by Will Jones, The Daily Sceptic
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.