SACP has always understood that it could not delegate its
socialist tasks to the ANC, consistent with the fact that the tasks of the
socialist revolution could not be delegated to the National Democratic
Revolution. For many decades, the SACP has therefore not seen and acted against
the ANC as its political competitor, which we are not.

I must also add this, that already during the 1940s, if not earlier, our
movement recognised the strategic position that our working class occupied and
would occupy in our economy, in our society, and in all our struggles to achieve
the victory of the National Democratic Revolution. 

Accordingly, to speak about the motive forces of the National Democratic
Revolution was to speak of the working class as a leading echelon in the
struggle for national liberation, which would also organise and fight for its
interests in terms of higher wages and better working conditions, and a role in
determining the future of our country.

The historical evolution of our society has meant and means that for the ANC to
secure the victory of the National Democratic Revolution, our movement must draw
into the common struggle our country’s democratic forces, our country’s
socialist forces, and our country’s proletariat.

This means that our Alliance, composed of the ANC, the SACP and COSATU, expanded
to include SANCO, is not a product merely of intelligent conference resolutions.
It is an imperative imposed on us by the nature of our society and the ideas and
organisational formations that have developed within the bosom of that society.

The nature of the society we inherited and the impact on us of a rapidly
changing international environment mean that our movement must indeed develop
the necessary capacity, ingenuity and maturity successfully to “take
responsibility for the evolution of the new society.”

The objective reality in our country is that in the same way that the defeat of
the apartheid regime would not have been possible without the ANC, so would it
not be possible to construct the new South Africa without the ANC.

This underlines the historic responsibility that rests on the shoulders of all
the delegates to the Policy Conference, all other members of the ANC and all our
structures, properly to position themselves to carry out the task of the
fundamental social transformation of our country.

Consistent with our internationalist traditions, this obligation also relates to
the work we must do further to advance the African Renaissance and contribute to
the building of a better world, even as we confront the challenges of
globalisation and the unjust distribution of power within the system of global
governance.

I trust that all of us gave ourselves time to study and respond to the
Discussion Document, “Towards the Centenary of the ANC: A Strategic Agenda for
Organisational Renewal.” The Document ends by inviting “all cadres to join in
the festival of ideas about the fundamental challenge of strengthening our
movement so that it remains a trusted leader, loyal servant of the people and an
agent for change!”

To discharge this historic responsibility, we must continue to pay the closest
attention to the accomplishment of the task we set ourselves at the 2000
National General Council, the task to build new cadres who are truly committed
to serve the people, and who must develop the necessary capacity and competence
to handle the complex process of the construction of a new society and a new
world.

This important Policy Conference must itself also be characterised by a festival
of ideas, producing the rich complex of policies that will confirm to the people
that their movement, the ANC, indeed remains a trusted leader, a loyal servant
of the people, a true agent for such change as will enable the masses of our
people fully to realise their aspirations.

Thabo Mbeki

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SLAVERY

An ancient institution with modern consequences

Viewpoint by Z Pallo Jordan

Slavery is the oldest form of exploitation evolved by humankind. There are
numerous accounts of the origins of the institution, but there seems to be
general acceptance that originally enslavement was imposed on those unable to
meet their debts. If that is true, it implies that enslavement was conceived as
a temporary arrangement, until an owed debt had been discharged. 

It is clear too that at a certain point prisoners of war, instead of being
killed, were enslaved. It was this later practice of enslaving war prisoners,
who might otherwise have been killed, that transformed slavery from a temporary
condition into the permanent fate of the defeated. 

The redefinition of enslavement as something imposed on those captured by the
victors in a war imparted to the institution its central tenet: the slave was a
person under sentence of death, in whose case the sentence has been commuted on
the understanding that the person will become the property of the victor. As
someone under a death sentence, it was understood by both the enslaved and the
enslaver that the death sentence could be invoked at anytime. The absolute power
the slave-owner exercised over his or her slave derived from this. 

