Think of the Children
40:43 Share

I was reminded of a famous image before recording this episode. The picture is of a young boy and his father. They are hunched behind a drum. The father is wearing a t-shirt and jeans. The child is also in blue jeans and a patterned fleece. The child is screaming, his face contorted in pure fear as his father attempts to shield him with just an arm from something that the camera can't quite see. That, some think, was bullets.

This image is of a young Palestinian boy, Mohammed al-Dura, just before he was shot to death by Israeli troops in the year 2000 during an uprising in Gaza. That picture shocked the world. It joined a pantheon of images taken of children during atrocities that transcend political allegiances with their depiction of horror and suffering, such as the 1972 image of the Vietnamese child running naked down a road after a US napalm attack

Or the 1943 picture of a Jewish boy being forced out of hiding in the Warsaw ghetto by an SS member, who was holding a machine gun, pointed his way. These pictures endure. They illustrate the extent of the brutality present in these moments because, in popular imagination, there is no figure more innocent than that of a child.

But at the height of the British slave trade, there were no cameras to capture the experiences of the children who found themselves forced into enslavement. There's not even exact numbers for how many young people were sucked into the system. Estimates suggest a quarter of the roughly 12 million black Africans enslaved between the 16th and 19th centuries would have been categorised as children. Their stories are some of the hardest to dig up, but people are persisting anyway.

I'm Moyalothi McLean, a journalist on the journey to discover the truth about Britain's slaving history. This is Human Resources.

Hello, Human Resources listeners. This is Renee Richardson, producer and co-creator of the Human Resources podcast. I'm popping in to let you know that even though the podcast has ended, Arisa Lumba, who was a researcher on the podcast, and I have written a new book called Human Resources, Slavery and the Making of Modern Britain in 39 Institutions, People, Places and Things. And just like the podcast, the book...

takes modern Britain items and traces their roots back to slavery. We're introducing new topics that weren't quite covered in the podcast, like accounting, the Church of England, the colour indigo, denim blue jeans, sugar, Lloyds of London. But we also revisit some topics from the podcast and go a little further, like the Bank of England, chocolate and the Green King Brewery, which was in our pubs episode.

We'd love for you to support the book and get a copy. I hope you enjoy it. It's for all ages. And just as the podcast focused on accessibility and making this history accessible, the book does the same. And we hope it encourages conversations between different generations and helps people get a step into this history and encourages more research and more reading on this subject. Thank you.

Hey, podcast listeners, have you heard you can listen to your favorite podcasts ad-free? That's good news. With Amazon Music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad-free top podcasts included with your Prime membership. To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts. That's amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads.

I'm Christine White. I'm a lecturer in global history at the University of Glasgow. And I focus mostly on the history of Sierra Leone and Liberia. And I've worked a lot around the history of the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. And right now I'm looking at what happens to children when they're liberated from

Three seasons of Human Resources and we're yet to cover the role of children in slavery in depth. So I want to begin by understanding who these children are. What was their role in the slave trade? And are they only born into slavery or bought in? When we're talking about slavery systems within West Africa,

What you see with the rise of the transatlantic slave trade is a rise in political violence and conflict and kidnapping and abduction. And their children are particularly vulnerable to those forms of enslavement. And with the abolition then, you still have illegal trading going on. Children again become even more vulnerable because it's really this kind of illegal activity and kidnapping. And so you see the proportion of children

rising on illegal slave ships. But children could also be assigned slave status at birth, and that's usually because their mother had slave status or was enslaved. In some societies, it had to also be that the father was enslaved.

And children's role in slavery was really significant. I mean, I see children as being at the heart of slavery systems because what sets slavery apart is from other forms of forced labour and coerced labour is that it's inherited. And so many of the ideologies of slavery were sort of built up around this idea of inheritance, the status of slavery. Were black African children from a particular type of background at a greater threat of being enslaved?

