Looking back to move forward – reflections for Black History month

“From the standpoint of the grower, the greatest defect of slavery lies in the fact that it quickly exhausts the soil. […] As Jefferson wrote of Virginia, “we can buy an acre of new land cheaper than we can manure an old one.”  

Capitalism and Slavery (Eric Williams, 1944) 

‘Sankofa’ is word of the Akan people of Ghana used to convey the idea that there is wisdom in looking backward to move forward. Sankofa is often represented by the minimalist symbol of a mythical bird, with its feet pointing forward whilst its head reaches backward to retrieve a treasured egg behind it. In January Natalie Lartey used the term to open our session on Reparations at the Oxford Real Farming Conference. It seems apt to re-engage with the concept for Black History Month given the challenging public discourse those who care about people and environment must now confront daily. We are desperate to know how to get out of this doom spiral, and I believe that a more careful study of Black history holds lessons for us all. 

New inspiration has rarely felt more desperate. Whether we should do away with our legal commitment to uphold human rights, and the degree to which it is ok to let Black and Brown people drown in the English Channel are serious political questions today. Credible plans with broad support to tackle climate breakdown and biodiversity loss are being abandoned. Corporate profits are greater than ever, while those who rely on wages, salaries, benefits, and state pensions to live are left with an increasingly grim menu of realities to choose from. And yet, we could all be forgiven for questioning at this time whether there is need to dredge up horrors long past, when there so many horrors in our present?  Why search for tears when it is hope that is missing? In my view, to see these two drives as being opposed is to miss the fundamental benefit of engaging with history. We must do this because the process allows us to connect our humanity to that of others. We gain an opportunity to reaffirm our values, reveal new avenues to act, inspire renewed perspectives on what we should be aiming for, and gain a better sense of the power we already hold. This is key for organisations as much as it is for individuals.  

Feedback campaigns for a food system which is good for people and planet. In doing so, we often find ourselves working to hold corporations and policy makers to account for decisions which are demonstrably harmful or working with communities and activists to pilot alternative ways of doing things. Increasingly our daily reality and that of our peers is of a world where winning the argument counts for very little at all. Policy consultations appear to have little impact on decision making processes. Historical malpractice appears to present no barrier at all to future profits.  

Bringing Black History into the fold helps to debunk the idea that we ever successfully civilised agribusiness. There is an unbroken tradition, stretching back through colonialism to antiquity, of elites holding profits in higher regard than human lives or ecosystems. The transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans is uniquely responsible however for embedding the perverse economic logics we are now left grappling with within the food system – wasteful and polluting production methods, disposability of racialised people and the ecologies they rely on, the subordination of agricultural production to commodity markets, and malnutrition in the context of systematic overproduction. 

In August 1962 Eric Williams, an Oxford educated academic, became Trinidad and Tobago’s first Prime Minister having led the country through the post-WWII movement for independence. His work Capitalism and Slavery is one of the first historical analyses critiquing the presumed moral character of Britain’s abolitionist and emancipatory achievements. Systematically, his work outlined evidence that the abolition of the slave trade was only possible once it was clear doing so could hurt the sugar production of the competing colonial powers of France, Spain and the USA. As the world’s foremost trafficker of enslaved Africans, Britain could starve them of labour.  

He also paints a similar picture around the time of emancipation. Excited by the prospect of investment opportunities in the new republics of Abya Yala / Pindorama (The Food Sovereignty movement’s preferred names for the South American continent), free trade proponents pushed for the liberalisation of trade policy, breaking the Caribbean slaveocracy’s monopoly on the British sugar market. Unable to compete with lower costs and beset by rebellions and uprisings from enslaved Africans, and an organised nexus of abolitionist and free trade lobbies in the UK, profitability collapsed for the West Indian Interest, along with their resistance to emancipation.  

Once we dare to look beyond the rousing mental image of a morally triumphant Wilberforce, we are left with some stark realisations. The value of Black life, or indeed almost any life, has yet to be accepted as a valid basis to proactively and systematically curtail harmful industry. The oft cited fact that it was the enslavers and not the enslaved who were compensated is typically used to underscore viscerally that there is unfinished business on the matter. Yet rather than an aberration, this bargain should be seen as the core of the situation.   

This is where Williams’ opening quote, of Thomas Jefferson’s 1793 letter to George Washington comes in. Although the word “slave” appears nowhere in his letter, Jefferson was explaining the core of plantation racial capitalism to his friend, the first President of the United States: It was more profitable to acquire a new patch of land and then exploit the dispensable bodies of enslaved Africans, (who would quickly exhaust the land after a few seasons crops), then move onto a new parcel and yet more newly trafficked African bodies, than think about caring for Black lives or bringing life back to the soil. Thus, racial capitalism ruthlessly put financial gain above the care of their fellow living beings (be they African human beings, Native American human beings or the creatures maintaining the health of the stolen soil). 

Two hundred and thirty years later, with its capacity to destruct life increased by a century of fossil-fuel derived agri-chemicals, capitalism has still not acquired the ability to embed a respect for life into its systems of governance. Instead, many in society consider themselves post-racial – having grown adept at interpreting historical alignments of interests – as with abolition and emancipation – as proof of a universal rejection of barbarism by former colonial powers. For both the individual and organisations like Feedback then, there are clear challenges levelled. Can we reduce our vulnerability to the allure of false narratives by striving to hold the fullest picture possible? Can we find where our sector has inherited a disregard for life, and in particular Black life? And by rejecting ahistorical narratives, can we become more effective in finding the sources of hope we are so desperately in need of? 

It is in this work that we find the cure to the pervading sense of futility. This is where we can reveal what systems need to rebuilt or restored, the relationships in need of repair, who should be expected to bear the cost. Moments like this helps us find ourselves amongst the chaos and underline where we, specific organisations and people with valuable strengths and particular experience, are needed. Tomorrow does not have to be even more bleak than today. All it takes is a small amount of courage and the commitment of some time. 

Over the course of October and beyond, we’ll be working to reveal our Sankofa inspired reflections on the unacknowledged roots of Feedback’s work within Black History. We will strive to be courageous even where this proves harder than we might expect. Our attempts will not be perfect. They may not even be satisfactory. But this work is everybody’s to further and so we will do our best to play our part.