If subverted, "natural affection" morphs into an unnatural affection .
These thoughts come to mind as I read in NARRATIVE OF AN EXPEDITION TO THE ZAMBEZI by David and Charles Livingstone (1865). They write:
"A man, near whose temporary hut we slept a crowd of fugitives, started even before sunrise , to sell a boy to some black Portuguese who were purchasing slaves in a neighboring village. The fortune of war had brought this poor boy into the fellow's power, and the heartlessness of the ruffian, who had himself suffered the loss of everything by the slave hunters , made us look upon him and his race as without natural affection.
Selling each other, when on the point of perishing by starvation , not for grain, but for cloth , of which there was no great lack, was so unnatural that at first we felt as if no mortal men, except blacks, could be guilty of such cruelty; and began to speculate how the idea of property in human kind could, ever enter into beings possessing reasonable minds like our own. We remembered, however, having seen a man who was reputed humane, and in whose veins no 'black' blood flowed, parting for the sum of twenty dollars...with a good looking girl, who stood in closer relationship to him, than this boy did to the man who excited our ire; and she was the nurse of his son besides , both son and nurse made such a pitiable wail for an entire day, that even the half-caste who had bought her relented, and offered to return her to the white man, but in vain. Community in suffering does not always beget sympathy, though we naturally should expect it should. "
P.314-315, NARRATIVE OF AN EXPEDITION TO THE ZAMBEZI RIVER by David and Charles Livingstone (1865)
Thursday, April 13, 2017
ZAMBEZI RIVER
If subverted, "natural affection" morphs into an unnatural affection .
These thoughts come to mind as I read in NARRATIVE OF AN EXPEDITION TO THE ZAMBEZI by David and Charles Livingstone (1865). They write:
"A man, near whose temporary hut we slept a crowd of fugitives, started even before sunrise , to sell a boy to some black Portuguese who were purchasing slaves in a neighboring village. The fortune of war had brought this poor boy into the fellow's power, and the heartlessness of the ruffian, who had himself suffered the loss of everything by the slave hunters , made us look upon him and his race as without natural affection.
Selling each other, when on the point of perishing by starvation , not for grain, but for cloth , of which there was no great lack, was so unnatural that at first we felt as if no mortal men, except blacks, could be guilty of such cruelty; and began to speculate how the idea of property in human kind could, ever enter into beings possessing reasonable minds like our own. We remembered, however, having seen a man who was reputed humane, and in whose veins no 'black' blood flowed, parting for the sum of twenty dollars...with a good looking girl, who stood in closer relationship to him, than this boy did to the man who excited our ire; and she was the nurse of his son besides , both son and nurse made such a pitiable wail for an entire day, that even the half-caste who had bought her relented, and offered to return her to the white man, but in vain. Community in suffering does not always beget sympathy, though we naturally should expect it should. "
P.314-315, NARRATIVE OF AN EXPEDITION TO THE ZAMBEZI RIVER by David and Charles Livingstone (1865)
