Africans demand reparations for slavery
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2979644Mar 25, 2007 — ELMINA, Ghana (Reuters) - Two hundred years after Britain's abolition of the slave trade, Africans blamed the modern-day problems of their continent on the crippling legacy of the transatlantic traffic in human beings.
[...]
Portugal built sub-Saharan Africa's first permanent slave trading post at Elmina in 1492.
It passed into English hands and by the 18th century shipped tens of thousands of Africans a year through "the door of no return" on to squalid slave ships bound for the Americas.
[...]
After years of campaigning by anti-slavery activists like politician William Wilberforce, Britain banned the trade in slaves from Africa on March 25, 1807.
Britain did not outlaw slavery until 1833. The transatlantic trade continued under foreign flags for many years.
[...]
When Ghana's President John Kufuor visited London this month, Blair said Britain was sorry for the slave trade. But many Africans want more, including reparations.
Countless Africans perished on the voyage or on disease-infested plantations in the Americas. Kufuor dismissed talk of reparations because of the active involvement of Africans in the slave trade.
In neighboring Sierra Leone, one of the world's poorest countries originally founded as a haven for freed slaves, journalist Samuel Beckley said Africa was still suffering.
"Slavery took away our strong men," Beckley said at a church founded in 1808 by exiled Jamaican Maroons — slaves who revolted against British rule.
"The economic potential of Africa was put in reverse gear … The only way to make amends is reparations."
The anniversary has raised awareness of modern-day forms of bondage, from illegal chattel slavery still practiced in some nations in Africa's dry Sahel belt, to mafias which traffic African girls as prostitutes to the West.
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If this was a serious approach to the problem, it would have my full support. Yes, race-based slavery was one of the worst systematic crimes of human history. So black Africans have good reasons to demand reparations for the injustice they suffered. But instead of engaging in anti-Western hate speech, they should send the bill to Saudi Arabia and the other Arab governments, whose countries were responsible for enslaving black Africans throughout the centuries and up to the present day. Europeans traded slaves, but they didn't enslave black Africans. This kind of crime was exclusively committed by the muslim scourge that plagued Africa since the times of the first caliphs.
Without Western military pressure there would still be black slaves in all muslim countries of the region.
At least Ghana's president is aware of "the active involvement of Africans in the slave trade." But instead of clouding the truth behind the vague term "Africans", he should have mentioned the active involvement of "African muslims". It is true that slavery was also practiced by animist tribes, but not in the same scale as muslims did, and not with the aspect of systematic extermination of settlements and their deportation and trade into other parts of the world. The muslim trade empires were responsible for the commercialization of humans as mass trade goods.
When the article speaks of modern day slavery, it mentions indeed the chattel slavery in Mauretania and Sudan (unfortunately once again omitting to name the Arab perpetrators) but then it mixes the entire problem with such [censored] as "trafficking African girls as prostitutes in the West". This ridicules and plays down the whole problem. Everybody knows that the majority of African girls who manage to get into the West are eager to do so and not trafficked against their will. They engage in prostitution, because they have no chance to get another job without the necessary education. So this is no case of slavery but stupid anti-western propaganda. The same cannot be said about slavery in Sudan, where women are abducted, raped and mutilated, and their families killed. South-Sudanese girls are certainly not eager to get to Khartoum in search for a better life.
Comparing this kind of real slavery with victimless pseudo-crimes that only exist in some fanatical anti-prostitution propaganda is a denial of the real genocide, which is in fact happening in Sudan.
When the justified demands of Black Africans are put in such a biased anti-western context, they cannot expect to be taken serious. Black Africans will continue to be abused, when they let this sort of hypocrites represent their interests. Muslims will continue to enslave and decimate them and at the same time keep them busy preaching hatred against Europe and the US.
At the end they don't need to blame others, because it is their own idiocy that always turns them into victims.
Topic: Africans demand reparations for slavery (Read 7315 times)