Kemi Badenoch says Africans should apologise for slavery | Hacker News Reader

Kemi Badenoch says Africans should apologise for slavery

theguardian.com

14 pointsprmph13 comments

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.

No mention of existing illegal slavery in quite a few countries?

Or that Mauritania did not criminalize slavery until 2007 and Niger in 2003?

Slavery is still practiced in America in all but name.

True; just look to Latin American and Asian gangs.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/03/29/521971468/in...

The article was on reparations to Caribbean nations from the Atlantic slave trade, not current day slavery.

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...

I lived to see Paulo Freire shared on Hacker News. Thank you, Internet stranger. I wish I had more upvotes to give you.

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.

Not many people know about the Barbary Wars or thank the US North Whites for shooting up the US Southernes until they ended slavery.

It's all lumped together as "USA ended its slavery", as if the soldiers marching for the North were slave owners..

I think Whites ending slavery - among themselves AND among others - is just not something that'll ever be thanked them for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars

But that kind of slavery was not chattel slavery.

The wealth of Mansa Musa was due to gold, not slaves. You could argue that slaves were used for mining, but that's a different argument from saying he directly profited from slave trading.

There were other kinds of slavery that were incredibly brutal and that were practiced, including using slaves for ritual sacrifice.

I think slavery is the most damning part. Without it, slave trading wouldn't be possible. It's even debatable if plain slavery hurt people more than slave trading.

Every historical figure I can recall that fought to abolish slavery, didn't target slave trading specifically.

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.

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