It has become commonplace for politicians as well as antislavery NGOs to invoke the history of transatlantic slavery when speaking of the need for actions to combat “trafficking and modern slavery”. But as sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois observed, different stories can be told about history, and the histories we choose to tell (and to hear) can produce very different understandings of the present. Our new project is concerned with marronage – the process of extricating oneself from slavery. It asks what the histories of runaway and fugitive slaves, as well as of the “maroon” or “quilombo” communities they sometimes formed in the Americas, might teach us about contemporary oppression and suffering, and the kind of action that is required to transform it. Recent talk of “modern slavery” in hand car washes in the UK offers one example of how a focus on histories of marronage can alter perceptions of the present, and point to different conclusions about the actions that need to be taken.
Fighting “Modern Slavery” in UK Hand Car Washes
Those at the helm of the movement against “modern slavery” hold that, like the Africans and their descendants who fell victim to transatlantic slavery, today’s “modern slaves” are controlled by violence or its threat, severely exploited, and unable to walk away from the situation in which they find themselves. However, because slavery is no longer legal anywhere in the world, campaigners continue, “modern slavery” is also unlike transatlantic slavery. Today, it is part of a criminal underworld. It is therefore “unseen”, or “hidden in plain sight”. It follows that where the old antislavery campaigners enjoined their audience to challenge and in some cases to defy the law, today’s activists often ask us to help enforce the law. In the UK, Theresa May’s Modern Slavery Act (2015) is a case in point. The Act introduced new and tougher penalties against the “traffickers and slave masters” who “exploit whatever means they have at their disposal to coerce, deceive and force individuals into a life of abuse, servitude and inhumane treatment”, as Mrs May put it.
Drawing inspiration from histories in which antislavery actors mobilised members of the British public to fight for the abolition of the slave trade, a number of NGOs now seek ways to involve us all in the fight against “modern slavery”. As well as circulating awareness raising materials, they provide training to local authorities, businesses and members of the public on how to “spot the signs” of trafficking and slavery and how and where to report it. And in response to claims that hand car washes are sites of “modern slavery”, The Clewer Initiative, in collaboration with the Nottingham Rights Lab, also developed a Safe Car Wash app, which allows car owners to complete a short survey about the working conditions they observe in car washes they use. Survey questions include: do workers have access to suitable clothing? Is there evidence of workers living on site? Does the body language of workers appear fearful or withdrawn? Does the car wash accept only cash? The data are then shared with the National Crime Agency and the Gangmasters & Labour Abuse Authority. Car owners who suspect something is amiss are also urged to contact the Modern Slavery Helpline.
How does this app look through the lens of a concern with histories of marronage?
The Pursuit of Freedom
Despite its immense and murderous force as a system of domination, Atlantic World slavery frequently met with resistance. Enslaved people organised revolts and revolution, and they also attempted to move closer to freedom by taking flight from slavery. In an effort to prevent their escape, states that supported slavery (which meant both slave and ‘free’ states of the US) sought to control and restrict the mobility of the enslaved using techniques that sound remarkably familiar. The means by which they “managed” mobility included passes and visas, fences and walls, border patrols and surveillance, carrier sanctions, detention, and deportation. They criminalized the humanitarian action of those who harbored or assisted runaway slaves, and “free” northern states enacted a “hostile environment” trying to make life impossible for escapees from southern slavery. Criminalised and rightless, those who fled slavery in the US South had to find ways to subsist whilst remaining invisible to the authorities. One way that those who escaped northwards achieved this was by taking work as sailors, including on whaling ships.
The narrative of John Thompson, an escapee who was 3 years aboard a whaler, reveals that the conditions endured by sailors were truly execrable (so bad, in fact, that captains of whalers had trouble recruiting labour which was why they were often willing to take on workers racialised as black). The work was extraordinarily harsh, the conditions extremely hazardous, and physical violence was a feature of labour discipline. Sailors who tried to run away before their contract ended were hunted down, whipped and returned to the ship to serve out their contract. They endured precisely the kind of conditions that would today be described as “modern slavery”. Yet John Thompson nonetheless found those conditions preferable to chattel slavery in the US south, not least because after serving two or three years aboard a whaler, sailors typically ended up with a small lump sum, sufficient to set up in some other trade and so to pursue their freedom project.
