The only known image of Elizabeth Heyrick (1769-1831), the Quaker anti-slavery activist, who, in the 1820s, first popularised the idea of ‘immediate emancipation’ for slaves in the British empire.
The Quakers were one of the radical sects that emerged from the turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century they became a quietist peace church and in the nineteenth century liberal Christian philanthropists. The late twentieth century onwards saw further changes, so that Quakers have become global, but in the UK and US are now dominated by anti-Western, anti-Zionist activists who agitate for slave reparations. This is despite British Quakers leading the movement against the slave trade and chattel slavery. Their successors have jumped on the reparations bandwagon for the thinnest of reasons, that in the mid-eighteenth century two or three Quakers in the port of Lancaster defied their co-religionists by continuing to invest in slavery and the slave trade.
The adverse influence on Quaker studies of Edward Said-style postcolonialism may be seen in The Creation of Modern Quaker Diversity, 1830-1937, published in 2023. It includes lofty condemnation of the ‘very different attitude of British Quaker chocolate manufacturers toward their English and African workforces’.[1]
One might ask what it would have meant for the chocolate manufacturers to have had the same attitude to factory workers in Birmingham UK as to field hands in Africa. Realistically, it would have led them to provide the model village of Bournville for their local workers and to campaign against the use of coerced labour on the cacao plantations of Portuguese Africa. This is exactly what they did. The Quaker chocolate manufacturers had the same attitude to local as to foreign workers, which was to treat them equally but in ways appropriate to the circumstances. To have done differently, for example by creating a model village on one of the cacao-producing islands, would have been folly and certain to fail.
Another instance of the distortions of postcolonialism is the attack on Henry Stanley Newman, secretary of the Friends Foreign Mission Association. In 1897 he established an industrial mission on Pemba, an island in the Zanzibar archipelago. Newman is accused of imperialism and racialism.
While British Friends thought their mission work in Pemba in the aftermath of emancipation was benevolent, the writings of Friends involved with the mission, notably Henry Stanley Newman, clearly envisioned this work in the context of empire and a definite racial hierarchy.[2]
This accusation is based on the following quotation from Newman:
‘Everything points to the establishment of one leading axiom in all African affairs and that is, that the future development of tropical Africa must be the work of the natives themselves under enlightened European supervision’.[3]
Henry Stanley Newman, 1837-1912
The establishment of the Pemba mission needs to be understood in the context of the ‘Scramble for Africa’ at the end of the nineteenth century, which revealed many examples of slavery that Quakers had previously been overlooked. In Zanzibar, which the British made a protectorate under a client Sultan, Arab gang-masters had long been enslaving labourers for work on spice plantations, in dreadful and often fatal conditions.
Newman and the Quaker MP Joseph A. Pease, later Baron Gainford, lobbied the government to put pressure for abolition on the Sultan. Newman was the author of the pamphlet, The African Slave Trade and the Way out of It, published in 1893. In 1896 the government responded to this lobbying and, in order to further buttress British power in East Africa, violently overthrew a new and uncooperatively pro-slavery Sultan in the brief but bloody Anglo-Zanzibar War of 27 August 1896. Newman’s mission in Pemba should be understood not as the product of a racialist vision but as part of the revival of Quaker anti-slavery facilitated by British hard power.
Following the overthrow of the slave regime in Zanzibar, Newman was able to implement a project to liberate enslaved labourers and equip them for new, autonomous lives. Newman recognised this autonomy when he said, ‘the future development of tropical Africa must be the work of the natives themselves’. Necessarily the natives needed assistance in terms of material resources and technical training, and it was the Friends Foreign Mission Association that provided this. It is facile for scholar-activists to dismiss the Pemba mission as imperialistic and racialist. Rather, it was an example of targeted, practical service provision.
The remarks in The Creation of Modern Quaker Diversity about the chocolate manufacturers and the Pemba mission show the fallacy or trap of post-colonialism, its predilection for the lofty and facile. Philanthropists like the British Quakers cannot win, because either they were being racially discriminatory in doing more for whites at home than blacks abroad, or they were carrying out foreign missions that were ipso facto imperialist and racialist.
Footnotes:
[1] Angell, S. W., Dandelion P., Watt, D. H., (eds.), The Creation of Modern Quaker Diversity, 1830-1937, Penn State University Press, 2023, p. 18.
[2] The Creation of Modern Quaker Diversity, 1830-1937, p. 28
[3] The Creation of Modern Quaker Diversity, 1830-1937, p. 202.