Slavery thus entailed the reduction of other human beings to a status not too
dissimilar to that of livestock. Despite its extreme cruelty there was an
unassailable internal economic logic to enslavement. Slaves, being human, had
exactly the same abilities as those who enslaved them, they could think, they
had the ability to reason; they could do conscious work; they had the capacity
to imagine. 

All these human abilities meant that they could be extremely productive. The
slave's utility was that he or she could be compelled to consume far less than
they produced. What slaves produced, over and above their own needs to sustain
life, accrued to the slave owner. In the wars of ancient times victorious armies
seized the cattle, sheep, horses, pigs, goats, and other livestock of those they
had defeated. Looting of property was the primary purpose of war. 

They also seized the non-combatants, the combatants who had survived the battles
and any other humans. Like the animate and inanimate goods so seized, enslaved
humans could be bought and sold at the market. And, like livestock, such humans
were the property of their owners, who exercised power over them. In all the
ancient civilisations, Egyptian, Sumerian, Chinese, Indian, Greek, Roman or
Carthaginian, slavery was the dominant mode of production. 

While various forms of free labour were found in all of these, slaves came to
dominate as producers and as providers of services from domestic work up to and
including even becoming leading state officials. The palace eunuch was a feature
of the Chinese state until the early 20th century. In the Rome of the emperors,
enslaved state officials were even able to influence important government
decisions and often conspired with the emperor's enemies to overthrow or
assassinate him. The post seventh century Caliphates employed enslaved officials
in a number of capacities. In a few cases ex-slaves rose to become heads of
state. 

One of the most inspiring stories in the Old Testament is the Exodus, which
recounts the narrative of Moses who led the "children of Israel" out of slavery
in the Egypt of the Pharaohs. In the ancient Hebrew kingdoms it was customary to
free all slaves every 25 years, in what was called Jubilee, to mark the exodus
from Egypt. The Greeks referred to a slave as a tool who has the power of
speech. A sharp distinction was drawn between the free and the enslaved. Apart
from the slave's likely foreign origins, as a person captured in war the slave
was not and could not become a citizen. A citizen was a member of the body
politique and as such enjoyed certain rights and owed the state a number of
obligations. 

In Julius Caesar's days in ancient Rome, slave labour had displaced free labour
to an extent that the majority of citizens were not employed and relied to a
grant from the state to live. The oft used phrase "bread and circuses" derives
from Caesar's practice of distributing free grain to the citizens and staging
regular spectacles at the circus or the arena to entertain them. The Latin word
for slave is "servus," from which we derive the English term "servile," meaning
behaviour suited to a slave. 

Slavery in ancient Rome flourished to the extent that in certain parts of the
empire slaves vastly out numbered the free. Sicily, the site of the biggest
latifundia, mines, quarries and other works in the Roman Empire was peopled
almost entirely by slaves and those who oversaw them. The island was
consequently the site of numerous slave revolts, though the most famous, led by
the gladiator, Spartacus and was on the Italian mainland. 

The economic rewards of slavery had declined radically by the time of the
"barbarian invasions" that finally brought down the Roman Empire in the west.
The institution continued in both Byzantium and in the emergent Islamic empires
after the seventh century A.D. as well as in other parts of the world. The
primary victims of enslavement at this time were the Slavic peoples of Eastern
Europe, hence the term "slave," derived from Slav. 

Slavery in Africa

Slavery had been known on the African continent since the beginning of time. It
had been practised in ancient Egypt, Libya, Carthage, Nubia and Ethiopia. In
West Africa household slavery was widely known and practised in virtually all
the medieval African kingdoms, Songhay, Ghana and Benin. Prisoners of war were
the usual candidates for enslavement. It was the arrival of the Europeans in the
Caribbean after the 15th century that revived slavery and accelerated its
plumbing depths of brutality. 

Their differences notwithstanding the Europeans shared a common goal: the
conquest and exploitation of the Americas. Within the first century after
contact with the Europeans, the peoples of the islands of the Caribbean had
virtually been exterminated by the new arrivals. Along with foreign domination,
forced labour, the gun and the whip, the Europeans had brought strange diseases.
Having developed no resistance to such illnesses, once they were infected, these
diseases spread like wildfire amongst the indigenes, wiping out entire villages.


