This morning (early April) on my way to work I heard a story on Bill Clinton's trip to Africa on National Public Radio. Why did he not take the opportunity to apologize for centuries of slavery in America, he was asked. Because he was in Africa "to look forward, and not backward," he answered. How clever sadda Billoo is!

    Africa lost fifty million people, it is estimated, to slavery between 1450 and 1900 including those that died during capture and incarceration and transport. The population of the entire African continent was about 100 million during any given year in the 1700's. So 50 million is a huge number that must have touched every African personally. The scholar and statesman Fredrick Douglass, himself an ex-slave, speaking in the 1850s said that the world had never ever, anywhere on the face of the globe, seen the sort of horror and injustice and violence the equal of slavery in America. 

    Slavery was abolished by the Emancipation proclamation in 1862 at the tail end of the American Civil War, but it would be another hundred years after that before African-Americans could vote in Mississippi. We in India had universal adult franchise well before the US, even though we gained independence 180 years after the US. And if I remember right someone wrote on Dakghar that in Switzerland women obtained the right to vote only in 1975! But they have a good excuse, the Swiss. They are too busy opening bank accounts for thieves around the world and raking in the stolen cash. 

    The American Declaration of Independence crafted by the Founding Fathers in 1776 speaks eloquently of the equality of all men. It says clearly that everyone is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Ever since, that document has inspired people all over the world, and given hope to those that had none. Here it some of it right off the web:

   "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness ... when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security ..."

    My friend Ram Ramarao once remarked that people should be judged by the mores of their times. But I lack sufficient imagination to do that. And even if I were able, I would resist, for to do so would mean to forget and forgive all sorts of horrors that should never be forgotten. 

    The laws of Virginia and Massachusetts and Maryland provided for the whipping of slaves, for the cutting off of their body parts, for hangings and execution, and breaking on the wheel. I read somewhere an account of a slave that was roasted to death over a slow fire. He must have been a tough guy. It took him hours to die. Is it possible that it did not occur to Jefferson when he wrote "all men" that black people were also people? Or was this a case of deliberate deception? 

    I remember mentioning to my friend Shirley Rauscher about one year back that I thought that Thomas Jefferson was rather overrated as an American icon. Shirley's parents were British and had served as missionaries in Australia. That is where she was born and spent her childhood. She is a wonderful musician, and one of the members of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), and interested in many things besides. She also teaches the piano to Bui on Saturday mornings. Shirley was a little surprised to hear me say that about Jefferson I think. Her husband Ron, a writing man himself, is a big fan of Jefferson's. I must confess that I have not read Jefferson's writing in any systematic way, so I may be mistaken. 

    But I have read some scraps of his writing. I know that Jefferson believed that blacks were intellectually inferior to the whites. I know that he was instrumental in passing a law against miscegenation in Virginia. Since he had a black mistress himself (who he once even took visiting to Europe with him, I remember reading somewhere) he was careful to define miscegenation as sexual relations between a black man and a white women. It would take a foolish man to give up his own fun (hey Bond?), and he certainly wasn't that. In any case the penalties for miscegenation were not symmetric. I have read how a black woman was sentenced to be stripped naked, chained to a post in a public place, and receive an exciting 20 lashes for sleeping with a white man; while her partner was sentenced to a dreary afternoon of community service at the local church. 

    Even in the sixties, a chocolate brown professor of Indian-Indian origin at Washington University told me, a man of just any color could not walk into just any restaurant in St. Louis, even in the company of white people from the University. 

    The American mind tends to slur over certain historical facts. This is a nation that has recreated its history, not as it was, but as it might have been. The potholes have been papered over with myth. Else they are disregarded with a myopia of convenience. The schools teach a sanitized version of history. Columbus Day is a school holiday. Columbus was a brave and intrepid adventurer the first graders are taught. They draw lovely pictures of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. And of Columbus in a fine blue coat looking through his telescope. That he was also an extraordinarily cruel and evil man was something I had to fill Buramai in on! 

    Columbus had promised the bond-holders that financed his expeditions that he will find a new sea-route to India ---- and trade with India was then essential to Europe --- since the land route was blocked by extremely belligerent, newly victorious (at Constantinople), and well-armed Turks in the middle of the 15th century. Columbus had promised to multiply his investors' money a hundred-fold with gold and precious stones from India. Columbus went west, hoping to find a new route to India, but landed in Haiti in 1496; while Vasco de Gama, flying the Portuguese flag, went south and east around the Cape of Good Hope to arrive at Calicut in 1497. Isn't it a strange coincidence, I just noticed, that that the years 1497 and 1947 should be related like this! 

    But there was little gold in Haiti. So Columbus looted what he could, killed with zest and cruelty, and shipped American Indian slaves to Europe. He and his fellow conquistadors like Hernando Cortez were guilty of truly extraordinary cruelty and widespread genocide. But they don't tell all this to first graders in the US. And I'm not sure if there is a good opportunity to correct this oversight later on in schooling. Our RSS-BJP crowd could probably pick up a few pointers from the Americans as they rewrite Indian history. 

