Do African Nations Deserve Reparations for the Transatlantic Slave Trade?

The UN General Assembly passed a resolution which declared “…slavery and the transatlantic slave trade as the most inhumane and enduring injustice against humanity.” The Foreign Minister of Ghana said “The perpetrators of the transatlantic slave trade are known, the Europeans, the United States of America.” He demanded an apology from Western nations and suggested that African nations should receive compensation for these past injustices (https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/un-recognizes-slave-trade-as-gravest-crime-against-humanity/ar-AA1ZqbHK?ocid=BingNewsSerp).

The transatlantic slave trade is a blight on human history, but it is dishonest to lay the blame entirely on Europe and the United States. The MSN article linked above by Kate Hairsine says that “At least 12.5 million Africans were kidnapped and trafficked to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade…” but nowhere does the article mention that it was Africans and Arabs who did the kidnapping. Before the invention of quinine, Western slave traders restricted their activities to African ports to avoid deadly tropical diseases (Sowell, 2005).

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (2012) write that entire African states—such as “The Kingdom of the Kongo… [the] Oyo in Nigeria, [and] Dahomey in Benin…” (p. 254) were built around launching wars to enslave other Africans to sell abroad. I wonder if the foreign minister of Ghana lays any blame for slavery on the Asante Empire, located where Ghana is today, which Acemoglu and Robison write “…had been heavily involved in the capturing and export of slaves…sold at the great slaving castles of Cape Coast and Elmina” (p. 256). After the slave trade was abolished, the Asante and other African nations still engaged in enslaving others but kept the slaves for themselves for labor. Perhaps it is the descendants of slave-raiding nations who should pay reparations to the descendants of slaves sold to the Western hemisphere. Thomas Sowell (2005) suggests that efforts of intellectuals, politicians, and activists to lay the blame for slavery entirely on predominantly White western nations are used “…to induce guilt and thereby extract benefits from the white population…” (p. 111). It is no coincidence that only the wealthiest nations in the world are asked to pay reparations for the crime of slavery, which has been an institution in most societies around the world for millennia. Arab nations who also participated in the slave trade in Africa rarely face the same criticism or calls for financial compensation. Peter Bauer (2000) notes that the brutal slave trade of Africans to Arab nations lasted much longer than the Transatlantic slave trade, “Yet Arabs do not feel guilty, nor are they made to feel guilty…A feeling of guilt is genuinely a monopoly of the West” (p. 78).

— Colin Braman

References

Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson (2012). Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Currency.

Peter Bauer (2000). From Subsistence to Exchange: and Other Essays. New Forum.

Thomas Sowell (2005). Black Rednecks and White Liberals. Encounter Books.