Various forms of un-free labour were employed to "tame" the wilderness in the
"new world." In the Americas, both north and south, condemned prisoners were
sent into servitude in the colonies to do the back-breaking work on plantations
and in the mines. Australia is the classic example of this practice. In the
plantations of Virginia, the Carolinas and Maryland, convicted persons from
England often worked alongside African slaves. 

The European powers turned to African slavery as they realised that there could
not be sufficient numbers of condemned prisoners to meet the demand for labour.
Slaves from Africa replaced the indigenes as the labour force in all the
colonies in the Americas. Among the islands of the Caribbean, by the mid
eighteenth century, with the exception of Cuba, the demographic profile of the
Caribbean was overwhelmingly African. On the North American mainland African
slavery sustained the plantation economies of the southern states. South America
also acquired huge concentrations of Africans in Brazil and in many of the
territories along its north coast where plantations were established. 

Brazil, reputedly, received fully 37% of the Africans transported across the
Atlantic! Within a decade of the establishment of a permanent European
settlement at the Cape, the first slaves imported into South Africa were
purchased off a Portuguese vessel. They were from West Africa. After that
regular shipments of slaves were landed at Table Bay from the islands of the
Indian Ocean, from Bengal, from Ceylon, Indonesia and various points along the
East and West African coasts. For close to two centuries, until 1838, slavery
became one of the chief features of the society the Dutch settlers created in
southern Africa. 

The scale of slavery in South Africa never reached the proportions seen in the
Americas. But, as in the Americas, slavery was responsible for unprecedented
population movements. Thousands of Asians became part of South Africa's
populations as a direct result of slavery just as a huge African presence in the
Americas was created by slavery. And, as in the Americas, the enslaved tended to
be peoples from Africa and Asia, while those who were the enslavers, tended to
be of European descent. Race very quickly became associated with social status
at the Dutch colony in the Cape, imparting to the society that evolved from it
an institutionalised racism that became deeper and more pervasive with time. 

Like the other colonies founded by Europeans in the Americas and Australia, the
Cape produced foodstuffs and other raw materials for export to Europe. Unlike
the Americas, plantations did not play as dominant a role in the economy of the
Cape. Consequently, though the numbers of slaves grew and their owners carried
them further and further inland as the European colony expanded, their numbers
were relatively small and they worked as household servants rather than as
labourers in huge farms. 

Post 15th century slavery differed fundamentally from that practised in previous
eras. In the ancient, medieval and late medieval worlds enslavement was a by-
product of inter-state warfare. Slavery, as it evolved after the 15th century,
became a system of international commerce, the slave trade affecting the
Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. The principal source of slaves in this system
was the African continent, though the Indonesian archipelago, the Indian Ocean
islands and the Far East also became minor sources. 

The trans-Atlantic slave trade was part of a triangular system of commercial
exchange involving the sea-faring nations of Europe, Africa and the Americas.
Slavers would depart from European seaports bound for the west coast of Africa
laden with goods. At the various slaving ports these goods were exchanged for
human cargoes; at the American ports the African slaves were exchanged for raw
materials bound for Europe; in Europe these raw materials were worked into
manufactured goods which could in turn be exported to West Africa to be traded
for slaves. 

As the demand for human labour power grew in the "new world" pressure mounted
for more captives in the slaving ports of Africa. Slave-raiding and wars waged
to capture slaves became the norm in a number of kingdoms. The King of Dahomey
became one of the more notorious slave traders of West Africa who enriched
himself by mounting regular raids into the savannah to capture men, women and
children who were to be sold into slavery. 

Revolts and resistance

"The whole history of the slave trade and slavery is a sequence of revolts,"
Professor Oruno D Lara told a United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organisation (Unesco) meeting of experts in 1978. Unlike livestock,
slaves were conscious sentient human beings. 

