Martin Henry

This year, the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in Africans, I have devoted a great deal of column space to issues of slavery and freedom. For some time, in my own way, I have been a scholar of liberty with outflows in the column. We can be proud that one of the greatest scholars of freedom and of slavery is that son of slaves on Jamaican soil, Orlando Patterson.

His monumental works are leaders in the field: The classic, The Sociology of Slavery, published from Patterson's Ph.D. thesis when he was only 27; Freedom and Slavery and Social Death.

Christmas was a special time for Jamaican/West Indian slaves - one of only four annual holidays, and the most important. Patterson notes in The Sociology of Slavery that "the most striking feature of the Christmas festivities ... was the remarkable change that overcame the Negroes in their dress, their manner, and, most significant, their relationship with their masters which assumed the character of a kind of ritual license."

An eyewitness recorded that "on these occasions", the slaves appear a race of beings. They show themselves off to the greatest advantage by fine clothes and a profusion of trinkets; they affect a more polished behaviour and mode of speech; they address the whites with greater familiarity ... the distance between them appear to be annihilated for the moment, like the familiar footing on which the Roman slaves were with their masters at the feast of the Saturnalia."

But marked social distinctions among the slaves themselves stood out: Between African newcomer and creole, between tribes in the African group, and colour divisions within the creole group.

Last slave rebellion

Sam Sharpe, a Baptist lay leader and now National Hero, chose the Christmas holiday of 1831 to launch a withdrawal of slave labour. The strike escalated into the last slave rebellion in Jamaica, costing Sharpe and hundreds of other protesters/rebels their lives.

But, except in some features such as its racism, harshness and commercial organisation the enslavement of Africans in the New World was not particularly unusual in a world which accommodated bondage without protest. Patterson, in Slavery and Social Death, tabulates scores of large-scale slave systems, including many in Africa.

Patterson shocks in Freedom with the assertion that " ... There is nothing at all self-evident in the idea [of freedom] or more properly, the high esteem in which we in the West hold freedom. For most of human history, and for nearly all of the non-Western world prior to Western contact, freedom was, and for many still remains, anything but an obvious or desirable goal.

"Indeed, non-Western peoples have thought so little about freedom that most human languages did not even possess a word for the concept before contact with the West."

'Freedom'

Standing with Daddy Sharpe, the Christian protester of slavery, Patterson, the secular scholar of freedom, hangs Freedom on the cross of Christ. He expounded in dramatic language at the end of Freedom. "From its Judeo-Christian religion, forged in the sickening horror of Roman slave society, the West learned the reinforcing spiritual truth that 'out of evil cometh good'... Redemption - spiritual freedom - was not simply liberation from slavery to sin, but as Paul saw with fearsome vision, the suffering of sin made necessary the coming of the Christ and the promise of the cross - that central and most protean civilisational symbol of death and rebirth ... slavery and salvation ... . In the image of the wooden cross - the vertical crossroad ... we see the ultimate veneration of choice ... It is this strange, terrifying vision, at once mortal and divine, that has fashioned the culture and genius of the West."

And he proclaims: "All who have come up from the abyss of slavery and serfdom - the children of slaves as well as the children of slavemongers - must be humbled by this truth each time we celebrate our freedom."

Patterson picks up the terrifying theme of death, the social death of the slave, in Slavery and Social Death. The grand thesis of this "work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth" is that "slavery is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonoured persons" - human parasitism cutting off the parasitised not just from a self-determined future but from ancestry and social belonging as persons. Emancipation is, therefore, resurrection. "I AM the resurrection and the life" - Jesus, the Christ.