The native people are portrayed as having basic human virtues such as creative artistry ("beads of all colors, knives, axes, pins and needles") and modesty ("very modest and shy and despite living practically naked, there is never seen among them any improper or indecent behaviour,". Their native innocence is set against the corruption of civilization which is identified, in this work, with Europeans: 1. Yet this humanizing technique more often than not amounted to Europeanizing the African, allowing him to live up to an exacting standard of European refinement.īehn depicts the natives of Surinam, with whom the British live, as being in "perfect peace," as innocent as Adam and Eve. Pacheco ('Royalism and Honour'): Abolitionists sought to counter the various arguments in defense of slavery, all of which ultimately derived their power from assumptions about the African's innate inferiority, by granting the black man an individual identity- complete with feelings, abilities, and a moral life-that made it increasingly difficult to regard him as merely an alien object in the colonial system. to the support of rogues, runagades that have abandoned their own countries, for raping, murders, thefts and villainies." Refers to the oppressive colonizers as 'tyrant's whip'. No, but we are bought and sold like apes, or monkeys. my dear friends and fellow sufferers, should we be slaves to an unknown people? Have they vanquished us nobly in fight? Have they won us nobly in flight? Have they won us in honourable battle? And are we, by the chance of war, become their slaves?. He and his fellow slaves had not been won laudably in war they were captured and sold like animals, and to serve ignominious masters: "And why.
That they had lost the divine quality of men, and were become insensible asses, fit only to bear." As Oroonoko's speech to his fellow slaves suggests, it is dishonorable and treacherous enslavement that the novel objects to, not the existence of slavery as an institution. Oroonoko's rallying speech: "They suffered not like men who might find a glory, and fortitude in oppression, but like dogs that loved the whip and bell and fawned the more they were beaten.
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