homework oct 2nd

Behn claims at the beginning of Oroonoko to tell a true story, and indeed, even though I never heard of Oroonoko before, the tale is plausible enough and sticks to what I know about slave history. Blacks in Africa started the slave trade in the first place, fighting against each other and using their captives as slaves themselves or selling them. The sold Black people were then deported to faraway countries and rarely set free or able to buy themselves out of slavery. Nonetheless, friendly relationships between owners and slaves were possible. Some owners were fine men like Trevy and treated their “possessions” well. In return, Oroonoko helps them negotiate with the Indians instead of leading them into a trap and good riddance. But slave rebellions were punished severely. And some Blacks, if not whipped to death by their masters, saw no way out other than suicide and the killing of their whole family. There is a novel which tells a similar story but from the female perspective. When the runaway slave is about to be captured she kills her children, as she’d rather see them dead than in slavery. Unfortunately I forgot the title. Another title I do remember is ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl’, an autobiography by a slave who suffered terribly from her owner.

The second reading was not nearly as desperate. Though sold as a slave, the author of the autobiogrphy not only managed to buy his freedom and make quite a career in the white world. Equiano also embraced England as his home and lived there out of his own will. This is interesting, as it shows the often neglected side of slavery and the possibility of pursuit of happiness for everyone, as well as the successful fight for equal rights. Although there is no doubt that slavery is and always was wrong, it forced and forged a cultural contact which otherwise might never have come about. Who knows what our multicultural society would look like without Blacks. Or, with Blacks only starting to live in the “White” world now, without having had to fight for their rights already more than 150 years before. Discrimination would probably be worse. For, no matter how idealistic one is, the fact that people with a dark skin colour still are discriminated cannot be denied. But it gets less. The longer people of different ethnicities – or races, if that is a politcally correct term at the moment – live together, the more they get used to each other.

Advertisement