The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam

by (Historian) Simon Webb

Mention of 12 Years a Slave reminds us incidentally how little we really know about black people’s experience of slavery. Almost all that we read about the subject has been written by white people and most of it has been exaggerated for various reasons, either to justify or condemn the practice. Of course, we know that the authors of books such as Gone With the Wind and Uncle Tom’s Cabin were white, but the same applies to memoirs like Twelve Years a Slave. Although the film was allegedly based on the autobiography of a black man who had been enslaved, the book itself was actually written by a white man called David Wilson. Reading the book of Twelve Years a Slave, which we are led to believe gives us an insight into the actual life of a black slave, we find such gems as ‘a shrewd, cunning negro, more intelligent than the generality of his race’ (Northup, 1853). One can scarcely believe that a black man would really have written anything of this sort. Just as with Gone With the Wind, this book, ghost-written by a white man, tells us little about what black people actually thought about slavery or anything else.