The curse of trafficking substitutes for the slave trade of the past
March 7, 2020, 4:02 pm
The topic of slavery and its current counterpart - trafficking - came strong to mind as today is International Women’s Day, after reading a feature in the Economist of 8 February 2020. It was titled ‘British universities are examining how they benefited from slavery’. Slavery is a thing of the past and we in our country and even other Asian countries are free of this taint if it means deliberate enslaving persons to the point of owning them. But the western world is guilty, particularly Britain and the US of A. Black men were transported en mass in miserable holds of ships from Africa and islands surrounding the continent. Our ancient capitals of Anuradhapura and Polonnnaruwa, had huge stupas and wewas constructed, but it is known that labour was paid for. It was not even rajakariya service. Rajakariya was far removed from slavery even though rich and poor, advantaged and disadvantaged, came together. Labour was got from the peasant but he had benefits too – land to build his house on and cultivate, help for this, and a paternal eye cast his way by the king or near aristocrat and landowner, on whose land the peasant lived.
Why did I say this topic of today and article are apt as it is International Women’s Day? Because trafficking is mostly of women and the trafficked women who are coerced to leave their homes or threatened and taken away, even willingly giving themselves up sometimes, is the start of slavery for the trafficked, since these unfortunates work for no pay or very little, and are forced to work, mostly in the sex trade or as couriers in the drug trade. They have no rights.
Universities built or endowed with money earned from the slave trade
The Economist article is on the subject of the above subtitle. I quote:
"Every year, in early December, Jesus College, Cambridge, hosts the Rustat Feast.... The assembled diners raise a glass to Tobias Rustat, whose generosity three centuries ago allowed generations of orphans to go to Cambridge and be ordained as Church of England clergymen. Then, last November, just before the latest feast, Rustat’s name was quietly dropped from the jollities.
"Rustat was a courtier to King Charles II. John Evelyn, a contemporary diarist, described him as ‘a very simple, ignorant, but honest and loyal creature’. Rustat was also a big investor in the Royal African Company (RAC), which trafficked more African men, women and children to the Americas than any other British institution. According to one historian, in the half-century after it was founded in 1672, the RAC shipped close to 150,000 enslaved Africans, mostly to the Caribbean.
"When they think of their role in the history of slavery, Britons like to focus on William Wilberforce and his fellow abolitionists rather than on the role of slavery in building the British empire during the previous two centuries. That is changing. Pushed by student activists and inspired by work done, among others, by Brown University, Yale and Georgetown, to uncover the slave-owning beginnings of America’s earliest colleges, in Britain, universities are taking the lead. University College London (UCL) has created a database of British slave-owners which has been critical in pushing institutions, in higher education and beyond, to look into how they benefited from slavery and the slave economy.
"After London, the biggest concentration was in Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool, which is one reason why universities in most of those cities have taken the lead in studying their connections with slavery. Last year Cambridge announced a university-wide study.
"The University of Nottingham is doing a similar study. Aberdeen will soon do the same, and Hull is expected to follow. St Andrews and Edinburgh universities are the rare silent exceptions." After uncovering the fact that many British universities were built on earnings from the slave trade, the debate originated of what to do in reparation. Different routes are taken. For example, Glasgow decided on a programme of "reparatory justice" instead of reparations. It teamed up with the University of the West Indies (UWI) to create a new initiative, the Glasgow-Caribbean Centre for Development Research in Kingston, Jamaica. The programme focuses on three research areas: health care, particularly diabetes; degradation of the environment, especially along the coasts around the islands; and the creation of an online history museum that will be accessible to the whole region.
Our universities
The University Grants Commission (UGC) is the apex body of the University System in Sri Lanka which was established on 22nd December 1978. Funding is by the government. We know that in 1942 the University of Ceylon was established, amalgamating University College and Ceylon Medical College. It had two main campuses: Colombo (1942) and Peradeniya (1949). Much of the thanks for this is due to Sir Ivor Jennings, and enlightened politicians in power, both local and British, then. Other universities came later, with funding by government.
Trafficking of humans
"Human trafficking is the act of recruiting, harbouring, transporting, providing a person for compelled labour or commercial sex, through the use of force, fraud and coercion. At the crest of it is the trafficker’s goal of exploitation and enslavement-" of the trafficked.
Men, women and children are all vulnerable; the more disadvantaged and poor, the greater the vulnerability. Women are, as noted earlier in this article, more trafficked and in the majority to serve in brothels, like slaves with no rights of their own. Human trafficking is both intra-country and inter-country. In the first case, trafficking is mostly from villages to cities in the same country, while the latter of course means across country borders.
Well known is the fact that innocent village girls are lured by the promise of well paid jobs in cities and induced or taken away forcibly to end up in brothels. This utter disgrace occurs in the so called very religious country of ours with a cultural heritage of more than two and a half millennia boasted about. Also well known is that poor Nepali girls were trafficked to India and Pakistan and even further afield to slave in the sex trade. We’ve read of Columbian girls trafficked to transport drugs to the US.
A kind of trafficking of long ago
The term trafficking and its usage to denote stealing of people and taking them away is fairly recent, maybe after WW II. But we in Ceylon of then knew of a kind of trafficking that went on before Labour Laws were insisted upon by the International Labour Organization (ILO); our government became a signatory and child labour banned, at least of the hazardous kind.
Children from poor village homes were taken as servants to rich homes. The worst scenario was that parents were in such dire straits of poverty that they gave up a child so s/he could at least have a square meal a day. They did not ask for a wage. Often a child was inveigled from a poor home with the promise of the child being a playmate to the rich family’s child or children. Education was promised but not given. Often the child was ill treated. We have known of kids being burned on arms and legs or the head knocked against a wall by sadistic women employers. The child could only cry; perhaps turn more stubborn.
Two figures of say 60 years ago and before, were the black coated matchmaker – magul kapuwa - and the tout who went around villages familiar to him, recruiting child servants to rich town homes, he being paid for his service; the parents and child servant often getting nothing but more misery.
Most mercifully this cruel and criminal stealing of children and employing them in homes, small boutiques Рth̩ kades Рand fishing wadiyas is a thing of the past. This crime has been superseded by trafficking for the sex trade and in the drug business.
Pope Francis in his humaneness pronounced: "The trade in human beings, a modern form of slavery, … violates the God-given dignity of so many of our brothers and sisters and constitutes a true crime against humanity."