I think generally that would have been true. Being without family or community support made children much more likely to be enslaved. For example, I've just been looking this week at some testimonies from children who were enslaved in the mid-19th century in Sierra Leone. And a few of them mentioned being orphaned, being sent to live with someone else.

being sent to live as an apprentice to be trained in some kind of trade. And those children then were more vulnerable to either being tricked or kidnapped or abducted.

You do see examples of quite elite high status children also being abducted into slavery. For example, Olida Equiano was a high status family. And it's perhaps then no coincidence that then he goes on to become this great writer and sort of respected figure of the abolitionist movement.

Because he had this kind of background as from quite an elite family. And he was also abducted, which just shows you how dangerous political violence and instability made some areas. What kind of labour do we see children forced to undertake once they are enslaved?

The children would be employed mostly in agriculture and plantations. Scaring birds in West Africa is one particular thing that children were usually employed for. Weeding, fetching and carrying water. In the Caribbean, the British Caribbean colonies on plantations, children were also employed to sort of follow behind adults who were, say, harvesting different kinds of crops to look and pick up things that the adults had missed.

They could also be employed as domestic servants and wear quite often. And that's where we get these images, portraits of enslaved children who were brought to the US, to Canada, to Britain, to serve as pages and valets to these kind of elite families.

But children in West Africa were also enslaved for their potential. You know, they're full of potential as an adult. And so they would be trained perhaps as soldiers in the Indian Ocean. Children were enslaved to become peril divers because it's something you have to be trained in from a very young age. And so children's sort of potentiality was also what made them significant.

Something that has struck me throughout making Human Resources is how rare it is to get direct testimony from the enslaved people themselves. Voices like Oluwadah Equiano and Mary Princes stand out because they are so few. I imagine it's even more difficult to hear words from the mouths of babes. What testimony exists of enslaved children and who recounts it?

The testimonies I've been looking at this week were actually published in the parliamentary papers of Great Britain. So they come from an investigation the British colonial government in Sierra Leone did into this slave trafficking. And they were then taken down by a man called Thomas George Lawson, who was a Sierra Leonean African colonial official.

And he was a sort of a genius, I mean, a sort of fantastic linguist. He spoke a lot of different languages and his house served as a kind of refuge for different people who were escaping from slavery. And he took in and in fact cared for a lot of these children that were found to have been enslaved in the colony of Sierra Leone and beyond.

So the children were really giving evidence for court cases that were taken against the people who had enslaved them. Some of them are very detailed, some of them are very short, some of them they can talk about their parents' names and where they came from, and others they can't remember that. Those are quite unusual sources, this kind of like very direct testimony, sort of witness testimony almost, and also being taken down by an African who spoke their languages. That's quite an unusual situation.

There are other testimonies from children given while they were children that were taken by missionaries through the 19th century in West Africa. But there, of course, you have this kind of editing done by the missionary before they're then published. What jumps out from these testimonies that Lawson documents?

A great number of them refer to being caught in war and so they have this visceral memory of the violence around their capture and so they know that this is a conflict situation. Some of them were enslaved through a kind of trickery and so there's one where a boy talks about someone telling him that he would be taken back to his mother and father and he's then abducted and enslaved.

And so I think in general what you get is this real sense of a knowledge of where home is, where family is, and the sort of disconnection from that. And I mean, that sort of runs through all the testimonies that I've looked at, I think. That fear is still so present in society. The figure of the innocent child being taken from safety by nefarious forces is

It was certainly present in Britain post-abolition, to the degree that there was an entire moral panic in the 1880s about white slavery, where the British public feared that young white girls were being sex trafficked en masse and duly legislated against that threat.

I asked Christine what conceptions of enslaved black children were like in Britain when the slave trade was still legal. White children were becoming new avatars of innocence in the public imagination at this time. But how did people at the heart of empire conceive of black children in the slave colonies?

Did they compartmentalise them? Very early abolitionist campaigns, these kind of early arguments against slavery, were quite often framed around children and the terrible effect this was having on children. So they weren't about slavery as a whole. They were about families being separated and children being corrupted. And so children played this really significant role from the 1770s, 1780s in this discourse of abolitionism.

