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| Pablo Delcan |
‘The Zorg’ tells a story we all must hear
When the slave ship known as the Zorg left what is now the Ghanaian coast in 1781, it was headed for Jamaica, with 442 Africans pitilessly crammed into space intended for about 250. Along the way it drifted off course, and dehydration and scurvy took their toll on crew and cargo. The captain, desperately ill, appointed as his replacement a self-serving reprobate, a colonial governor who had recently been sacked. An incompetent navigator, he sailed clear past Jamaica.
After three months at sea, he and the other two white men in command threw about 125 of the enslaved Africans overboard to drown or be devoured by sharks.
Back in England, the Zorg’s owner sought an insurance payout for the loss. At trial, he claimed that water supplies had gone so low that sending the Africans to their death was the only way to keep the other slaves and themselves alive. At a second trial, however — convened in response to a fiery editorial by an outraged abolitionist — it emerged that the Zorg in fact had plenty of water. Why, then, were the slaves thrown overboard? Because the captain determined that in their weakened state, they would be more valuable as an insurance claim than for sale at the auction block. No one was charged with the crime.
Siddharth Kara brings these revolting events, as well as their consequential reverberations, to life in the stunning new book “The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery.” Among its many revelations — including a description of the Middle Passage as visceral as the account of plantation life in Percival Everett’s “James” — is the starkness of the fact that Africans were sold into slavery by other Africans. Not just a few of them. According to the historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood in their study of the slave trade in the early 1600s, about 90 percent of the Black Africans sold as slaves in English and Dutch North America during that period had first been captured in war by fellow Black Africans. The captives were sold to white traders for gold and weapons, and then fed into the hungry maw of the plantation economy across the ocean.
“The Zorg,” fascinating in its own right, arrives at an interesting moment. The history of Black involvement in the slave trade has often been treated as off limits — inconvenient at best and outright slander at worst. But it has gained traction in recent years. I was pleased to see it mentioned at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (though I wished for a deeper treatment) and fascinated to see that it is a significant theme of the Royal Academy of Art’s current show of Kerry James Marshall’s paintings.
Kara describes how slaves were often captured hundreds of miles inland and forced to walk to the coast chained, ankle to ankle, in a “coffle” that could include upward of 100 unfortunate souls. The journey could take six months or more, and as many as one-third of them died along the way, left to rot on the side of the road. The captives were sold by Hausa traders to Ashante traders, who sold them onward to members of the Fante tribe, who in turn sold them to the white officials running slave-trading castles on the coast. There they were imprisoned for further months in the castle’s dark, fetid dungeon, awaiting purchase by slave ship captains. From there they passed through the “door of no return” and into the holds of ships like the Zorg.
Some of those slave trading castles still stand. My family and I visited one in 1987, on Gorée Island in Senegal. We held the shackles that immobilized untold thousands of innocent people. Looking out on the ocean, I tried to imagine how it felt to be packed into the largest vessel you had probably ever seen and hauled off to a fate you couldn’t know anything about, because no one ever returned to tell the story.
Since then, I have read everything I could about what these castles were like. Kara’s is the most accessible account I have encountered. He explains the anatomy of the Cape Coast castle, a complex ecosystem that included white administrators, soldiers, artisans, laborers, accountants and a chaplain, as well as a large number of “castle slaves” who lived in a separate village. They worked in shifts, and in gradations of bondage: Some were locals who received wages; others were slaves loaned out by local kings. At least a few later ended up in the colonies.
From the castles, the captives were canoed to the slave ship over terrifyingly high waves, another torture, and delivered into the slave ship hold. Even the diagrams you may have seen showing the cross-section of a slave ship, with human bodies stacked like cordwood, understate the horror of the Middle Passage. Slaves were wedged into what were essentially shelves, a bit more than two feet in height. When the ship lurched, the wooden planks they were jammed against could shear off large patches of flesh. The stench of people dying or dead was all but unbearable. On the Zorg, one woman gave birth — and was thrown overboard with her baby.
As the African American studies professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written and I have experienced, people are often uncomfortable learning that Africans sold one another into this living hell. A common objection is that Africans had no way of knowing what conditions their captives would encounter. But they saw those captives being marched all but to death, sold like animals and penned into a slave castle hold. Black African slave traders had more than enough information to understand the fundamental immorality of the undertaking. If whites had seen even only what the Africans saw, we would not hesitate to judge them as unforgivably complicit in sin.
One lesson of “The Zorg” is that history and people are complex. The recently fashionable view of American (or Western) history as just one extended hit job, with whiteness always the oppressor and people of color always the subaltern, is ultimately a childish temptation, excusing us from engaging detail and nuance. Humans of all shades have quite often been awful to one another. Our job is to work against that tendency, not to pretend it doesn’t exist. And to celebrate those who overcome it, whatever their race. Abolitionism — a Western, Anglophone achievement, which Kara recounts in a final chapter — was a keystone example of that effort, and “The Zorg” is invaluable instruction in what made it so important.
By the way, one reason I’ve been so fascinated by these castles is because of my work as a linguist. These sites of so much cruelty and death were, my research suggests, also the birthplace of many of the creole languages of the New World. Jamaican patois, Gullah of South Carolina, the “Creolese” of Guyana and many others began there. Slaves who labored in the castle found ways to communicate with the white people who had purchased them. If the castle slaves later were sent across the Atlantic, the lingua franca went with them, and became the common language of the enslaved people who labored on plantations.
The slaves are long gone, but the languages they brought into being are still very much alive, and point to a birth specifically on the Ghanaian coast in slave trading castles. The history is there in practically every sentence. Slaves were taken from a vast stretch of the West African coast, from Senegal through Ghana down to Angola, regions where languages differ as much as French, Japanese and Arabic. Yet all of the “patois” varieties of the Caribbean have grammatical patterns based on the languages spoken in one place: the areas of modern-day Ghana where the slave castles were situated. There’s something else that binds them together: All of them use variations on “unu,” a second-person plural pronoun that is found only in the Igbo language of Nigeria, spoken on that same coast. (Here in America, Gullah speakers say “hunnuh.”)
It makes no sense that the same pronoun would be consistent across three dozen different Caribbean patois, created by speakers of a good dozen languages — unless “unu” got into their DNA through the single grandfather creole in Africa and was then broadcast throughout the region.
A crew member on the Zorg wrote in his diary that one slave pleaded that he and the others would rather starve than be thrown overboard. He made his plea in English, which Kara artfully proposes he picked up from what he could overhear while shackled in the hold. It’s a vivid story, but that is not how humans acquire a language. To me, it seems more likely that the man picked up some English while serving time as a castle slave.
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| The New York Times |