spirit of wilberforce

special edition

yeschurch Mission society

slave trade banned 25/03/1807

An ambitious schools project to introduce children to the story of slavery is touring the UK in 2007. CMS and Big Intent Theatre Company are bringing Free For All to your area. Using physical theatre, music, dance and workshops, Free For All gives pupils in years 5 to 8 the opportunity to learn about the history of the transatlantic slave trade and the reality of modern day slavery in an engaging and thought-provoking way. Through Free For All, CMS hopes to develop a network of schools, teachers and young people committed to living with a greater global awareness and with the conviction that together we can make a difference!

free for allWells 11–13JanuaryWinchester 15–19JanuaryWestminster 23–24JanuaryChelmsford 5–9FebruaryGloucester 13–15FebruaryManchester 26Feb–2MarchBlackburn 5–9MarchYork 12–16MarchPeterborough 26–29MarchGrantham 30MarchHull 16–21AprilLiverpool 24–27AprilSwansea 7–11MayChester 14–18MayHereford 21–25MayPortsmouth 4–8JuneBirmingham 11–15JuneDerby 18–22JuneIsleofMan 25–29JuneExeter 4–7JulySunderland 9–13JulySheffield 16–19JulyMoggerhanger 21JulyTBCGuildford 17–21SeptemberStAlbans 24SeptemberBristol 25–28SeptemberTBCChichester 1–5&8–12OctoberSouthwark 16–19OctoberNorwich 29October–2NovemberCoventry 5–9NovemberBradford 12–16NovemberLancaster 19–22NovemberSierraLeone 26November–3December

“Itwasamazing!Utterlyfabulous!”Harry, Year 5, Avening Primary school

“Itwasamazingtoseehowitallcametogetherattheend,engagingtheheartsandmindsofchildrenandaudience.”Janet Hoyte, teacher, The Croft Primary School

“Agreatwayoflearningaboutslavery!”Rebecca Surridge, teacher, North Nibley Primary School

For more information, please visit www.freeforalltour.infoor contact:

AnitaMatthews,CMSNationalAdviserChildrenandYouthanita.matthews@cms-uk.org01332270917or07910137229

�YESWILBERFORCE

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4 SPIRITOF WILBERFORCE

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7 SHACkLESOF

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8 SLAvERYTIMELINE

10SETTING CAPTIvESFREE

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13BLAxPLOITATION2007

JEREMYWOODHAM

14GETINvOLvED

William Wilberforce is gagged on the front

cover of a magazine titled ‘The Spirit of

Wilberforce’. It seems a little odd.

After all, 2007 is a big year. It marks the

bicentenary of the British Parliament passing a

Bill, drawn up by Wilberforce, MP for Hull, which

banned areas under British control from trading

in slaves.

The Bill conferred on Britain, the master of the

seas, the additional task of being an international

police force. The connection with CMS was that

those first key anti-slavery campaigners were our

founding fathers.

It’s right that we celebrate the achievements of

Wilberforce; but we can’t just end there. Does the

spirit of Wilberforce live on, or have we stifled the

voice that would tell us slavery is very much an

unfinished business?

The anniversary gives CMS an opportunity to

reconnect with the vision and values of our

founders and ask how they might apply today.

When we do that we quickly discover that the

problems of our world are deeper and wider than

in Wilberforce’s day.

There are more slaves today than 200 years ago.

There are the spectres of child soldiering, sex

trafficking and drug addiction that our Setting

Captives Free campaign has tried to fight over the

past four years. There is also bonded and forced

labour. All have the effect of enslaving human

beings, both adults and children. And then there

is humanity’s continued enslavement to arms and

warfare.

Perhaps at the pinnacle of this catalogue stands

the kind of slavery our Africa Director Dennis

Tongoi describes in his piece on page 7: the

slavery of the mind.

To understand the full import of slavery, it is time

the voices of people of colour, particularly those

in the economic South, are finally listened to, and

with care.