But at the same time of course you have enslaved children in Britain who are serving quite visibly in these elite households, in the households of plantation owners and enslavers. And they're part of these portraits, so they're part of this kind of display of wealth and status. You can see that they're playing these two very different roles in the kind of white British imagination.

In the 19th century, after the abolition of the slave trades and then after the abolition of 1833, the abolition of slavery and the British occupied colonies, children become again this kind of focus of humanitarian concern. So when you look at sort of missionary movements, particularly in West Africa, they're very concerned about children

You see missionaries, they're often setting up schools, they're often bringing a lot of children into their mission stations.

they're often what they call redeeming children, enslaved children, subbying children basically, who then come and live on the mission station. And they bring some of those children to Britain and to Scotland for education, to learn English. There's schools set up. There's a school, for example, in Wales set up specifically for African mission children. But they're also using them in a way for these kind of humanitarian campaigns. So...

Children are on stage with missionaries giving speeches about what it's like in West Africa. So this is the late, this by then is the late 19th century. So the scramble for Africa, this European colonial expansion into Africa. African children are in Britain talking about their experiences and what it was like.

Obviously, with present-day humanitarian campaigns, there's such a focus on figures who can represent this idea of innocence and vulnerability, like children. The thinking goes, if you can't muster up sympathies for adult suffering, surely children will bridge that connection.

We see it very viscerally in areas of complex political conflict, like the 2022 fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban or the 2023 bombardment of Gaza by Israel. Above all the geopolitics, children are put front and centre as a unifying touchstone. Our anti-slavery campaigns wear this idea of children as a separate category of human who are in ultimate need of protection, whatever your beliefs, starts coalescing.

Yes, I think so. I mean, through the 19th century in Britain, you know, there's all sorts of changing modes of thinking about British children and the introduction of all kinds of different legislation around child labour and the very slow, gradual rollout of schooling and education for children. And there's also these kind of late 19th century scandals around sex workers and prostitution, a lot of which focuses on children.

And so my interpretation of it, this kind of humanitarian concern is always about other people's children, of course. And so it's always about intervening in the lives of other people's children, children who are not part of the kind of political or social elite in Britain. So if we think about the, say, for example, the abolition of the slave trade,

which is often talked about as though it just happened in 1807 as a parliamentary act and then that was that and it was done. But actually it was a very long, extended, attenuated and violent intervention. So the Royal Navy was involved in suppressing the slave trade until the 1890s in the Indian Ocean. Settlements in West Africa were bombarded and set on fire and there was frequent military conflict over this issue.

And so this kind of violent humanitarian intervention is very much then being promoted and promulgated by the idea that this is about protecting children, women and children, and protecting families. In this season's episode nine, A Tale of Two Pews, we heard about children who were brought over from Sierra Leone to Clapham by wealthy abolitionist elites.

I wanted to know if there were any analogous examples of this happening in Scotland. We've talked a bit previously about the experience of mixed-race children who are raised there by their paternal families. It's something I've been trying to think about a lot, is the longer history of African children, in Scotland particularly.

Scotland, there was also this trade in enslaved children in the 18th century until the late 18th century when the status of slavery was abolished in Scotland. But there were also children that came to Scotland that had been sent by their parents. And so this was part of a kind of longstanding tradition where African elites, political elites, merchant elites came.

would send their children to Britain to learn English, to learn how British markets worked, to get that kind of competitive edge and just to learn more about the world. So one example is there's a boy called Tom Jenkins, a Gola speaking boy from what's now Liberia. And he's sent to Scotland with a Scottish surgeon who,

He arrives in Scotland in the very early 19th century, 1803, and he proves to have a tremendous facility for languages. He learns English, he learns Greek, he learns Latin, he learns Scots dialect as well as English. And he becomes a school teacher and he applies for a job in the local school and they reject him on the basis of his race.

And so abolitionists in Scotland establish a school for him so that he can be the head school teacher. I find this idea really sort of interesting, this idea, this boy is sent for education, he himself becomes a school teacher.

