Something truly atrocious happened at the United Nations this week. Ghana introduced a resolution calling on the world to find that the Trans-Atlantic slave trade is “the gravest crime against humanity” and calling for reparations as a “concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”.
It further called for recognition of long-term consequences of slavery, “including structural racism and inequality” and urged the return of cultural artefacts taken during slavery and colonialism.
Basically, what Black people were asking for, finally, is a recognition of their humanity, that they are not cups or pieces to be traded and benefited off. Yet, Israel, the United States and Argentina said no. Most of Europe hid behind the curtains.
The resolution got solid support from the so-called Global South, 123 votes, but the United Kingdom and most of the European Union abstained.
It was a resounding endorsement of humanity’s refusal to acknowledge ancient crimes against the black race and a grim determination to cling to treasures stripped off this continent.
Between the 15th and 19th centuries, about two million Africans were hunted down, rounded up and chained in overcrowded ship holds for weeks during the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in which about 25 per cent perished.
For the survivors, only horror awaited: brutal exploitation in the plantations of the Americas, whipping, mutilation, total dehumanisation, including having their names, language and cultural heritage, erased.
They were property, not humans, to be treated as their owners pleased: to torture, kill, sell, buy, separate, humiliate. Hell, they could be inherited like bangles of silver.
On other side of the continent, an even more brutal version of slavery had gone on from the 7th Century to the early 20th Century. This is the Arab slave trade in which between 10 and 18 million Africans crossed the Red Sea, Indian Ocean and the Sahara desert over land for captivity in the Arab Peninsula (Oman, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Persia [modern day Iran]), the Ottoman Empire and the Indian subcontinent.
You might be wondering why, after 14 centuries of importation of Africans, there are almost no black remnants in the Middle East. The Arab Slave trade was based on mass castration of African males, a crude, unsanitary surgery, to make eunuchs for domestic servitude, soldiers, palace servants and harem attendants.
Very few males survived the gelding. Between 60 and 90 per cent died of shock, bleeding or infection. For every 10 victims, nine died in the worst cases, or six in the best of outcomes.
It was a demographic destruction of a race that was perhaps not seen anywhere before or since. This brutal trade was carried out by the Omani ruling class in East Africa (the Swahili-Arab elites), African collaborators and chiefs, traders in Zanzibar, the coasts of Kenya and Tanzania and the Sudanese on the Sahelian route.
Zanzibar was the nexus of the slave trade in this region, Stone Town was the market where they sold and castrated captives, where prices were set and distribution agreed.
Let us pause in this terrible tale and perform an important duty. If you are sitting near a Maasai, please ask the waiter to place at his feet, on your bill, a crate of whatever he is drinking, let it soothe his throat and drown his sorrows. His ancestors have earned it. The Maasai had a well-organised and fierce military that they used to block and disrupt slave columns. They formed an almost impenetrable buffer zone between the slave traders at the Coast and our communities inland. The Maasai protected us from the greed of those marauding slavers.
Others like the Omwami of Wanga and the Kabakas, since they dealt with coast traders, found themselves sticking their feet in the sludge. The ancestral Ngoni and Nyamwezi of Tanzania had no fig leaf to hide the ugliness of their past. They rounded up their neighbours and sold them at the coast to be castrated, transported to far lands, for a nightmare of a lifetime tending harems, fighting their captors wars or some other unpaid servitude. Tanzania down to Mozambique was ground zero for slavery in East Africa.
I have seen on social media that Israel has so far received $80 billion in reparation from Germany because of the Holocaust. Every year, Germany budgets $1 billion in compensation and welfare for holocaust survivors. But Israel, the US and much of Europe do not wish even to acknowledge that slavery was a crime against Africans. They don’t want to have to pay for the crimes in their ancestry. Bristol became rich by selling Africans, its most notorious slaver is a folk hero with statues in his honour. But they don’t want to risk having to share that fortune with the victims of his crimes.
Until humanity, in a meaningful way, acknowledges and makes amends for slavery, violence, discrimination and racism against black people will continue to be a wink and nudge affair—tolerated. Those madmen in the Sahara will continue to trade in Africans – in 2026 – safe in the knowledge that leaders like Tinubu of Nigeria are too muddled up to send a platoon of soldiers to break up a slave market in Libya where Nigerians are almost certainly part of the stock.
That’s why the vote at the UN, passed and ineffectual without the support of the beneficiaries of slavery, was a wasted opportunity.
