Throughout the English-speaking world elites are falling over themselves to believe the very worst of their own countries.
In Britain, the Church of England has committed itself to spend an initial £100 million (C$180 million) on slavery-reparations in response to the discovery that its endowment had “links” with African enslavement. “The immense wealth accrued by the Church … has always been interwoven with the history of African chattel enslavement,” a document explains. “African chattel enslavement was central to the growth of the British economy of the 18th and 19th centuries and the nation’s wealth thereafter.” And this has “continuing toxic consequences.”
Yet almost none of this is true. The evidence shows that the Church’s endowment fund was hardly involved in the evil of slave-trading at all. Most economic historians reckon the contribution of slave-trading and slavery to Britain’s economic development as somewhere between marginal and modest. And between abolition in 1834 and the present, multiple causes have intervened to diminish slavery’s effects.
Consonant with his church’s policy, the (then) Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby preached a sermon in Christ Church Cathedral, Zanzibar last year, in which he criticized Christian missionaries for treating Africans as inferior and confessed that “we (British) must repent and look at what we did in Zanzibar.”
Really? What the British did in Zanzibar during the second half of the 19th century was to force the Sultan to end the slave-trade. Indeed, the cathedral in which the archbishop was preaching was built over the former slave-market. And here’s what the pioneering missionary David Livingstone wrote about black Africans in 1871: “I have no prejudice against (the Africans’) colour; indeed, anyone who lives long among them forgets they are black and feels that they are just fellow men…. If a comparison were instituted, … I should like to take my place among (them), on the principle of preferring the company of my betters.”
Meanwhile, in Australia, there’s the extraordinary career of Bruce Pascoe’s 2014 book, Dark Emu. This argues that Aborigines, far from being primitive nomads, developed the first egalitarian society, invented democracy, and were sophisticated agriculturalists. Such was the morally superior civilization that white colonizers trashed in their racist greed. Named Book of the Year, Dark Emu has sold more than 360,000 copies and was made the subject of an Australian Broadcasting Company documentary.
Yet, it has been widely criticized for being factually untrue. Author Peter O’Brien has forensically dismantled it in Bitter Harvest: The Illusion of Aboriginal Agriculture in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2020). And in Farmers or Hunter Gatherers: The Dark Emu Debate (2021) — described by reviewers as “rigorously researched,” “masterful,” and “measured” — eminent anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe dismiss Pascoe’s claims. … Read it all in the National Post
