On slaves, enslavement and emancipation

I am not a big fan of such issue-specific ‘days’. I can’t understand why there should be a day set aside to be concerned about the earth, days to celebrate mothers, days for water, people with disabilities, children etc

If you take all the issues that the world should concern itself with, they will add up to more than 365. At the rate we are screwing up things around us and each other, we would soon have to set aside hours and minutes and might even celebrate/commemorate a World Anti Book-Burning Minute at the 19th minute of the 8th hour of the 29th day of June.

Such ‘days’ do help focus energies around specific issues but this could also produce lethargy on the other 364 days of the year on the very same issues.

Like May Day or Human Rights Day. It smacks of agitation-management and feels like the violators have decided to let the violated rant and rave for a day and then revert to quiet submission. ‘Days’ indicate to me that we’ve lost the art of ‘dailying’. We don’t remember our fathers everyday, so we set out one love-daddy day. We have forgotten to love, so we have February 14th to remember to love those we say we love. And then there’s the commercialism of ‘Days’ and ‘Daying’.

Yesterday (August 23, 2010) was World Anti-Slavery Day. We are now in ‘late capitalism’, some people say. Assumed here is that we’ve come a long way from the pre-historic commune. Tribalism is a thing of the past. So too slavery and feudalism.

That’s according to the book, though. Look around you and you’ll notice that tribalism is in the pink of health; that feudalism exists not in remnant but in the main.

Look closely and you will realize that Abraham Lincoln, contrary to assertion, was not liberating the slaves but was fighting to alter the terms of slavery in favour of the emerging industrial sector. I think that the powerful realized a long time ago that the easiest way to dull opposition is to hypnotize it into believing that things are hunky-dory. We’ve been had, I’ve come to realize.

We are as enslaved as ever but we would never admit it, that’s the extent to which we’ve been had. How does it feel to know that millions of men, women and children around the world are forced to live in slavery, even today? How does it feel to be a member of a ‘human family’ that use threat of force and use of violence to make millions of ‘relatives’ work, that regularly (yes, even today, even this very moment) buy and sell people like object? Sure, unlike in days gone by, there is an element of ‘choice’, but that, ladies and gentlemen implies only degrees of enslavement.

A man can, unlike in the past, CHOOSE not to work, which by the way boils down to choosing to be homeless, to be a beggar.

The International Labour Organization estimates at least 12 million people are in forced labour around the world; more than six million of whom are children. Slavery exists on every continent of the world and affects most countries. But we are made to understand that today there’s no ‘slavery’. Instead we talk about ‘Forced Labour’.

Child labour

We talk about human trafficking. Today we talk about appalling working conditions, absence of safeguards for workers in the event of economic downturn prompting ‘downsizing’ etc. We talk about prisons, about crime and punishment; but not about the fact that it has become difficult to distinguish imprisonment and enslavement from one another. We still have bonded and forced labour, descent based slavery, the enslavement embedded in early and forced marriage, child labour and trafficking of people into forced labour.

If slavery is defined by the fact that an individual (slave) is forced to work through mental or physical threat, is owned or controlled by an employer (through mental or physical abuse or threats), is dehumanized, treated as a commodity or bought and sold as ‘property’, then it might be good to check out in the mirror where you stand, i.e. the degree of your enslavement.

There are other forms of enslavement it would be good to think about. The enslavement of and by spectacle for example. We live in a world of signs and signals, elaborate and of the goes-without-saying kind of easy, complex and simple, all of which enslave our minds, narrow the spectrum of options we are willing to consider and in other ways seriously impair our compulsion to change systems.

Mental slavery

Wealth, power, corruption and abuse trap us in abysses of oppression, my friend Fazli Sameer (who alerted me to World Anti Slavery Day) points out. Such situations aggregate into a stark and disturbing message on a hoarding of a mother-of-all dimension: NO YOU CAN’T.

That’s the biggest and most inhibiting form of slavery. Bob Marley was dead right when he pleaded, ‘emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds’. True. So true.

There are certain things I plan to reflect on today. I am part of my enslavement.

The degree of enslavement is determined in part by me. The ideologies and mechanisms of slavery are not out there drawing up frameworks that limit engagement; they are resident within me. We are often both slave and our own slave-master.

There are things we can do. There are two ways of not seeing: being struck blind and choosing to keep eyes closed.

We must try to protect our eyes from such threats, but it’s not always all in our hands. As for keeping eyes closed; there’s choice there.

We cannot free ourselves unless we know we are enslaved, and, once this is realized, until we convince ourselves that the key to liberation is with us; that we are our own jailors.

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