Beware the Bight of Benin

It was a pleasure to go and watch a group from Benin, many of them children, performing the other night in Valencia, our local city.

Voices for Benin:
enthusiasm, commitment, passion in a great cause

In any case, we had to make allowance for the fact that these weren’t professionals – at least not yet – but students from a music school set up and run by the non-governmental organisation that arranged the evening. Besides, the fact that we were contributing, simply by having bought tickets, to assisting that organisation made the whole evening worthwhile. Not least because it seems to me that it’s a restitution that we in the wealthy west owe to the people of West Africa, including Benin.

One of the photos projected onto the back of the stage during the performance was of an archway – a sort of triumphal arch, except that what it commemorates has nothing to get triumphant about – which is called ‘the gate of no return’. 

Benin’s gate of no return

Benin’s not alone in having such a gate. Several other West African countries have one too. They’re memorials to the millions of Africans who were shipped across the Atlantic to the European colonies in the Americas to work as slaves until they dropped dead. And not just for as long as they remained colonies: thirteen colonies later won their independence to create what would become the world’s leading power, the United States, a beacon of liberty to all other nations, even though they went right on importing slaves and keeping slaves, even using slave labour to build the presidential mansion that is now the home of Joe Biden.

The latest estimate is that there were 12.5 million slaves transported across the Atlantic, of whom 10.7 million arrived alive. 

It was a trade that demonstrates as powerfully as anything could that profit trumps morality. Plenty of people defended it. They regarded the growing numbers, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who were calling for its abolition, as dangerous radicals. To backers of slavery, making money by condemning millions to a lifetime of suffering with no hope of release, was perfectly respectable.

Such was the lure of the trade that it attracted many men seeking a fortune, even though the dangers were pretty acute, even to the privileged whites who took part. There’s a piece of sailors’ doggerel from the time that makes the point:

Beware, beware the Bight of Benin

Where few come out though many go in

Benin today is a small independent country. It has still to recover fully from the devastation that allegedly Christian slave traders let loose on it. That’s a good reason to support organisations like the one that ran the concert we attended. 

It’s also good to be reminded, by monuments such as the Gate of No Return, of the shameful events in the history of the West. More particularly, we need to be reminded that what we now realise was an atrocity was regarded as a perfectly legitimate trade, to be defended by respectable people, back then.

It’s the kind reminder we need when we look at such behaviour as that of Florida governor and presidential hopeful Ron de Santis when he flew illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard in the middle of the night without notice and without making any arrangements for their wellbeing. Even worse is the British government’s determination to fly refugees to Rwanda and dump them there. Transporting unfortunate people to an uncertain destiny, and in the Rwanda plan, to a place of which they know nothing, is regarded as legitimate today, just as the slave trade was in the past. 

In reality, it's a denial that the victims have human rights. Indeed, it’s treating them as though they barely belonged to humanity at all. Which is how we once treated slaves from Africa.

I wonder whether at some future date, people might attend concerts for the victims of British or American inhumanity, and ask, as we now do about the slavers, “how could they do it?”