BBC Radio 3 Evensong Homily: 25th March 2007

 

An Afro-Caribbean family went into a large country house somewhere in England that was open to the public. Walking past the ticket-desk they were told by an official that there was an entrance fee. ‘We’ve already paid’, came the reply, and they walked on. The house in question was built on the profits of the slave-trade, and that family was descended from slaves.

 

Whether or not that story is true, it illustrates a terrible truth about the 200th Anniversary of the passing of the law that abolished any more trading in slaves. Many, many people in this country made a great deal of money out of it. They would send their ships to places like Cape Coast, in Ghana, pay local people in guns and the like for their cast-offs – perhaps misfit children aged seven; ship them across the Atlantic Ocean to places like the West Indies, where they were sold in exchange for such luxuries as coffee and sugar – which they then took back home with them to earn their fortunes. This had been going on for three hundred years, and involved an estimated 3 million black people, many of whom died either before they even left Africa, or on the ships, or in the sometimes appalling conditions in which they were put to work.

 

Slavery had existed in Africa long before the British arrived: there was an East Africa-Arab slave-trade from the ninth century, and the economy of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations depended on slavery. But it was the sheer extent to which the British developed and exploited this traffic in human lives that is so shocking. And it wasn’t all done and dusted by that Act of Parliament two hundred years ago. The Royal Navy sent its ships from Portsmouth to patrol the seas in order to prevent greedy traders breaking this new law. But it took another twenty six years for slavery itself to be abolished in those Caribbean plantations, where the slaves themselves rose up and fought, often at the cost of their lives, for their own freedom.

 

In this country the anti-slave movement was inspired by Christians, like Thomas Clarkson, Hannah More, and William Wilberforce – who gave it a powerful public voice in Parliament. They became convinced that slavery was evil and wrong; they believed they were called to ‘liberate the captives’, as we heard in today’s first reading. So they had to take on fellow-Christians, who had defended slavery because in the Bible it is an accepted way of life – even for St Paul, whose Letter to Philemon, our second reading, is concerned with sending a runaway slave back to his master. What Wilberforce and his fellow-campaigners did was to show how the Bible as a whole, how the message of Christianity cumulatively expressed in the Bible, taught the supreme importance of every single human being, where all barriers are broken down.

 

That leaves us with a twofold challenge. The first is that slavery is still around us today. 12.3 million people are victims of forced labour, producing cheap commodities that we eat, use or wear. They do not live in the squalour of those Afro-Caribbean slaves, nor do they walk with shackles round their feet. But subjugating people into being non-persons is an appalling indictment on our world.

 

The other challenge concerns different groups of people - like the divorced and remarried, women clergy, gays – who are apparently condemned by the Bible, and who have been rejected by some in the Church. Don’t they match the same kind of cumulative biblical perspective of Christian love and acceptance that opened Wilberforce’s eyes to the evils of slavery?

 

In Portsmouth, we’re proud of a special link with Anglicans in Ghana, the first Sub-Saharan African nation to achieve independence, the 50th anniversary of which was celebrated earlier this month. Near one of their old slave-forts there is a memorial plaque that reads as follows:

 

In everlasting memory

Of the anguish of our ancestors.

May those who died rest in peace.

May those who return find their roots.

May humanity never again perpetrate

  such injustice against humanity.

We the living vow to uphold this.

 

+ Kenneth Portsmouth                      

(recorded 24th March at Bishopsgrove)