denied expression, and the right to expression; denied mobility, and the right to mobility; denied pride in themselves or their traditions, and the right to that pride. To their bodies they do indeed retain limited rights, available to them whenever exercise of those rights does not conflict with the needs of their masters. They are encouraged to reproduce, but not to form permanent attachments to mates or children, since one or more family members might, at any time, be sold or traded away. They are taught that their physical differences are proof that they are intrinsically evil, as is their belief that the power that drives the universe is manifested among many different gods and spirits. Their own ancestral deities, they are repeatedly told, are in fact demons in the service of the Great Adversary and fit only to be destroyed by the One True God: that of the masters. Furthermore, they learn that this single (albeit tripartite) Supreme Being, despite His love for them, is punishing them for their unbelief in Him, and that He will continue to do so until they have earned His approval by passively accepting and enduring their fate. They are taught that their masters are good and that they are evil; that their masters are intelligent and that they are stupid; that their masters are beautiful and that they are ugly. Most crucially, they learn that their masters have won, and that they have lost.
The slaves survive as captive peoples always survive under circumstances where escape is virtually impossible, and where the only possible consequence of insurrection would inevitably be to provoke the extinction which only compliance, or the illusion of compliance, can keep at bay. Their first act of survival is the creation of a space within which they can share some small degree of intellectual and emotional privacy. Within this space, they develop methods of using any and every resource at their command to make some sense of their condition; and of preserving their humanity against what eventually turns out to be centuries of captivity or near-captivity. In other words, they set out – each separate grouping in their own way, in isolation or near-isolation from their peers both near and far, working with whatever they have – to transform a group of victims snatched at random from a variety of peoples, each with its own language and customs, into a People; one People with a common means of expression, a common awareness of their condition, and a set of common goals.
The first tool which comes to hand is the masters’ language. This is rapidly reinvented and modified into something entirely new, spoken and understood by the People but rendered impenetrable to the masters. From the captors’ tongue evolves a new one, deceptively similar to the old, but one in which the meanings of each word, each phrase, each sentence are radically affected by microtonal shifts of pitch and infinitely subtle shades of intonation. The new language is restricted in vocabulary, by comparison with its predecessor, but it is infinitely richer in nuance. First and foremost, it is a secret, private language that has emerged: words from The People’s various native languages – handed down, despite their formally proscribed nature, from generation to generation – are incorporated into the new lingua franca. Their work songs and ‘field hollers’ become means of conversing freely even in the presence of an overseer; the songs of the masters are subversively transformed to serve as the basis for new songs lampooning the masters, commenting on recent events, bemoaning their fate, and praising the new heroes: the rebels and runaways who defy the masters. Those whom the masters call ‘bad’ are the most thoroughly respected and the most fulsomely praised; in the new language, ‘bad’ becomes the highest accolade there is. Every member of the People grows up effectively bilingual, speaking one language in the inner world, another in the outer: the single language which they were forced to share, both with each other and with the master race, becomes two. With each language comes a face: the face they show to their masters, and the face they wear among themselves. The masters’ musical instruments, especially, are approached in new ways; they begin to make sounds never intended by their manufacturers, sounds reminiscent of the by-now near-mythical homeland whence the slaves had been wrenched all those years before. The part of the process incorporating elements of music and dance is an integral one, since the People came from cultures where music and dance were an integral aspect of everyday community life, and literally everybody sang, danced and played some sort of instrument. (Their musical traditions involved plucked stringed instruments, wind instruments and percussion; the latter pair also serving as means of communication. The People were therefore forbidden access to the drum and the fife in case they were used to send wordless, but articulately phrased and pitched, messages which contained or transmitted any whiff of sedition.) To the more devout amongst the masters, to whom all dance was anathema and for whom music was only acceptable if it was religious in nature, this was in itself evidence of innate primitivism, and all the more reason to replace their indigenous music with the hymns and ballads which the masters, and their ancestors before them, had brought from their own homelands.
The second tool is the masters’ religion, which was supposed to justify their oppression. One particular text of this religion yields up a central metaphor which becomes the linchpin of a powerful liberation theology: the tale of a captive People held in slavery in a foreign land until, eventually, they win their freedom and triumphantly return home. Almost as crucial as its content is the manner in which this religion is adapted to the spiritual needs of the captives: where the masters’ worship is staid and complacent, in the hands of the captives the same worship becomes visceral, becomes transcendental, becomes a rite of transformation, of possession, of joyous surrender to the spirit of the divine.
Time passes: the slave trade is finally banned, by which time the number of slaves has vastly increased. Because new arrivals are no longer forthcoming, the masters feel obliged to treat their existing slaves marginally better; since there is no longer a theoretically infinite supply of them, they now represent an asset which must be conserved rather than wasted. For the first time, the skills and knowledge of a slave are perceived as assets comparable in value to his or her strength and fertility. As a consequence, the masters find newer uses for their slaves. Some receive a broader education than their peers and become household servants, or even skilled personal assistants. Some of the enslaved women become sexual playthings for the male masters; their offspring never acknowledged as members of the owning families, but nevertheless highly prized as more valuable slaves. A convention arises that the visible evidence of even one slave ancestor among eight could outweigh any amount of the masters’ genetic inheritance in identifying someone as a slave. The proudest of the People take this to mean that their bloodline is measurably and demonstrably more potent than that of their masters; the most thoroughly intimidated take it as a sign that the shame of their origins is utterly ineradicable.
Towards the end of their second century of captivity, there is a war among the masters. Though the freeing of the slaves is not the specific objective of the side who eventually prove victorious, it is nevertheless part of their agenda, if only as a means of weakening the losers’ economic base. As such, it is successful. Unfortunately, what the People actually receive is a nominal liberation only; a legalistic simulacrum of freedom which reproduces slavery in all but name. It keeps the bulk of the People in economic bondage to the former owners, hems in the better-educated and more ambitious by blocking their progress with a comprehensive net of laws and codes, and denies them the legal and civil rights granted to any citizen who looks as though his or her genetic inheritance from the stock of the masters is untainted by any visible ancestors from amongst the People. The People’s exclusion from the public life of the nation continues to be justified on the grounds that they are intrinsically inferior beings who are nonetheless extremely dangerous. Those who had been forced to breed as if they were stud cattle are, as a consequence, considered overly sexual; those who have faithfully and lovingly nursed their masters’ children are deemed profligate and cruel; those who had been routinely subjected to corporal punishment nigh unto the point of death for the slightest infraction of an unfulfillable code are deemed uncontrollably violent. And what remains unarguably true is that their skin is still a different colour. For the fruits of their liberation, they have genuine freedom of movement and association in very few places in deed. They are not entitled to vote, and any attempt to apply for the right to do so is, informally but invariably, cause for spontaneous corporal punishment. Their word can be freely contradicted in a court of law by any member of the master race. They may be physically attacked with impunity. They are subject to the full penalties of the law, whether or not they have committed an actual of fence, but not entitled to its protection from a member of the master race.
There is more. They are forbidden