What made Jesus so uncomfortable to society

was his refusal to accept the prevailing consensus

of ‘the system’. The same was true of Wilberforce.

CMS is at its best when it follows the same path.

YES Magazine Special Edition. Published by CMS. General Secretary: Canon Tim Dakin. Editor: John Martin. Staff writer: Jeremy Woodham.

Designer: Gareth Powell. Printers: CPO. Printed on Arctic the Volume, a sustainable paper that has been accredited by the Forest Stewardship Council.

Views expressed in YES are not necessarily those of CMS.

CMS is a community of mission service: living a mission lifestyle; equipping people in mission; sharing resources for mission work. CMS supports

over 800 people in mission and works in over 60 countries with offices in Cape Coast, Kampala, London, Nairobi, Seoul

and Singapore. Church Mission Society, Partnership House, 157 Waterloo Road, London SE1 8UU. Registered Charity Number 220297.

JohnMartinEditorjohn.martin@cms-uk.org

free for allWells 11–13JanuaryWinchester 15–19JanuaryWestminster 23–24JanuaryChelmsford 5–9FebruaryGloucester 13–15FebruaryManchester 26Feb–2MarchBlackburn 5–9MarchYork 12–16MarchPeterborough 26–29MarchGrantham 30MarchHull 16–21AprilLiverpool 24–27AprilSwansea 7–11MayChester 14–18MayHereford 21–25MayPortsmouth 4–8JuneBirmingham 11–15JuneDerby 18–22JuneIsleofMan 25–29JuneExeter 4–7JulySunderland 9–13JulySheffield 16–19JulyMoggerhanger 21JulyTBCGuildford 17–21SeptemberStAlbans 24SeptemberBristol 25–28SeptemberTBCChichester 1–5&8–12OctoberSouthwark 16–19OctoberNorwich 29October–2NovemberCoventry 5–9NovemberBradford 12–16NovemberLancaster 19–22NovemberSierraLeone 26November–3December

Aportraitofamanwhofoughtthegreatestevilofhisday,byhisbiographerStephenTomkinsThe Spirit of Wilberforce

Aportraitofamanwhofoughtthegreatestevilofhisday,byhisbiographerStephenTomkins

After the Abolition debate on 23 February 1807, when Parliament finally agreed to abolish the slave trade by a landslide majority, Wilberforce returned with his victorious friends to his Westminster house. It had been an emotional night for him. After a twenty-year campaign which had repeatedly wrecked his health – nearly killed him, in fact – and had often seemed quite hopeless, the victory was won. In each of those twenty years, British ships had carried 40,000 slaves from Africa, and finally the trade was outlawed. For two decades Wilberforce had been opposed in Parliament as a misguided do-gooder, and derided as a traitorous fanatic, and suddenly MPs were fighting to pay tribute to “that exalted and benevolent individual”, clapping and cheering him – a display unprecedented in living memory. Wilberforce sat through it in tears.

And now as he came home to celebrate with his friends, his first words were to his Abolitionist friend and Clapham landlord Henry Thornton: “Well, Henry,” he grinned, “what shall we abolish next?”

One thing this snapshot of Wilberforce exemplifies, I think, is his sense of humour. That might not normally be the first of his qualities that a biographer would list, but it is worth mentioning if only because it tends to get eclipsed by his weightier attributes. He has the misfortune of being known to later generations through the biography of his sons, who inherited his piety and seriousness, but were as monumentally dull as he was full of life. Others, such as Thornton’s daughter Marianne, talk of his childlike sense of joy, his sparkling eyes and his tendency to get so carried away in family hymn-singing that he would pull the leaves off geraniums. He had a wicked wit – though it was important to him to control it – and was famous as a young MP for his satirical impressions. As weighty as Wilberforce’s achievements were, it is

worth remembering that there was a human being behind them.