    Abha and I took up the Columbus Day issue during a parent-teacher conference with Mrs. Jane Cox, Bui's teacher. She is a kind and gentle person who has tried to introduce her little class to certain aspects of American race relations by means of historical biography. She said that she understood our concern. She was aware, she said, of the terrible violence that the conquistadors visited upon the natives, but she thought that it may be too much to subject first-graders to. I said that perhaps they could just be told that people were hurt. That people died. 

    The arrival of the Spanish in America was an event drenched with great blood and sorrow for too many. I'd like Buramani to know the truth. I'd like her to know that people are capable of great cruelty and great violence, just as I want her to know that people are capable of nobility and grace. I want her to be prepared for everything that life will throw at her. I would like for her to know the difference between history and mythology. 

    I did tell Bui on my own about the genocide of the Aarawak Indians of Haiti. About how Columbus' soldiers cut off their hands if they failed to bring in gold. How they gave them copper tokens to hang round their necks if they did bring in gold. I have tried to give her some idea of the number of people they killed, even though she does not yet appreciate the enormity of numbers like a hundred thousand or a million. She grieves when she hears things like that. She has wept a few times at stories of slavery that Abha read her from books written for children. We always try to read her things that interest us ourselves, and Abha has long been a student of African-American history. I would like Bui to carry within her a healthy mistrust of government. Any government. Because the hands of every government are tainted with the blood of the innocent, and people must be prepared to question the motives and the methods of a government every step of the way. 

    Of the few works of historical American letters that I have read, the one that affected me most deeply, I told Shirley, was the autobiography of the militant black leader Malcolm X. It is a brutally honest account. I think that fine language is all very good. But it is like glass beside the hard diamond of truth. I'd rather read someone like Gandhi who really means 'all people' when he writes "all people".

    The first black slaves arrived in North America at the port of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. Till that time Europe and South America were the primary slave markets. People were kidnapped in the interior of Africa by black employees of European companies, working on commission. They were transported to slave fortresses maintained by the white people --- the Dutch, the Portuguese, the English, the French, and the Spanish --- on the African coast. I was surprised to learn that American companies entered the slave trade business late, only in the 1800s. 

    It is estimated that some 40% of the slaves died during the long march from the interior of Africa to the coast. People were marched hundreds of miles over many days while chained round the necks in long single files, hands tied, and marched under gun and whip. 

    At the coastal slave fortresses, men and women and children were separated and chained in dungeons. They were sold to slave traders in auctions. Once a slave had been bought, he or she was branded on the chest with a red-hot iron, exactly like they branded swine and sheep and cows on English farms, so that it would be clear whose property who was. 

    Many of these slaves were taken to Europe and resold. The Catholic church declared that slavery was sanctioned by God. In fact it promised solace and salvation to these unfortunate black savages who had not known nothin' about that compassionate fair-skinned bearded Fellow in the sky with flowing white robes and a happy smile, when they were back home in the bush beating their tom-toms with an uncivilized frenzy unbecoming of decent Christians. Even though these were not people but property (ruled the US Supreme Court in 1857 in the case of Dred Scott, assuming a position that would not be repealed until after the passage of the fourteenth amendment), it is heartening to learn that a Church still assigned some salvage value to their souls. Some black slaves were even sold by European traders in countries as far off as India. But, by and far, after 1620, the vast majority of slaves went to America, to the southern states of the USA. The American demand for slaves was insatiable. The main problem was that the world financial markets just couldn't raise enough capital to build the sorts of fleets needed to satisfy the demand. 

    Slave ships were carefully designed for the job. The slaves were stacked in rows on top of rows in holds. The space between loading platforms was eighteen inches. The slaves were led in in chains, they were laid down on their stomachs, their hands and feet were shackled to the beams with forged iron chains. Rough and rusting, they would easily abrade both skin and flesh. An economic process for the mass-production of steel would be invented by the Englishman Bessemer (the name doesn't sound very English, but English he was) only in the mid-1800s. Bodies jammed into bodies on either side. That is how the slaves would stay for the thirty days' journey from Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa to Cuba, and then to North America. No itching. Sorry! No place to turn over --- remember, eighteen inches. That is less than the space across the shoulders. In any case they were chained down. Each ship started out with three to four hundred slaves in the hold. 

    The slaves were fed on gruel dispensed right into their hands by sailors that walked the gangway between facing rows. Since food tends to displace valuable cargo, the slaves were fed just about enough to keep them barely alive. Also since the hundreds of slaves had of necessity to urinate and defecate as they were, European delicacy and European hospitality demanded that they not be feasted excessively. Too much mess and stink. At the receiving end the holds were cleaned of thirty days' effluence by hold-cleaning slaves. 