Consequently, in every part of the world where slavery was practised there were
slave revolts, large and small. Slaves rose while on board slavers carrying them
across the seas; slaves rose on the plantations where they worked; slaves rose
in the harbours they were brought to for auction; they rose in the towns and the
cities. 

All such revolts were crushed with terrifying brutality. All, except for the
revolution of the African slaves which began in 1791, two years after the
Storming of the Bastille, in the French colony of San Domingo. Eighteenth
century San Domingo was considered one of the richest colonies in the "new
world." But its wealth was built on an extremely brutal plantation regime that
required the regular replenishment of the slave population with new arrivals
from the mother continent. 

The upper reaches of San Domingo society were white, some of noble birth, but
many were descended from commoners who had acquired land for the first time in
the colonies. Ownership of land and the slaves, who worked it, was the index of
wealth and power in San Domingo. As in all slave owning societies, the white
slave owners, their white retainers and servants, the petit blancs had extracted
sexual favours from the African slave women. A sizeable Mulatto population,
which already outnumbered the whites, had consequently grown up. 

Most of San Domingo's Mulattoes were free. Some had become very rich, owning
both plantations and slaves. They sat awkwardly between the overwhelmingly
African slave majority and the white plantation owners. On 15 May 1791, at
Robespierre's instigation the French National Assembly, established after the
Revolution of July 1789, passed a decree granting equality of political status
to whites, Mulattoes and freed Africans in its colonies, including San Domingo. 

The revolutionaries in Paris had ignored the slaves. On 22nd August 1791 the
slaves rose in revolt and in 12 years of war inscribed one of the most inspiring
chapters in the annals of humanity's struggle for liberation. Toussaint
L'Ouverture, born on All Saint's Day (hence his name) 1744 to the freed man,
Pierre Baptiste, emerged as the most significant leader among the slaves. Though
his father was free, because Toussaint's mother was a slave, he too shared her
status. But his father's freedom gave him access to a vital skill literacy,
which opened the portals of human knowledge to him. 

Toussaint had also been fortunate in work assignments on the plantation. >From a
herdsman he rose to the position of a coachman, offering him opportunities to
travel within San Domingo beyond the boundaries of plantation and parish, thus
broadening his horizons. Toussaint emerged as a leader during the second phase
of the revolt, after the republican government in Paris decided to lend its
authority to what the slaves had achieved for themselves emancipation in 1793.
From then on until his betrayal and capture, Toussaint was the senior leader of
San Domingo's former slaves. 

Under Toussaint's leadership the self-liberated Africans of San Domingo fought
off repeated attempts by the White planters, supported first by France, to re-
impose slavery. After 1793, revolutionary France became the freed slave's
principal foreign ally as they fought off English and Spanish armies. They gave
such a good account of themselves that by 1799 United States (US) and British
diplomats in the Caribbean were speculating about a possible invasion of Jamaica
and the US to liberate the slaves. 

"His (Toussaint's) army amounts to 55 000 men, of which 30 000 are of the line
and disciplined. The remainder are militia," wrote Edward Stevens a US consul on
the island. So formidable an army made up of slaves who had won their freedom by
their own hand, was considered a threat by all the powers in the Americas.
Napoleon Bonaparte was so fearful of such an eventuality that he reportedly
remarked that unless Toussaint was stopped, "the sceptre in the "new world"
would sooner or later pass into the hands of the blacks." 

When Napoleon made himself military dictator of France, one of his aims was to
re-establish San Domingo as a prosperous French colony. This, he was told, could
only be attained through the restoration of slavery. Slavery was first re-
imposed in the other French territories of the New World - Louisiana, Martinque,
Gaudelope and Cayenne where there had been no revolt. Having tasted freedom, the
former slaves of San Domingo would not submit without a fight. Skilfully using
guerrilla tactics and aided by what they called "general mosquito," the freed
slaves fought the French Armies to a standstill. But during the course of the
war Toussaint was betrayed to the French and captured. 