On the other hand, many a true word is spoken in jest, and I think that Wilberforce’s quip reveals some important things about his outlook. One is that he was not a one-issue politician but an inveterate campaigner, and had many other concerns as well as the slave trade. This contrasts with the other great Abolitionist leader, Thomas Clarkson, for whom Abolition was his life, and when he (Clarkson) gave up on the cause he quit public life altogether and became a Lakeland farmer. The other main causes

for which Wilberforce contended throughout his career were evangelism (at home and in British India), providing for the poor, and improving public morality. In his own words, “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.” By manners he meant morals, rather than talking with one’s mouth full.

So if Wilberforce were alive today I think it is safe to say that he would be involved with the most pressing campaigns for social justice such as the abolition of world poverty, and with Christian mission at home and abroad. His choice of causes was not perfect. His reformation of manners, for example, sometimes involved getting penniless workers gaoled for selling tracts arguing for democracy, and he opposed extending the vote to Roman Catholics (though he changed his mind on that). Of course he would not espouse the same ideals today, 200 years down the line, but still I do not imagine I could always agree with him.

Another aspect of Wilberforce’s outlook that is reflected in that joke is his underlying sense of mission. It was not simply that the issue of the slave trade assaulted his conscience and drove him into action. This is what happened to Clarkson, who wrote an essay on the subject at Cambridge and then could not get it out of his head. Rather, for Wilberforce, the compulsion to do something worthwhile with his life came first, and he channelled that into Abolition.

This compulsion came from his evangelical conversion. He was a man of unusually high moral principles before then, an incorruptible politician in an

The Spirit of Wilberforceage of endemic corruption, but he lived his life largely for his own benefit. On his conversion you could say that he struggled to find enough sins to repent of – except for a notion that he had done nothing in the face of a dreadful, overwhelming sense that he was accountable to God for what he had achieved with his life. He spent a year in miserable self-condemnation, until he saw the two great objects that God Almighty had set before him.

His critics picked up on this point and blew it out of proportion. The poet Coleridge said that Wilberforce did not “care a farthing for the slaves” if only “his soul were saved”. In reality, his private journal

�

reveals a man whose compassion for the slaves was unquestionably real and heartfelt. But it was his commitment to God that turned that compassion into an unflagging 20-year campaign.

It’s unfair on a lot of people that Wilberforce’s name is so uniquely linked to the Abolition movement. Many others brought to it essential qualities that Wilberforce lacked. He was not perhaps as driven as Clarkson. He did not have the first-hand knowledge of Olaudah Equiano, the former slave, or John Newton, the former slave trader. He did not have the PR genius of the Quakers who invented the idea of the mass petition. He did not have the rage of the evangelical lawyer James Stephen, who said, “I would rather be on friendly terms with a man who had strangled my infant son than support an admission guilty of slackness in suppressing the slave trade.”

What Wilberforce brought to the campaign was, above all, stamina. He was the one who kept bringing his bills to Parliament, kept researching and

speaking and debating, and kept the issue alive in the public eye, while others came and went, for 20 years. And, just as important, he then devoted another decade and more to getting the law properly enforced.

There is some debate among historians of the Abolition about who gets the lion’s share of the credit. I would prefer to say, of Wilberforce as of any of them, that he fought the greatest evil in the world of his day, and played his part in its defeat. Who could ever claim more?

William Wilberforce: A Biography by Stephen Tomkins is published by Lion in January, priced £8.99. Stephen’s recent Short History of Christianity was described by J I Packer as “a brilliant popular page turner that keeps you reading for hours at a time,” and by Terry Jones as “the sort of book I wish I’d read 50 years ago.”

�

There is a particularly pernicious form of slavery going on all over Africa today. It can be put very simply: perception.

Thanks to Bob Geldof, the United Nations and others, we all know that on the richest continent in terms of natural resources, the majority of the people live in crippling poverty.

When African leaders address this underdevelopment, they are quick to blame colonialism among other external factors. Yet many of the world’s richest nations were once colonies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, USA, Hong Kong.

