18 Guyana – Feeding the ghosts – Fred D’Aguiar – December 2014 (Score 6.14)

The ship’s captain is addressing the crew on the need to jettison some of their cargo in order to save the rest and make a profit from their long and arduous voyage. Some of that profit will have to be made from the insurance to cover the lost cargo.

After some initial, not dissent but grumbling and hesitation, the crew agree. In the middle of an increasingly severe storm the first of what is eventually 132 damaged pieces of cargo are brought from the hold to be thrown overboard into the raging sea – the first of 132 sick and suffering human beings, stolen from their lives in Africa to be transported to the New World, the future “Land of the Free” to be sold as slaves.

Their lives are to be sacrificed to protect the remaining “cargo” from the infection which has struck, and already taken a number of the crew along with the “cargo”.

In the middle of the extended jettisoning operation, a slave called Mintah is tossed overboard, not because she is ill, but because she speaks English and could bear witness.

Miraculously the waves throw her against the hull, allowing her to catch a rope and, with difficulty, pull herself up to a porthole where she climbs into a kitchen and storeroom where she takes a plate of the stew which is cooking. She dissolves into laughter at her situation.

As Mintah sleeps and dreams we see, as frequently in our reading, the beginning of the breakup of indigenous families and the destruction, with whatever good, but ultimately bad and false intentions, of the indigenous culture.

Mintah is helped by young Simon, a boy of limited intelligence, who takes a fancy to her when he finds her and hides her from the search which ensues. This happens because rumours get around the ship when she shows herself to some of the men and women among the slaves.

Part 2 of the book opens in a courtroom in London. The case is between the investors in the slave ship Zong and the insurers of the cargo. The judge seems more interested in finishing in time for lunch than in achieving a fair resolution. I believe that a fair resolution, even in the time of these dreadful evens, is impossible since the insurers are as aware as the investors that the cargo in question was human beings. The judge knows this too.

The investors look like winning until young Simon gives a book (which he cannot read) to the legal representatives of the insurers. It is a record written by Mintah.

We find that the judge himself has slave holdings, and that the law of England declares that Africans are not human and so can therefore, legally, be treated in the way that livestock can be treated. We see how Mintah, after having helped with the slave freedom railroad in Maryland, goes to Jamaica to live her life in Freedom, on land she has bought for herself, amid trees she planted, one for each murdered slave from the Zong.

I can’t say that I enjoyed a book which discusses such horrendous treatment of human beings, but I appreciated the insight which it gave me into the machinations which were gone through to make it possible for decent Europeans to convince themselves that it was acceptable to treat humans like cattle for the purpose of buying and selling them, as a prelude to forcing them into a life of slavery. I gave the book a score of 8.0.