In the end however, Napoleon was forced to admit defeat and abandoned San
Domingo at the end of 1803. Historians speculate that this defeat persuaded him
to sell the Louisiana territory, which extended along the Mississippi river
basin as far north as present day Minnesota, to the USA. Toussaint's fate was a
portent of future of the revolution he had led. After the 1793 emancipation
decree, he had regarded France as an ally and had governed San Domingo as such.
Transported to Europe as a prisoner, he died aged 59, after issuing a prophetic
warning to Napoleon that he would meet the same fate. 

When Haiti's new national flag was about to be raised, Dessalines, who had
replaced Toussaint as leader, briefly halted the proceedings in order to rip out
a band of white bunting. "We want nothing white in our flag!" he declared. So
embittered had the former slaves become after 12 years of fighting successive
armies of White soldiers bent on the restoration of slavery. 

From these revolts, rebellions and uprisings there even arose distinctive
cultural practices, like the Capoeira dance of Brazil, which African slaves
evolved as a means of training in martial skills in preparation for an uprising.
It is a martial art developed by African slaves in Brazil, starting in the
colonial period. Slaves at the Cape too staged numerous acts of resistance. 

Given the relatively small numbers of slaves in South Africa, mass revolts was
not a realistic option. Resistance assumed a number of forms, some covert,
others overt. Escape plots were a regular device of resistance as when a Dutch
slaver, the "Meermin," docked at Table Bay, the slaves on board overpowered the
crew and forced them to take the ship out to sea in an attempt to return to
their home countries. As in many other instances the slaves were outwitted and
their rebellion crushed. Escapes in groups or by solitary slaves were also quite
frequent. With the frontier within reach, escaped slaves sometimes found refuge
among Khoikoi and other indigenous communities. 

Individual acts of sabotage, like hay-rick firing, the burning of crops, setting
alight the houses and homes of slave owners as well as random acts violence
against particularly brutal slave owners took place. A mass march on Cape Town
from the wheat fields of Mamre in 1828 was a stirring example of an attempt at
open revolt, as was Gallant's uprising, centred on the farm "Houd Den Bek" in
the Bokkeveld. In the Americas, on the mainland of North America, South America
and the islands of the Caribbean mass revolts, involving extended periods of
armed conflict, was a regular feature of the slave economies. In Brazil, on the
islands of the Caribbean and in some parts of North America, escaped slaves
banded together and established free communities, similar to those of the
Cossacks of the Tsarist Empire. 

These communities, called Maroons, were stable enough to field armies. In
Jamaica, for example, after repeated wars, the maroons were able to impose
treaties on the British authorities who recognised the maroons as free
communities by signing such agreements. Maroon communities retained a host of
African cultural practices and in a number of instances, words from various
languages. But it was not the resistance of the slaves alone that finally led to
the abolition of slavery. Motivated by Christian principles, liberal politics
and humanist ideals, an effective movement for the abolition of slavery evolved
in Europe and the Americas. 

The efforts of the slaves to free themselves form an important dimension of that
story, though it is oft-times suppressed. Post-revolutionary France, as I have
mentioned, first abolished slavery in France and its colonies in 1793; Britain
abolished the slave trade in 1807 then finally abolished slavery in the British
Empire altogether in 1836. 

After numerous slave rebellions, all of which had been suppressed with sadistic
brutality, in 1885, slavery was finally abolished in Brazil, bringing to an end
well nigh four centuries of the most despicable form of commerce of modern
times. Though formally "free" Brazil's former slaves occupied the lowest rung on
the social ladder and subjected to every form of legal and non-legal
discrimination. 

Slavery and its legacy still haunts us in the 21st century. In marking the bi-
centennial of the end of the slave trade we are celebrating a giant step in the
making of our modern world. A modern world in which all human beings are
accepted as of equal value and worth irrespective of their skin colour, their
hair texture, the religion they observe, their gender or the previous condition
of their ancestors as slaves.

** Z Pallo Jordan is a member of the ANC National Executive Committee. This is
an extract from a discussion at the Cape Town Book Fair, 18 June 2007.

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