On the other hand some of the world’s poorest nations were never colonised: Afghanistan and Thailand, for example. Many rapidly-developing nations received their independence at the same time as African countries: Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam.

According to the World Bank there are three major sources of a nation’s development: 59 per cent comes from human and social capital, 25 per cent from the ground (natural resources), 16 per cent is manufactured capital (infrastructure).

This means that in the wealthiest countries, human capital accounts for three-quarters of the producible forms of wealth.

I believe Africa’s biggest challenges are not external but internal, that of her worldview.

Pete Ondeng in his book Africa’s Moment says, “I am convinced that the perception, or paradigm, through which many non-Africans view Africa is one of the key obstacles to Africa’s development. Unfortunately, this negative perception is not confined to non-Africans. Too many Africans carry around a burden of negativity about themselves and their continent that severely cripples their ability to progress.”

The humanistic world view predominant in the secular Global North identifies poverty in physical terms: limited resources. The solution? More money needed. Africans dominated by their traditional religion relegate the problem to the spiritual realm: more power needed. The solution? To appease the spirits, more sacrifice, hence the thriving of prosperity Gospel ‘theology’. Biblical Theism defines poverty in relational

terms, the solution being the restoration of proper relationships to God, others and Creation.

The Church in Africa holds the key to her development and must look beyond numbers and the saving of souls. She has divorced discipleship and development, preaching a dualistic worldview.

Dr Tokunboh Adeyemo, founder and executive director of the Center of Biblical Transformation says:

“Africa has been evangelised but the African mind has not been captured for Christ... For decades ... evangelism and missionary activities [were] directed at getting people saved [spiritually], but losing their minds. Consequently, we have ... over 50 per cent Christian population on the average, but [it has] little or no impact on society. In fact, it sounds like an irony that within our own rank and file such practices as witchcraft, traditional religions, orgies, tribalism and the like are regarded as normal...”

The Good News of the Kingdom is relevant for this world, not just for heaven. CMS in Africa is engaging leaders in Discipleship For Wholistic Transformation and as a result is beginning to see local churches not only proclaim, but also demonstrate, the love of Jesus to their broken communities. They are preaching the whole Gospel to the whole person, to the whole nation.

ShackleS of the mindcmS africa director denniS tongoi addreSSeS the rootS of africa’S preSent day Slavery

free your mind

John newton 1735–1807. A former slave-ship captain, hymn-writer and founder of Eclectics, the evangelical group that first proposed an Anglican society for evangelistic mission. Wrote a gut-wrenching account of his time in the slave trade and its evils.

william wilberforce 1759–1833. MP for Hull and a founder vice-president of CMS. (He was initially invited to be President but lacked the time). His first anti-slavery bill, in 1791, was defeated 163 votes to 88, but he didn’t give up. When in 1805 the House of Commons finally passed a law that made the slave trade illegal, the House of Lords blocked it.

Henry thornton 1760–1815. Economist, banker, philanthropist and MP for Southwark. He was the founder and financial brain of the Clapham Sect, one of Britain’s first ‘pressure groups’ instigating numerous campaigns for philanthropic causes and lobbying for social reform.

1102: The trade in slaves in Britain made illegal. By the 18th century black slaves were being imported as personal servants, although they weren’t bought or sold.

1783: Anti-slavery becomes a public issue. Dr Beilby Porteus, Bishop of Chester and later Bishop of London, issues a call to the Church of England to cease its involvement in the slave trade. Sir Cecil Wray, MP for Retford, presented the Quaker anti-slavery petition to parliament.

1785: Thomas Clarkson enters a Cambridge Latin essay competition. His topic: Is it lawful to enslave the unconsenting? It caused him to start amassing information on the slave trade, a course which he pursued for the rest of his life. His in-depth research built a body of solid evidence which was invaluable in proving the evils of slavery.

1787: Granville Sharp takes the lead in founding, with Clarkson, the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and a settlement for emancipated slaves in a newly demarcated region of Africa called Sierra Leone.

