By Cameron Bowman
Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko is a text like no other. Probably the first English language novel, its major theme is a subject rarely discussed in the late seventeenth century: the morality of the transatlantic slave trade. When Behn wrote Oroonoko in 1688, the British were still relative newcomers to the transatlantic slave trade. Across the previous thirty years, however, they had carved out an Atlantic empire with profitable sugar colonies in Jamaica, Barbados, and Surinam. Oroonoko is set in the latter location.
Oroonoko is the story of a slave revolt, led by Oroonoko the titular character. We are first introduced to Oroonoko as a warrior prince in the West African kingdom of ‘Coramentian.’ Oroonoko himself is a ‘war-like and brave’ prince who captured and sold many prisoners of war to Europeans as slaves. Later, Oroonoko himself is sold into slavery by his uncle (the King) after he sneaks into the royal palace and visits the apartments of Imoinda, the King’s mistress and Oroonoko’s romantic partner. He is then tricked by English merchants into entering a slave ship, where he is promptly bound and transported to Surinam. When he arrives in Surinam, many of the fellow Africans he meets are people he himself had captured and sold. Eventually, Oroonoko elects to lead the African slaves in Surinam in open revolt against their white owners.
Aphra Behn is primarily remembered today for her literary career; she wrote several stories and collections of poems. She was also a staunch Royalist and employed as a spy by Charles II. Considering this, recent scholarly interpretations of Oroonoko have emphasised that Behn’s work can be read as a defence of transatlantic slavery, or even as a political parable about the politics of Restoration England. The royal figure of Oroonoko may stand for King Charles I, and his mistreatment in Surinam may represent Charles’ mistreatment in England. Yet, much of this scholarship has missed that Behn’s critique is deeply involved in seventeenth century traditions of discussing slavery: namely, the commonly accepted notion that a prisoner of war could justifiably be enslaved.
In the Roman world, when a general took captives in a campaign, the fact that he had spared their life meant he gained perpetual mastery over them and their progeny and could dispose of them as he wished. In the 1600s, when Europeans went to Africa seeking slaves, they understood a similar process to be happening. Take for example Africa, John Ogliby’s monumental 1670 geography, which asserts African princes in the interior ‘send many Slaves, partly taken in the Wars, and partly made as punishment for their offences,’ for sale to European merchants. Or Richard Ligon, who wrote one of the first British accounts of the triangular trade in 1657 and claimed that all African princes ‘made slaves’ of those whom they took in battle.
The practice of making slaves of prisoners of war is on display in Oroonoko. Our hero Oroonoko is himself a slaver. However, the novel isn’t a redemption story as Behn never has her hero grow a conscience about the people he made slaves by capturing them in war and selling them to European merchants. Because of this, some interpretations emphasise that Oroonoko isn’t an anti-slavery text in a straightforward sense. While this is correct, it misses the point that for Behn and her readers the idea that someone captured in just war could rightfully be enslaved was uncontroversial. For Behn’s readers the idea that Oroonoko had sold slaves to Europeans was exactly how they understood the slave trade to take place.
Behn, however, does want to raise questions about this practice. When Oroonoko rouses the slaves into revolt the rhetoric he uses is telling:
‘And why, said he, my dear friends and fellow-sufferers, should we be slaves to an unknown people? Have they vanquished us nobly in a fight? Have they wone us in honourable battel?…This would not anger a noble heart, this would not animate a soldier’s soul; no. But we are bought and sold like apes or monkeys, to be sport of women, fools and cowards.’
Here, while Oroonoko seems willing to accept that those taken in battle might be made slaves, he denies that Europeans, who themselves did not fight in the battles, have any right to keep them as slaves. This is an important innovation. Whereas many authors, like John Ogliby and Richard Ligon, had merely accepted that slaves could be purchased without scruple in Africa, Behn highlights the injustice involved in this formulation of slavery. Her critique challenges the core justification of the transatlantic slave trade at the time of writing, and particularly the idea that prisoners of war could be bought and sold as slaves.
Oroonoko’s rebellion fails, and he is brutally executed at the end of the novel. The emotion of the final scene is surely meant to highlight further the brutality and injustice of his enslavement. Oroonoko would go on to have a resounding impact in Britain, especially in its stage adaptation, which was performed almost continuously throughout the eighteenth century. In 1709, an anti-slavery pamphlet, containing a speech made by an enslaved person at a funeral, grounded the critique of slavery in similar language to Oroonoko’s own speech: ‘Do victory and right go always hand in hand? No, our Masters, by experience, know they don’t.’ The voice is almost identical to Behn’s Oroonoko. Throughout the eighteenth-century, defending war slavery became increasingly rare, and this was partly due to interventions like Behn’s in Oroonoko. When the anti-slavery movement began in the 1770s, it was pernicious racial stereotypes it had to fight against, not the legitimacy of old Roman ideas. It is, however, a historical fact that in Behn’s time, and in the 1770s, to speak against slavery was to push against the tide. By the 1780s Britain was the preponderant owner of slaves in the world. It would take a long time for legalised human bondage to be extinguished. In fact, the final enslaved African people in the Americas were not freed until 1888, exactly two hundred years after Behn put pen to paper to write Oroonoko.
Further Reading
Behn, Aphra Oroonoko and Other Writings. Edited by Paul Salzman. Oxford. Oxford University Press, 1994.
Hudson, Nicholas. “Britons Never will be Slaves’: National Myth, Conservatism, and the Beginnings of British antislavery.’ Eighteenth Century Studies 34, no. 4. (2001): 559-576.
Jaher, Diana. ‘The Paradoxes of Slavery in Thomas Southorne’s Oroonoko.’ Comparative Drama 42, no. 1 (2008): 51-71.Lipking, Joanna. “Others’ Slaves and Colonists in Oroonoko.’ in The Cambridge Companion to Oroonoko, edited by Derek Hughes and Janet Todd, 166-187. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
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