Mental Slavery

I notice a huge advert at Holborn tube station. Across the top it says, 'There's more beneath the surface. Nigeria', and the image is of a lone tree in a landscape of semi-desert. Underneath, the caption reads, 'Bitumen, coal, iron ore, gold, and lots more.'

The advert was placed by an organisation promoting Nigeria as a place of investment opportunity, presumably targeting the UK business community. The deliberate omission of people from the picture is instructive (with a population of 130 million people, Nigeria is rich in humanity), as is the apparently deliberate decision to collude with (albeit ultimately to challenge) pre-existing western stereotypes of the African continent as an arid and empty wasteland.

The advert set me wondering what the equivalent marketing image might have looked like more than 200 years ago before Nigeria was called 'Nigeria' - when the transatlantic slave trade was at its height, and when people were the exploitable natural resource in a more obvious and straightforward way than they are now. 

In contemplating the history of the abolition of the slave trade, I've heard Christians express shock that some of their forebears-in-faith defended and upheld slavery. How could they acquiesce in something that was so obviously wrong? How could they use the Bible to forge a theological conviction that certain people were marked for subjection, and others were marked to rule?

But is this really so shocking? Two hundred years from now, how will our descendants-in-faith judge the way we engage with the normative values and assumptions of our age?

Will they shake their heads in bemusement that we seemed to know the monetary cost of every thing, and the value of nothing beyond the material? Will they be confused that we somehow thought human beings should be, first and foremost, self-sufficient and autonomous, and that therein lay 'freedom'? Will they be scandalised that this meant we let our very old - the wise ones - to believe they were of no value to anyone? Will they scratch their heads that our sense of human identity seemed shackled to things that we owned, as though that were what really mattered? And will they look askance that we didn't seem to notice that the things we owned came anyway from unearned wealth - stolen from the faceless anonymous people who continued to die every day, like the slaves deprived of their names two hundred years before that. And will they wonder why we seemed to think that so much had changed between 1807 and 2007?

The question is: what is enslaving us now, who are we in turn enslaving, and what are we going to do about it?

Alison Webster is the Social Responsibility Adviser for Oxford Diocese