Conversation with Martin Plaut

Here is Episode 8 of The Fading Causes Podcast. My guest is distinguished journalist and historian Martin Plaut, whose upbringing under apartheid South Africa gave him a piercing lens on the unfinished business of history.

We focus on African slavery and its dirtiest and most hidden secrets. Everyone knows about trans-Atlantic slavery but few know that this was just one relatively short and not the biggest dimension of a global network of misery and exploitation that spanned millennia and reached all corners of the planet.

How many Africans were enslaved over the years? And how did the mechanics work? Spoiler alert: most were enslaved by fellow Africans (whose elites practiced the most brutal cruelties ever documented anywhere) and who then sold their people on to Ottoman, Arab, and European traders.

So why are Africans not talking of their own role in this nefarious business? And why are modern Turks and Arabs also not doing so? And why not India and Pakistan too where the descendants of African slaves can still be found? Why do some of these countries keep their archives closed – unwilling to acknowledge their own historical roles? And what about the Europeans (from as far north as Iceland) who got enslaved by West and North African raiders?

That then rises the question of who should recompense who for historic slavery? And are calls for restitution practical/ useful or merely a distraction from today’s egregious human rights abuses? Such as continuing slavery in Africa – the inspiration for the title “Unbroken Chains” of Martin Plaut’s book on 5000 years of African slavery released this book. A highly-recommended read!

In our muddled awareness of the past, we often conflate slavery and colonialism. Does replacing one wrong with another make it right? What was the reality? Did colonialism aggravate or stop slavery – both trans-Atlantic, trans-Arab, and trans-Indian Ocean?

How did the moral anti-slavery struggle come about? And eventually gave us the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948? Any insights for moral movements (if any) of our own age?

The legacy of African slavery is not merely a matter of correcting and fleshing out – the historical record. The descendants of enslaved people still face stigma in the Middle East and South Asia (and in Latin America and North America – despite progress of the civil rights movement), while modern slavery thrives in new forms of exploitation, from human trafficking to bonded labor.

Meanwhile, how do current zones of conflict and instability in Africa map onto the regions where historic African slavery was most prevalent and gruesome?

What can we really say in riposte to Martin Luther’s assertion that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”?

These and related questions are mulled over in my conversation with Martin Plaut