The African Countries Demanding Reparations Are Astonishingly Hypocritical

The African Union’s demand for colonial reparations is an act of cynical opportunism that ignores that slavery was already endemic in Africa, and African kingdoms resisted abolition even as the British forced it on them, says Nigel Biggar in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.

The cartoonish “decolonising” tale of rapacious British colonisers exploiting helpless African victims is a caricature of the historical truth. Take the issue of slavery. Africans had been enslaving other Africans for centuries. Those they didn’t consume in human sacrifices they sold first to the Romans and then to the Arabs. A few years before the first British slave-ship arrived on the West African coast in 1563, a Portuguese witness had reported that the African kingdom of Kongo was exporting between four and eight thousand slaves annually.

Three hundred years later, Omani Arabs were running slave-plantations on the coast of East Africa, and Fulani Africans were running them in the Sokoto Caliphate in what is now northern Nigeria. Indeed, according to the historian Mohammed Bashir Salau, the Caliphate became “one of the largest slave societies in modern history”, equaling the United States in the number of its enslaved (four million).

Meanwhile, the British had repented of their involvement in slave-trading and slavery, and in the early 1800s were among the first peoples in the world’s history to abolish them. They then used their global dominance, following the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, to suppress both the trade and the institution from the Pacific North-West, across Africa and India, to New Zealand. In mid-century, the Royal Navy devoted over 13% of its total manpower to stopping slave-traffic between West Africa and Brazil.

At the same time, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton’s idea that the key to ending the slave trade and slavery in Africa was to promote alternative “legitimate” commerce was gaining traction. This led to the setting up of trading posts in West Africa, and then, when the merchants complained of the lack of security, a more assertive colonial presence on land. 

In 1851, having tried in vain to persuade its ruler to terminate the commerce in slaves, the British attacked Lagos and destroyed its slaving facilities. Ten years later, when an attempt was made to revive the trade in 1861, they annexed Lagos as a colony. Observe the developmental logic of ‘colonialism’ here: first, the humanitarian intent; then the promotion of commerce; and finally, the imposition of colonial rule. 

Contrary to the claim of Caricom reparations champion, Sir Hilary Beckles, African rulers generally opposed British anti-slavery efforts. The Beninese historian, Abiola Félix Iroko, has written that “[w]hen the slave trade was abolished [by the British], Africans were against abolition”. John Iliffe, Professor of African History at Cambridge University, agrees, writing that “[m]any African leaders resisted the abolition of the slave-trade. Kings of Asante, Dahomey, and Lunda all warned that unsold captives and criminals would have to be executed”. 

Worth reading in full.