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God Politician by Garth Lean. Pub Darton, Longman and Todd, pp180, ISBN: 0 232 52690 7, £10.95
God’s Politician by Garth Lean, is probably the best light introduction to the life of William Wilberforce. In 174 pages, Lean tells the moving and gripping story of Wilberforce’s 20-year campaign in parliament to abolish the slave trade. The act to end the British slave trade , 200 years ago in March, was a turning point in the affairs of the world. It cut across all the vested economic and political interests of the age.
It was one of the most shameful periods of British and European imperial history. African slaves were treated as “goods and chattels”; the captain of the slave ship Zong threw 132 slaves overboard after 60 had died of disease on board; and in Jamaica slaves outnumbered whites by sixteen to one. The profits from such exploitation were huge, the deaths were appalling and the numbers of slaves shipped across the Atlantic were vast: an estimated three million by Britain alone.
But abolition might never have happened if Wilberforce had not undergone a profound Christian conversion. He was the rising star in the political firmament and the close friend of the Prime Minister, William Pitt. He could have become Prime Minister himself. Instead, he felt that God had laid on him two great tasks: the abolition of slavery and the ‘reformation of manners’, or morals, in British public life, which was rife with corruption and sleaze. Indeed, the book is as much about this as it is about the campaign against the slave trade. Wilberforce knew that in undertaking such a calling he was sacrificing the top political job: those who conspired against him would see to that. Lean tells how Wilberforce came to his new conviction and the people who influenced him, including the former slave ship captain and convert John Newton who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace.
Wilberforce would never had done it alone, and Lean’s book - first published in 1980 and reissued in an attractive new edition - tells of the ‘Clapham saints’, in parliament and churches, and including former African slaves who had won their freedom, who campaigned together. In his foreword, Jim Wallis, the author of God’s Politics and President of Sojourners/Call to Renewal in Washington DC, writes that “Wilberforce profoundly changed the political and social climate of his time. His life is a testament to the power of conversion and the persistence of faith.” Wallis hopes that Lean’s book “will inspire this generation of Christians to reunite faith and social justice in our time”.
Mike Smith
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