Think black slavery in North America was only a part of American history?
As we celebrate the tenth anniversary of Black History Month this year, many Canadians still retain the image of black history in this country that they got in school-that of U.S. slaves using the Underground Railroad to reach freedom in the North.
But according to U of T history professor Afua Cooper, this is a picture that leaves out half the story-a history of the slavery, torture, and even murder of blacks in Canada.
“Canada has always positioned itself as morally superior to the U.S.,” said Cooper. “For Canada to acknowledge its slave past, it has to look at itself in the mirror and deal with an ignoble past.”
Long before this country became a refuge for escaped slaves from the United States, Canada had its own shameful history of African enslavement, one that Cooper has made it her life’s work to study.
In her new book, The Hanging of Angélique: Canada, Slavery, and the Burning of Montréal, she chronicles the life and death of Marie-Joseph Angélique, a black slave in Montréal who was executed in 1734 for allegedly setting fire to the city.
The book tells the story of Angélique’s relationship with a white indentured servant, Claude Thibault, who attempted to escape the colony with her. Angélique’s story not only reveals the history of Canadian slavery, it also sheds light on the many types of oppressive labour systems in New France, which included aboriginal slavery.
The first slave to arrive in Canada was a young African boy christened Oliver Le Jeune, whom explorers brought in roughly the second quarter of the seventeenth century. The British and French continued to bring slaves to Canada well into the eighteenth century.
Canada’s slavery did have differences from America’s. Canada did not have as much plantation-style slavery as the United States-it was more agricultural and domestic-based. But enslavement in Canada was just as ruthless. Based on white supremacy and black subordination, Africans here were punished, whipped, and sometimes killed by their masters.
Cooper describes her work on Canadian slavery as almost accidental, something she came across in her research of the black experience in Canada.
“In many ways it was slavery in Canada as a subject that found me,” she said. “I discovered that Canada had intimate colonial links with the Caribbean and the U.S., and one of these connections was the enslavement of Africans. I discovered that slavery in Canada was an institutionalized practice and was regulated by law in both the French and British regimes.”
The ignorance of Canadian slavery is something she is steadfastly trying to get Canadians to acknowledge. She regards it as a by-product of our national pastime of hating America.
“Canada neglected its history of slavery because it is an unsavoury history, one that puts them in the same category as the United States. Integral to Canada’s national identity is American-bashing.”
She said that unlike the U.S., which “has been bashed for being a repressive slave society,” Canada sees itself as playing an almost heroic role.
“After all, we gave refuge to Black Americans who fled slavery on the Underground Railroad.”
Although the historic fire burned 40 buildings in Montréal (which constituted half the city), Cooper’s research is the first account of the story of Angélique in English, and one of the first English-language histories of slavery in Canada.
Prof. Cooper’s book will be launched at the Gladstone Hotel next Wednesday, where she’ll be accompanied by fellow U of T professor George Elliott Clarke, who wrote the book’s foreword. Cooper hopes the book will help ensure Canada’s history of slavery becomes a fixture in both our textbooks and our national narrative.
The book launch of The Hanging of Angélique takes place next Wednesday, February 15 at the Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen St. West at Dufferin) at 7:00 p.m.
