Kemi Badenoch says Africans should apologise for slavery

longbrass

This article shows why praxis matters. The Guardian does a good job of presenting different sides but doesn't really confront the structuralist assumptions at the center of the argument. Most articles like this try to force a shared meaning between groups rather than allow these groups to create meaning together outside the dominant structure that separated them. https://archive.org/details/PedagogyOfTheOppressed-English-P...

xhkkffbf

I know a black man who went to one of the big castles in Ghana that used to hold slave markets. He was shocked and humbled to find out that his family name is shared with some of the leaders that ran the slave markets in the past. He doesn't like to talk about it.

ETH_start

This really downplays that the supply side of the slave trade was overwhelmingly dominated by Africans. It also mostly omits how deeply embedded slavery was as an institution in Africa, long before European colonial powers showed up. The wealthiest man in history is Mansa Musa, of the Mali Empire, was one of the largest slave owners and sellers of his time, and he ruled long before the emergence of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, or major European participation in the trafficking of black African slaves. The article totally omits the British Empire's role in abolishing slavery across much of Africa and the rest of the world. British sailors and taxpayers paid a heavy toll in stationing the West Africa Squadron in the Atlantic for 59 years to disrupt the transatlantic slave trade, to give just one example of the United Kingdom's role in ending what had until then been an eternal institution. And pointing out that accountability should be universal, not selective, is not whataboutery. In fact, Badenoch did not engage in whataboutery at all. She demanded accountability for everybody, which is not the same thing as saying that Europe's complicity in the transatlantic slave trade is made whole by Africa's.

readthenotes1

No mention of existing illegal slavery in quite a few countries? Or that Mauritania did not criminalize slavery until 2007 and Niger in 2003?

duxup

The apology or non-apology for such things are strange to me. If someone wants to do it I don’t mind but I don’t see any benefit from it. The reparations concept seems totally disconnected from whatever it is for…. and impossible to somehow resolve long ago historical events.