Two hundred years on we are awash in apologies and near apologies. The State of Maryland has apologised. The State of Texas is being pushed to apologise.
The Church of England, which owned slaves on plantations in the Caribbean, has apologised. The British Prime Minister has apologised. The city of Liverpool has apologised. The mayor of London has apologised.
For 400 years before the mid-nineteenth century, it is estimated that more than 12 million slaves — over half of the population of modern day Ghana — had been taken across the Atlantic in chains. For one in six it was a voyage of death.
A CBC article this week by Don Murray puts the 'white man's" role in that shameful enterprise called slavery into perspective. It recalls that the odious commerce of slavery was at the heart of the British Empire, and indeed of several empires.
One Caribbean historian estimated that profits from the slave trade provided one of the main streams of capital that financed Britain’s Industrial Revolution.
Thanks to an insightful series of programmes this month by BBC, we know how much the great British ports — London, Liverpool, Bristol — prospered on our ancestors being sold as chattels and treated as such.
The abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 did very little to stem the trade. The Spanish and Portuguese empires indeed increased the trade in Africans afterwards. In fact, slave revolts, first in St. Domingue (Haiti) and then in British Jamaica in the early 1830s helped bring a legal end to slavery in the empire in 1833.
It took several decades of citizen pressure and government pressure — British government pressure — backed up by the threat of seizure of ships for piracy for the world trade finally to be ended in the second half of the 19th century.
In all this there is one important player whose role has been stated as almost miniscule - the African. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade thrived for centuries because our own concept of humanity allowed it to thrive. It thrived because even those who resented it preferred the stance of passiveness to positive action.
Slavery thrived because Africans chose to build and expand their own kingdoms on the dehumanising trade. Yet, as we call on the West to apologise and pay reparations, we keep mute on our own role.
The very traditional authorities in what is now Ghana that made the slave trade their main exporting item on their balance of trade scale are not willing to admit and make the very amends that we seek of others.
There is hardly an ethnic group in our land that can show a clean pair of hands for the atrocities meted to our own under slavery. Though, the guilt can be graduated, in our case we don’t even want to acknowledge it.
The truth is that admitting our ancestors were wrong does not make us wrong. It makes us better understand the ways of the world. It makes us more willing to review and reform our own conceptions of morality and righteousness. It can help us aspire to greater heights of humanity.
As for talks about reparation, our view is that it simplifies and misguides Africa’s great need for support towards prosperity. It is recalled that the British Parliament in the 19th century voted the colossal sum, for the time, of £20 million in compensation — not for the slaves but for their plantation masters.
We should first accept that whiles the old economic drive, sense of racial/ethnic superiority and twisted morality that kept the slave trade alive still persist, we have not found the collective compassion and constructive energy for self-redress.
The black Diaspora does not feel it owes any allegiance to the ancestral continent. Arguably, the African in Africa continues to be driven in a large extent by the very instincts that made some of us sell our brothers and sisters, while others stood idly by.
A UN study estimates that, even in the 21st century, there are still 12 million people living in bondage. In the words of Don Murray, "It seems that death, taxes and exploitation are with us always.”
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