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?”

Discovery in Africa: the limits of certainty

Challenges to deep-seated convictions can come from unexpected quarters. 

So it was with an account by Thérèse Awada, a Strasbourg plastic surgeon, of a medical assistance mission she accompanied to Benin.  

Beware, beware, the Bight of Benin,
Where few come out though many go in
And it's a testing ground for strongly held convictions too

The team travelled along the Niger river in open canoes, trekking inland as necessary to different villages to provide surgical services. Their form of transport made it difficult to carry equipment and, by the end of the trip, they were low on consumables.

As they started their last day’s surgery, a young boy was brought in. He had a strangulated hernia, a potentially life-threatening condition. The team decided to rearrange their schedule for the day and operate on the child immediately, even though the supplies they would use meant possibly jeopardising their ability to carry out planned surgery on an old man’s lipoma in the afternoon.

I would have absolutely no quarrel with this decision and I’m sure most of us in the West would feel the same. A life-threatening condition has priority over a matter of discomfort; a child has priority over an adult. It seems absolutely self-evident. And there’s nothing casual about my use of the word ‘absolutely’: this is the kind of principle that my feelings tell me is absolute, if any is.

Well, nothing could be further from the truth. Even though in the event the old man had his surgery, the villagers were appalled by the team’s decision. So much so that they expressed their dissatisfaction firstly in expostulation, secondly by letting the team wait half the next day before agreeing to take them back to the river.

What was their complaint? Well, where in the West we see the old as reminders of decline and mortality, to them an old man is someone who has got through all that life can hurl at him. He is an exceptional figure, and he is the keeper of the community’s memories, its wisdom, its knowledge of how things should be done because this is how he learned from his predecessors they had always been done.

That made the old man far more precious than the boy. Running the risk of not being able to help him, in order to treat the child, was a horrifying reversal of the natural order of things. I’m sure, if asked, they would have used the same language as I did before: they would have found the truth of their view absolutely self-evident.

Now Awada makes it clear that she and the rest of the team, faced with the same circumstances, would take the same decision, and I agree with them. But the villagers would feel just as strongly about their own convictions. And, to be honest, in their terms their position is not without merit.

So what’s the lesson? It’s surely another powerful response to those who would have us believe that there is, out there, something that is true in some absolute sense. Pronounced by a god, written in scripture, carved on a tablet. Whereas in reality there are only a culture’s shared convictions. Strongly, powerfully felt, perhaps. But always open to question by someone else, whose own convictions are as strong as ours.

With no possible grounds for deciding that one set is right, the other wrong.