it has existed throughout written history and, in fact, exists under most people’s naïve noses today. To those who have won absolute power over other human beings through systematic murder, to enslave the conquered is certainly no great moral offense. Some might even consider it to be a twisted form of benevolence. It endowed the conquerors with food, land, whores and generations of enslaved workers who themselves were a commodity. Typically slaves were considered inferior by the fact of their status. They had lost in war and deserved no mercy. They were considered culturally, genetically or religiously inferior and so were regarded as no more than livestock.
It is doubtful that slavery existed before the rise of agriculture. How could a hunger/gatherer enslave another hunter/gatherer? Firstly, the necessary workday was only a few hours, negating the need for a slave. Secondly, it would be extremely difficult to oversee a person who must follow wherever nature leads them in their quest for food. Modern slavery presents few modifications from its ancient ancestral state. Although it is usually referred to by a different name, it is slavery none the less. It is now referred to as debt.
When the slaves in the United States were emancipated in the 1860s, former slave owners found a simple way to continue their dominion over them and have their crops harvested and labor performed by simply enslaving them with debt. Because these people had had even the most basic of education denied to them, they were illiterate. They possessed no resource of cash to buy their own land, no housing, no food. The only way they could survive in the North or South of the United States was to seek menial labor. In the southern states, in particular, they were compelled to pay rent for the shanties they had previously lived in, pay for the food their former masters had given them, denied an education to improve their lot, and were unable to cast a vote to change an unfairly oppressive system. Often, they were actually worse off than they had been before. Of those who travelled north, many fared little better. Racially and culturally discriminated against, only the most difficult, most menial, most dangerous, and lowest paying occupations were available to them. They had gained freedom, but by no measure had they gained equality. Cruelly, by impoverishing humans, one gradually increases the likelihood that they will obtain what the need for life or comfort by the use of theft, deception, or violence. As I stated before, that is a common natural behavior among all mammals, and human beings are not an exception. The unfortunate consequence, however, is that other races or cultures of the rest of society see this as a confirmation of negative prejudices against minorities in American culture or other outsiders in other cultures. Because freed slaves in America universally began their post civil war culture impoverished, this debilitating economic position functioned to maintain them in poverty almost perpetually, after all, it takes money to make money, and if you don’t have it, you are fucked!
I lived in Jamaica for four months in 1995. As with all my adventures since adulthood, I have never travelled or lived in any country as a tourist. I arrived with almost no money and left forty pounds lighter and penniless, however, I was blessed with a pristine experience immersed as a clandestine cultural anthropologist. Before my experience I had envisioned Jamaica as a tropical paradise where one could enjoy abundant natural vegetation and fishing that would easily provide you with a ready supply of natural food. This was not the case, however. I lived in Redground, a suburb of Westend Jamaica, within sight of Montego Bay. I went there to be a “mule” on a drug deal and earn myself and fiancée $5,000 which we planned to use to obtain a business license in my adopted home in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. The deal did not work out, due to my employer’s heroin habit. He ended up leaving me there with no plane ticket home. I was trapped on the island with no money, food, or even shoes! I contemplated stealing one of the many sailboats moored offshore and sailing due West back to Mexico.
But I survived there by helping a local ganja farmer tend to his crops in the jungle. I also contributed to my host families’ welfare by shoplifting food from the grocery stores as they graciously shared every one of their meals with me. Eventually I was picked up by a camouflaged narcotics squad in the bush one morning en route to our clandestine marijuana plot. I never gave away its location. After eleven days in the Negril jail (which was another cultural experience), I was able to weave a plausible enough tale to win myself a free ticket back to Milan, Italy, and my waiting fiancee and baby child, compliments of British Airways.
While living in Jamaica, embedded in the local culture, I followed the “prime directive” as outlined in the original “Star Trek” series by Gene Rodenberry. It reads: “There can be no interference with the internal development of pre-warp civilizations.” I was only an observer; I did not judge or intervene. Rather than a cheerful and robust people, I found the populace to be quite poor economically and largely illiterate. Food was expensive and in short supply, gainful employment difficult to find, and the culture prone to drug activity as well as domestic violence. Indeed, for most people, participation in the local marijuana or cocaine trade was, for the most part, the most viable path out of poverty. Employment in tourism was available to those with an education, and the money to buy a permit as a tourist guide, without this permit, a Jamaican citizen faced arrest for even speaking to a tourist. For women “renting” was almost the only opportunity to earn money, and they were typically pimped by husbands or boyfriends. Fathers were usually estranged from their baby mothers and children. Health care was non-existent for most. Island economies are very sluggish as goods must be imported and exported making everything expensive. Here, it was another example of “takes money to make money” and no one seemed to have the money. I was appalled at the prevalence of domestic violence; it was the norm. The men beat the women and children, the women beat children, and children fought with other children. Now, this was not the case with every family, but it seemed to be so in the majority of families, especially those who did not have assets. Those who did have money used it to build walls around their fortified houses.
When I would walk to the store and get a newspaper, I would often have people ask me to read it to them. Indeed I only ever saw one book for sale in Jamaica, Bob Marley’s Biography, Catch a Fire. In over 120 days on the island I saw only two children with toys, a boy with a hand-crafted wooden car with wheels made from the lids of tuna fish cans and powered with a string to pull it. Another little girl I knew always tightly clutched a little white skinned blue-eyed blond haired dolly. The possibility of experiencing anything except abject lifelong poverty was almost nil. Certainly, poverty breeds violence and desperation, but it was the violence within families that pained me the most. Keep in mind, all things are relative, and I know this because I have experienced it, there exist far more terrifyingly brutal cultures than what I observed in Jamaica.
By far my most profound revelation in Jamaica involved my discovering the malignant roots from which sprang the most negative aspects of their culture, that ogre I despise the most in all human societies, domestic violence. I saw the frequent aftermath of women or children bearing facial cuts and bruises from beatings. Once “Plumber,” the father figure in the family which sheltered me, was angered at the oldest boy, Musai, because he had failed to do his household chores. The man promised the 7 year old a beating, and the little man had run off and hid in the bush near a decaying abandoned house across the lane. He was clad only in a pair of white briefs. The poor kid hid out for three days like that, too fearful to return to accept his beating. He had no other clothes, food, water, or shelter from mosquitoes at night. Daily, I took what food I could, a banana, perhaps a slice or two of bread, and left it where I had last spied him. Because he always ran off when I approached, and stayed out of sight, I never knew for sure if he had gotten it. Finally on the fourth day he returned to accept his beating; I was grateful it occurred while I was gone.
A trait that I believe was borne out of a great human decency to their comrades in suffering was the Jamaican tradition of food sharing. If any family member or friend arrived as a group was eating, each of the diners would scrape an equal portion of the food off their plates in order to present the newcomer with a meal the same size as everyone else’s, regardless of how grand or meager the meal. One morning while sharing breakfast with by my host family, we sat or squatted around the cooking fire outside their one room hut, I was making funny faces at the youngest of the three children, a two-year-old spirited little tyke they called “toughest.” He would run up to me and look into my blue eyes smiling