    Abha and I went to see Steven Spielberg's "Amistad" on the afternoon of Martin Luther King's birth anniversary. Amistad was the name of a slave ship. While it was on its way from Cuba to Virginia, some slaves broke loose and mutinied, and commandeered the ship till they were intercepted and subdued by the US Navy. There were five other people in the cinema hall. The opening scenes were scenes of much blood and gore. The movie did not give a good picture of the layout of the ship. There is a slave ship at some museum on the East coast that has recently been reconstructed from an actual wreck, I heard on National Public Radio. 

    About 25% of the slaves died during the trip across the oceans. Still the ones that hung on at the edge of life and despair were so valuable on the auction blocks of Massachusetts, Virginia, and Maryland, that the proceeds could provide a dividend of 100% on investment per trip, all clear above labor and other expenses, in a mere 70 days. Thirty days from Africa. Unload and clean up. Sail back empty --- thirty days. Then a few days of R&R in Africa. Repairs. Seventy days in all. A return of 520% per annum on invested capital. Cool, eh! 

    James Madison, another of our celebrated Founding Fathers, wrote that every slave he owned earned him $270 per annum, but required only $13 for maintenance. Food, clothing, chains, and whips, all included for the year in that $13, I should think. Calculate that return! 

    A Nobel prize for economics was awarded in 1995 to an economist on the distinguished faculty of a school that awarded me a couple of graduate degrees. One of the works they cited in the award was his research into the slave economy of the American south, and how he had concluded that slavery had been profitable to the American economy. I nearly had an accident driving home from work when I heard that on NPR. What did he expect? The genius! You get slaves to work for free on land wrested at gunpoint from Indians. I wonder how much loss on investment he had expected to calculate. I still have trouble believing I heard that report correctly.

    Another thing that Bui was taught at school was that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. This is a statement that belongs to a class that has been called a doughnut-truth. The truth, the whole truth --- with a hole in the middle of the truth. It is true that Lincoln signed the Proclamation of Emancipation. It is however not true that Lincoln set out to free the slaves, or that the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery. Lincoln's speeches before and during the Civil War furnish the evidence. He says clear as a bell that the purpose of the conflict is not to abolish slavery. That slavery can stay if the South will submit. The Civil War was fought in order to preserve the Union, in order to preserve the North's hold on the combined economy --- and the emancipation proclamation, issued in 1862 at the tail end of the war, was above all a convenient ploy to destroy the southern economy and thereby to bring the confederate army to its knees. Blacks abandoned their southern masters in hordes and fled north at the promise of emancipation. But there was hardly any material change in their condition as a consequence of the war. Their inferior economic and social status, and the attendant vilification and insinuation and prejudice and KKK activity (still quite active in southern states like Texas and Missouri) that go with that --- just like the lower-caste situation in India --- continued, even intensified in certain places, and linger on to this day. 

    It should also be noted that the Emancipation proclamation said that that all slaves will be freed in those states that were still at war with the Union on January 1, 1863. States that chose to capitulate before that could have kept slavery intact. So it is not at all right to teach that Lincoln freed the slaves. 

    However it is not my intention to be too hard on America. After all we still have slavery in India, even fifty years after independence. Except that we are polite enough not to call it that. We call it "bonded labor". In truth it is not as egregious as slavery in America, being closer to (but more barbarous than) what was called "indentured labor" in the American colonies. But there it is. Still around. So an Indian is in no position to cast a stone or act righteous. 

    Moreover, the RSS, and its front organization the BJP, have recently made us a gift of this new notion they call Hindutva. Now clearly either you are for Hindutva or against Hindutva. It is a divisive yet organizing notion. Much, in that respect, like a branch-cut in the theory of complex-valued functions of a complex variable. If you are for Hindutva, why you are a soul-mate of the RSS. If you are against the notion, you had better go to Pakistan or the Devil or somewhere. You are a traitor, a rascal, a Muslim, an atheist, a bhangi, a chamaar, a communist, a troublemaker, or all of the above. And you probably cheer for Pakistan during Indo-Pak cricket! As if that were a crime. 

    The purpose of Hindutva is to produce a certain tension in the polity, much like race prejudice in America, such that a certain level of division and conflict is maintained. In America the purpose of such conflict was to divide the white underclass from the black underclass. To keep them from getting together and making trouble for the rich and the franchised. The Indian Hindutva will likewise serve to divide and divert the society while frenzied mobs demolish mosques and temples, and while defenseless people are butchered. The BJP will rule in New Delhi and say serenely: See we always told you that the place was infested with trouble-makers financed by the Arabs. This has been the BJP's ticket to power. 

    When we start on the road to exclusion, we are guaranteed many more years of misery. If we are inclusive we can address the three real issues before India: illiteracy, poverty, and the near-complete absence of the right to legal protection and redress.