And abolitionists see this as a way, I mean, I'm sure they probably wanted to support him as an individual in themselves, but it's also a sort of strategy, isn't it? You can sort of demonstrate, okay, look, here is a living, working example of cooperation without exploitation and how we could be living together in cooperation with African societies instead of exploiting them.

That's one very particular example, but I think it sort of illustrates there was a powerful abolitionist lobby in Scotland. You know, there's a great deal of popular public petitioning goes on in Scotland. There's ladies emancipation societies set up. You have tours from luminaries like Frederick Douglass. You know, it uses the trains to go to all these remote areas. But there's also a very powerful underlying racism and prejudice. Right.

The individualisation of these children always fascinates me. Plucking one or two children out of enslavement, this limited saviour mission, what does that tell us about the way young black children were viewed at this point in time? Is it a paternalistic legacy that persists? There's a kind of exceptionalism to it. And so you have these very few individuals that we know a great deal about. And then other than that, because you have this kind of

humanitarian discourse of a lot of unnamed, anonymous, semi-fictionalized sort of, I don't want to say propaganda, that sounds strong, marketing around the idea of humanitarian in Africa. It's quite sharp, the distinction. The linguistic abilities of African children is something I'm very interested in. It's something that's quite marked in

And I mean, it comes out of the fact that in 19th century West Africa, just like today, most Africans would speak two or three different languages. And so children were primed with a facility for languages. And so it's a really common theme to see British abolitionists and missionaries being quite diverse.

sort of agog this kind of tremendous ability linguistic ability from part of these children and of course European missionaries in Africa had to learn the languages and they had to learn them when they got there there was no teaching in Britain of African languages and

And they would learn from children often because the children would pick up English quickly and so could communicate with them. And you see often in missionary accounts, they'll say that they spent a long time playing with the children so they could listen and pick up new words. But they also had the children working, writing grammars and writing vocabularies.

helping them construct these dictionaries, which became so important then when you then move into the 20th century. They're so important to nationalist stories, to the construction of the idea of African nations. Language is really like a bedrock. And obviously the children weren't paid for their work on these dictionaries.

I think what we're seeing here is the constant presentation of children as these pitiful creatures, removed of agency, awaiting external salvation rather than empowerment. You also see this in the way adults within enslavement were treated too. That's a really fascinating dynamic because yes, the ways in which African adults are infantilised, they're not fully political agents or not considered fully political agents.

and are certainly sort of cast as children in the colonial enterprise. With European missionaries in Africa, often they're very unsuccessful with adults. Adults have no need for missionaries and what they're bringing. And that's why, particularly enslaved children or vulnerable children, orphan children,

are in a way an ideal audience for missionaries because they can bring them up in a Christian tradition and they can train them to be missionaries themselves. And so if we look at children who were liberated from the transatlantic slave trades and then they were resettled in Sierra Leone and they are taught in these missionary schools and some of them become Christian missionaries and they

travel back maybe to their regions of origin and they set up Christian missions there. Famously, Samuel Crowther, the first black bishop of the Church of England. And so missionaries have a much better, it sounds weird to say, they have a much better success rate with children who are not already fully embedded in a community and family life than they do with adults.

And the missionaries explain this in lots of different ways. You know, obviously their interpretation of it is that children are innocent and adults are not. And so adults are sort of impossible to persuade. But the vulnerability of children certainly makes them, is one of the reasons that they are the ones sort of populating these mission stations. Let's talk more about these missionaries.

What religious denominations are these missionaries from and what is their relationship to the British slave trade? Well, the relationship to British slavery is a huge topic because when we look at the British occupied colonies in the Caribbean and the movement of missionaries there, these kind of attempts to provide different kinds of education and to some ways educate.

ameliorate the conditions of slavery, which did not necessarily go hand in hand with any particular zealous abolitionist beliefs. And so Christian belief and Christian ideology was often used to uphold systems of slavery alongside this.

