- What care the jetty African requires?1 [35]
- Yes, thou wilt deign to hear; a man thou art
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Who deem’st nought foreign that belongs to man.
- IN mind, and aptitude for useful toil,
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The negroes differ: muse that difference sing.2
- WHETHER to wield the hoe, or guide the plane; [40]
- Or for domestic uses thou intend’st
- The sunny Libyan: from what clime they spring,
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It not imports; if strength and youth be theirs.
- YET those from Congo’s wide-extended plains,3
- Through which the long Zaire winds with chrystal stream,4 [45]
- Where lavish Nature sends indulgent forth
- Fruits of high flavour, and spontaneous seeds
- Of bland nutritious quality, ill bear
- The toilsome field; but boast a docile mind,
- And happiness of features. These, with care, [50]
- Be taught each nice mechanic art:5 or train’d
- To houshold offices: their ductile6 souls
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Will all thy care, and all thy gold repay.
- BUT, if the labours of the field demand
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Jetty means jet black. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British writers often used the terms “jetty” or “jet” when describing what they saw as the idealized beauty of exceptional Africans. See, for example, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: Or, the Royal Slave (1688), where the narrator describes Oroonoko as having skin of “perfect Ebony, or polish’d Jett” (Behn 13). ↩︎
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Grainger indicates that he is going to distinguish Africans by what he considers to be their different mental abilities and aptitudes for work. As such, he is taking on the perspective of the slave trader or buyer, who made judgments about Africans based on similar considerations. ↩︎
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Kingdom in southwest Africa north of Angola and near the modern Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). ↩︎
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Zaire or Congo river. The second longest river in Africa, it drains into the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of the DRC. ↩︎
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Grainger recommends that enslaved persons from the Congo be assigned specific trades rather than being forced to work as field laborers. ↩︎
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Malleable, flexible. ↩︎