One thing is for certain. If good white citizens of American whaling ports concerned about the appalling working conditions aboard whalers in the 1850s had somehow managed to develop a “Safe Whaler App” and reported John Thompson as a “potential victim of modern slavery”, he would not have been grateful. This is because, subject as they were to the Fugitive Slave Act 1850, the authorities would simply have deported him back South to his owner. Are things much different for hand car wash workers in the UK today?
Modern Marronage
On June 30th 2018, an immigration raid took place on a car wash in Newport where a 23 year old Sudanese asylum seeker, Mustafa Dawood, was working. He did not run toward the authorities, arms outstretched in welcome and relief. Rather, he was so terrified that he ran from them, clambering up onto a roof in the hope of getting away, and fell to his death. Mustafa Dawood risked and lost his life not because he was naïve or ill informed or had been told lies by employers to control him, but because he knew what would happen if he was found working in the car wash. If he was discovered there, his arduous and courageous journey to Libya, across the Mediterranean, through Europe, and across the channel, as well as his years of struggle to survive the UK’s hostile environment and to claim asylum, would all most likely have come to nought. Like many other migrants and asylum seekers found working illegally in hand car washes in recent years, the chances are he would have been taken to a detention centre and eventually deported.
It’s possible that Mustafa Dawood was paid below the minimum wage at the car wash. He may not have been supplied with protective clothing. He may have worked long hours in cold weather. But even if all those things were true, like John Thompson, he might have felt that it was better than the alternative. He may have preferred to accept those hardships and at least have a little money to spend, perhaps also some camaraderie with other migrants working there, than to lead the life of penury, loneliness, and humiliation, that the UK government deliberately imposes on asylum seekers. In fact, even if he had been trapped in such work by the brute force of criminals (as opposed to that of government policy), and had actively wanted rescue, there is no saying that being identified by the authorities as a “modern slave” would have improved his lot. It was recently reported that the government has cut the weekly subsistence rate for some asylum seeking victims of “modern slavery” from £65 to £37.95, meaning that they are often forced back into low paid, precarious forms of illegal working.
In calling on us to imagine and report marginalised and rightless workers like Mustafa Dawood as potential victims of “modern slavery”, initiatives like the Safe Car Wash app overlook the fact that under existing immigration laws, the authorities do not and cannot act simply to provide victims of crime with protection and justice. Those who have infracted immigration rules by working must also be processed as immigration offenders. The fact that people processed as such are frequently held against their will in immigration detention centres where they are allowed to work, but paid well below the minimum wage for doing so, only adds to the bitter irony of their situation.
Why Marronage?
Thinking with marronage instead of “modern slavery” does not instantly solve all dilemmas about how to respond when members of marginalised populations are subject to labour exploitation or crimes of violence (and this can happen in car washes as in other informal economic settings). But it does make it possible to simultaneously respect the agency of migrants and asylum seekers and acknowledge the structural roots of their vulnerability. It therefore encourages very different forms of political action than those promoted by “modern slavery” discourse. It prompts, for instance, participation in struggles to overturn unjust and discriminatory immigration laws, resist deportations, dismantle the “hostile environment”, and abolish borders. It highlights the need for supportive involvement with the many organisations (faith based and secular) that provide material, legal, and other support to asylum seekers and undocumented migrants, and so on. Beyond this, it allows us to see connections between political struggles against borders and against other systems of domination. The appalling working conditions and employment relations on C19th whalers affected white as well as black sailors, and those with free status as well as fugitive slaves, for example. Similarly today, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants who live “off the radar” and labour in precarious conditions do so alongside others who may not be deportable, but who are typically dispossessed, excluded, stigmatised, sometimes criminalised, in other ways. Marronage potentially opens up possibilities for new and more progressive political alliances than those fostered by the concept of “modern slavery”.
MODERN MARRONAGE 