For example, here at Glasgow, at my university, in our library, we have a Bible from the early 19th century, which was a Bible specifically produced for the use on slave plantations in the Caribbean. And it's a Bible with...

many areas edited. And for me, this Bible presents a little bit, a kind of insight into the missionary on the slave plantation. What does this Bible mean? I mean, it is obviously a form of censorship because you're not giving the whole Bible to the enslaved population. There is this paternalistic assumption that people should only be given partial truth

But it also reflects this kind of missionary belief in the duty to impart education and knowledge, particularly Christian knowledge, to the enslaved population. Following abolition, what happens to the children emancipated through missions who straddle the experience of both being enslaved and then free, although not free in the sense people would understand it now?

To give one example of children who were emancipated or redeemed at a mission station, talk about Frank and Lena Clark, who were both redeemed and quasi-adopted by some Scottish missionaries, and they were brought to Scotland. Lena Clark spent some time living in the Clark's house in Edinburgh in the early 1880s.

And they both returned to the Congo, where they were from, and they both become really important, sort of significant players in the resistance to the Belgian regime in the Congo, which was extremely brutal. It's very difficult to do a kind of comparative colonial violence summary,

But the Congo from 1884 onwards was known as the Congo Free State. And it was basically treated as though it was a large plantation owned personally by King Leopold of Belgium, who implemented a vicious regime of violence against African agricultural workers and their families in order to extract rubber.

The resistance to that came from an international coalition of Africans, journalists, activists, missionaries. And Frank and Lena Clark, who had been these redeemed children brought up on a mission station and living in Edinburgh, Frank spent some time in Glasgow, became translators and interviewers. And they sort of

in some ways, hosted a kind of refuge from people escaping from this violence at their mission stations. And so Lena assisted Roger Casement, who was the Irish investigator sent to investigate these atrocities.

She was interviewing people, translating for them. Again, these linguistic abilities are so, so vital here. And Frank performed a similar role. And you have to think, I think, would people have been as honest and forthcoming with a white male European interviewer as they were with people who spoke their own language, who came from their community? It's difficult to imagine.

What about the other children who were freed when Britain abolished the slave trade? Were they mostly subject to apprenticeship, that transitional system of labour we discussed in the last episode, which brought little difference to the slave trade itself? Apprenticeship, that becomes the main way that children are dealt with. So the British colonial officials had this very unpleasant term called disposal. They would talk about the disposal of liberated Africans,

So children who were liberated from the slave ships that were captured by the Royal Navy, they would be relocated, most of them to Sierra Leone, but others would then be trans-shipped. So they would be relocated to Sierra Leone and then maybe sent to the Gambia, maybe sent to the Caribbean colonies. And there they would be apprenticed to local artisans or traders or merchants.

And a lot of these apprenticeships, there was very little oversight of it. So there are records of complaints that children made, records of children running away from the apprenticeships and records of re-enslavement. So in places where slavery was still legal nearby, for example, in the Caribbean, of course, when the British abolished slavery in 1833 and an end apprenticeship in 1838, there

Caribbean, British-controlled Caribbean colonies are sitting right next to Cuba, where slavery is still legal. And so children could be then sold into or transported, trafficked into slavery. And the same thing would happen in West Africa. I would say what really strikes you is a real lack of concern about family reunification.

On the part of the British government, very little concern is given to how could we ensure these children get back to family and the continued use of their labour and the exploitation of their labour. What does this entire story of children in British slavery tell us about philanthropy?

And the role that philanthropy might play in easing guilt compared to actually confronting or dismantling a system that oppresses people. You could in a way sum it up that philanthropy is not nearly as important as democracy, as important as giving people control over their lives and over their resources. When people, for example, hold up the abolition of the slave trade is this example of British philanthropy. And I can tell you that that's not a modern phenomenon anymore.

At the time when they would take people off of these slave ships, people were sometimes very unwell after this horrific treatment. Those people had to gather in a kind of refugee camp called the King's Yard and there was a gate to that yard and on it was engraved 'liberated by British valour and philanthropy' and so there was already a self-celebration.

