Africa demands reparations from Europe despite continued African slavery
African nations are demanding slavery reparations from Britain and other European countries despite Africa’s large role in the transatlantic slave trade and its continued involvement in modern slavery.
African Union and Caribbean leaders met at a summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, this week where they resolved to demand “meaningful reparations” from European countries. The African Union Commission, which represents all of Africa’s 55 countries, is accusing former colonial powers like Britain of “systemic injustice” and insisting on “reparatory justice and true liberation.”
Caribbean nations are already demanding trillions of dollars in reparations from Europe. The African Union is expected to draft its own list of demands.
The African Union Commission has declared 2025 the year of “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations.”
African slavery
These reparations demands ignore the fact that slavery was and continues to be most prevalent in Africa. Europeans involved in the transatlantic slave trade purchased their slaves from African kingdoms. Some of those kingdoms, like Dahomey (present day Benin), begged the British not to abolish the slave trade because it was such a profitable enterprise.
A PBS “Africans in America” series companion book acknowledges that it was primarily Africans who enslaved Africans:
The white man did not introduce slavery to Africa . . . . And by the fifteenth century, men with dark skin had become quite comfortable with the concept of man as property . . . . Long before the arrival of Europeans on West Africa’s coast, the two continents shared a common acceptance of slavery as an unavoidable and necessary—perhaps even desirable—fact of existence. The commerce between the two continents, as tragic as it would become, developed upon familiar territory. Slavery was not a twisted European manipulation, although Europe capitalized on a mutual understanding and greedily expanded the slave trade into what would become a horrific enterprise . . . . It was a thunder that had no sound. Tribe stalked tribe, and eventually more than 20 million Africans would be kidnapped in their own homeland.
Africans enslave Africans to this day. According to the Global Slavery Index, roughly 7.6 out of every 1,000 Africans were living in modern slavery as of 2018. In Ethiopia, where the African summit was held, an estimated 6.3 out of every thousand people live in modern slavery, according to Walk Free. Roughly 727,000 Ethiopians are subjected to forced labor or forced marriage. The country ranks 13th in Africa for modern slavery, and the Ethiopian government has scored a 45/100 in its efforts to crack down on the practice.