1789: William Wilberforce’s first House of Commons speech against the slave trade. It took 18 years before he secured a Commons vote.

1791: John Wesley’s last letter addressed to William Wilberforce. “O be not weary of well doing! Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the Sun) shall vanish away before it.”

global abolition Sweden:1335

Finland:1335

Portugal:1761

Haiti:1791

UpperCanada:1793

France(firsttime):1794–1802

Argentina:1813

GranColombia(Ecuador,Colombia,

Panama,andvenezuela):1821

Chile:1823

Mexico:1829

Mauritius:1835

Denmark:1848

France:1848(includingallcolonies)

Peru:1851

Romania:1855

Netherlands:1863

UnitedStates:1865

PuertoRico:1873

Cuba:1880

Brazil:1888

korea:1894

Zanzibar:1897

China:1910

Burma:1929

Ethiopia:1936

Tibet:1959

SaudiArabia:1962

Mauritania:July1980

1807: Slave trade declared illegal by the House of Commons, but the Act did not end it. British sea captains caught slave- trafficking were fined £100 for every slave found on board but could avoid fines by ordering slaves to be thrown overboard.

1833: Slavery Abolition Act: gave all slaves in the British Empire freedom and the Government paid compensation to slave-owners according to the number of slaves they had. For example, the freeing of the Bishop of Exeter’s 665 slaves resulted in him receiving £12,700.

today’s church Mission society cares deeply about continuing the legacy of its founders, in a world which contains more slavery than in wilberforce’s day. throughout the last four years, cMs has been building the setting captives free campaign to fight modern forms of slavery, including sex trafficking, child soldiers and various types of addiction.

in the run-up to 2007, setting captives free has addressed over 100,000 people, exhibited at over 40 major events, inspired a personal commitment to anti-slavery from around 10,000 people, distributed 20,000 ‘Kitgum crosses’ to people who wore them as a sign of their solidarity with children forced to go to war in Uganda, gave away 7,000 prayer bands, delivered a petition on child soldiers to downing street and lobbied Mps and other Vips to get involved.

4,000 women trafficked to UK to work as prostitutes

11

Enslaved, trapped, lost, forgotten, without hope... Can words fully describe how trafficked women and children must feel? Trafficking, our modern day slavery, is a global reality that is only beginning to be fully grasped, and already the figures are overwhelming. It is estimated that one million humans are trafficked across international borders each year, many of them children, and the majority end up in some form of sexual exploitation. But the figures cannot tell the human side of the story. Sabina was 12 when she was taken to India, sold and forced to work as a prostitute. Listening to her tell her story with tears rolling down her face was heartbreaking. I wanted to cry, I felt sick, and wondered at the depths of human sinfulness.

But I am reminded that it was for such people that Jesus came to earth – to give hope to the hopeless, to set the captives free. Throughout the Bible we read of God’s heart for the poor, commanding his people to help widows and orphans. It is in this light that the Church of Bangladesh Social Development Programme (CBSDP) carries out its anti-trafficking project. Working in vulnerable communities, it raises awareness about trafficking and how to prevent it as well as supporting and rehabilitating returned women who have been trafficked. As a result, Sabina has now been able to complete a tailoring course, and works

making clothes from her house. She has regained her dignity and hope for the future. Trafficking is inextricably linked with poverty, with the great majority of trafficked victims being the poorest people from the poorest countries. The CBSDP’s work complements our regular development work of helping raise people out of abject poverty. Five years ago Sadana was struggling to run her family with the wages of her day-labourer husband. But with help from CBSDP she started raising poultry and began to earn an income. Now she is able to educate her children, and more importantly, she has a sense of security and is positive about the future. She is at much less risk from traffickers.

But in this age of globalisation, poverty, and hence trafficking, the problems cannot be solved by local development projects alone. We all have a part to play, be it just in choosing carefully the tea we drink or the food we eat. And of course we can all lobby our politicians to effect change. I take heart from the work of William Wilberforce, who showed that by doing just that, the seemingly impossible can be achieved.