But when people sort of talk about that, and my friend Patrick Scanlon has written about this really eloquently, there's this idea that there's a debt owed, that by giving people their freedom, somehow they are then beholden

which of course is absolutely extraordinary given the centuries of British exploitation from the abduction and exploitation of Africans. So this kind of ideology kind of builds up that philanthropy makes people in some way beholden to you, it gives you some kind of power over them. And it's also profoundly anti-democratic because the ways in which philanthropy is dispensed

is not made, a decision that's made by a community. It's decisions that are made by very few elite people. So for example, if you look at the building of Mission Schools, which is sometimes held up as this great good,

Who makes the decision about where that school is or what that school teaches? Well, that would be missionaries from, you know, often from European backgrounds who are making those decisions, not the communities in which those schools are being built. So it's profoundly undemocratic. I keep thinking, going back to this spectre of the vulnerable child and that cultural image,

What sort of legacy do you think children in slavery and the image of the enslaved child has left on our cultural understanding of children? Even thinking about who gets to be a child. I mean,

That's also something extraordinary that comes out when you look at the history of enslaved childhoods. How children were defined was very biological, if you could say it like that. It was defined often by height, how tall the children were, but also by, again, looking at the abolition of the slave trade, also by looking at their physical development, right? And so it's this quite brutal sort of...

cut-off point that bears very little resemblance to any of ideas of its intellectual emotional development. And then of course it's really profoundly gendered after that point and so it's girls are seen as children in some ways longer and then in other ways not. Girls were often married off

And you see quite a lot of arranged and coerced marriages happening in enslaved and emancipated populations. And quite a number of those women are what we would define as girls. Whereas boys are seen more often, and you can see it in the records, more often seen as men, or more often called men. Girls remain girls until they're older.

And are then, of course, seen as potential recruits to the British Army and Navy. Also something that happened quite significantly to Maxby's slave children recruited into the Royal Navy. And that's something, I think, of course, that comes through to today. And I think we saw really come through really powerfully in these debates about refugee resettlement in Britain and these issues

this sort of reduction to biological markers that somehow would be able to measure childhood or adulthood, that only real children should be accepted. And certainly where I was living in 2015, in Kent, the debate around it was, I found quite extraordinary, definitely in attitude that boys, particularly Syrian boys, were men and not children.

It's that highly racialized element, isn't it? Children who are not categorized as white have adulthood automatically bestowed upon them.

We see it with young boys liberated from slave ships who were then recruited into the Royal Navy as full-blown maritime soldiers. As young as eight is the youngest I've seen so far. So they were recruited often onto the boats that were then used to suppress the slave trade. It's just another, maybe it's like a personal irritation of mine that there's this attempt to claim slave trade suppression

on the part of the conservative or right wing. And sometimes that's framed around British sailors dying to stop the slave trade. I mean, a great number of Africans served in those ships and they're not remembered and they're not spoken about. And some of them were children.

And that, to me, is something quite extraordinary. And those children, it always comes back to language, I don't know why, those children who would grow up and be sailors on the slave trade suppression ships would often speak to the enslaved people. So if they caught a boat in its...

a slave ship and it's full of enslaved people. They don't speak English, they don't necessarily know what's going on. It's your African sailors who speak the languages that would say to them, "This is liberation. This is not re-enslavement. This now is freedom." And we've got a testimony from an enslaved man who was liberated who says, two of the black sailors said to me, "This is freedom."

We'll end on that image, that promise of freedom, a hand extended from a black sailor to an African man who thought the rest of his life would be spent in chains. In the next episode, we're going to examine the reality of what happened to the emancipated people that Britain deemed worthy of freedom, but not a home in the country that had enslaved them.

Human Resources was written by me, Moyalothian McLean. Our editor and producer is Renee Richardson. Our researchers are Dr. Alison Bennett and Arisa Lumba. Production assistant is Rory Boyle. Sound design by Ben Yolovitz. This is a Broccoli production, part of the Sony Podcast Network.