Amidst the darkness of trafficking, there is hope.

trafficking iS a miSSion frontier

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THE PRICE OF A SLAVEThis was the currency of the slave trade. Called manillas, they were ſirst produced by the Portuguese in imitation of bracelets worn by African women to show off wealth. By the 18th century they were the main currency used to buy slaves and Birmingham was the world centre of production. British slave traders would pay Africans in manillas for

captured slaves and then trade the slaves for sugar, tobacco and other commodities. This symbol of the slave trade remained legal tender in

British West Africa until 1949.

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Another middle-class white man opines about slavery. Oh goody. Brace yourselves for a lot more before the year’s out. The bicentenary of Wilberforce’s Bill is a historic occasion, to be sure, but in the celebration are we witnessing the exploitation of exploitation?

For the issues around slavery and its so-called abolition are by no means cut and dried. They are though, it still seems, black and white.

While well-meaning white folk are eager to celebrate the achievement of Wilberforce and are focused on using the Wilberforce legacy to fight modern slavery, some black groups are vociferously campaigning against celebrations. The Operation Truth 2007 website says it’s akin to the Germans organising a commemoration to the Holocaust.

Of course, last year in Berlin a vast memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was unveiled, not without controversy, but mainly interpreted as Germany properly facing up to its history.

So will we face up to our history and dig deeper into the story we all think we know? It is tempting for Christians simply to rejoice at the chance for a ride on Wilberforce’s coat-tails.

Well, it could be a bumpy ride. Wilberforce’s 1807 Bill of course only abolished, as he put it in his speech to the Commons, “the carrying of men in British ships to be sold as slaves in the British Islands in the West Indies”.

Even in 1833 when the Act to emancipate slaves was finally passed, they didn’t get their freedom straight away. Wilberforce himself didn’t think they should, favouring a gradual ‘apprentice’ system. Should we excuse him, just because it seemed like a step too far in the context of the time?

Not necessarily, says Toyin Agbetu of the Ligali organisation, which campaigns against negative stereotyping of Africans in the media. For him, abolitionists were guilty of still trying to control the people whose freedom they had campaigned for. “African activists have always worked towards immediate freedom, immediate independence, immediate debt relief, immediate increases in aid, immediate trade reforms and immediate equal rights.”

And Richard Reddie, the project director for Set All Free, the Churches Together programme for 2007, which CMS is supporting, is sympathetic. “It is not enough for Christians to hide behind the good work of William Wilberforce and use this as an excuse not to address the damage caused by the Church.” On the contrary, we have a golden opportunity “to finish off the good work started by Wilberforce and others, who, in their efforts to end slavery, failed to dismantle the structures and systems that oppressed Africans.”

As one does, I’ve been flicking through an original Morning Chronicle of 17 March 1807 (thanks Dr H Oliver). Once past the adverts for sprung wigs, you’ll find “Mr Secretary Windham” criticising the abolitionists thus: “Those who supported this, did it at no expence [sic] of their own, and he always thought there was in this too much of cheap virtue.”

It may have been an unfair criticism of Wilberforce and the campaigners who had sacrificed money and time over decades to pass the bill. But the response of Christians today must not smack of “cheap virtue”.

One response of CMS is sponsoring the play African Snow. Award-winning playwright Murray Watts enters the minefield of guilt and forgiveness, and finds no easy resolution between slaver and enslaved.

I’m just a white man opining about slavery. All I know is, as a CMS mission partner recently said to me, “Slavery didn’t go away, it just changed its face.”

blaxploitation 2007

1�jeremy woodham

get inv- ol- ved

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wilberforce underStood chriSt’S miSSion – he could not Shut hiS

eyeS and pretend he could make no difference to the world. cmS

offerS practical wayS for churcheS and chriStianS to deepen

their underStanding of that Same miSSion, both around the

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25/03/2007 27 million slaves