Kings & Slaves, Apologies & Reparations

His Majesty the King is currently enjoying a tour of various Caribbean countries. Sadly, this occasion for friendship and affection has been mired by various governments demanding apologies and reparations for the trans-Atlantic slave trade which ended back in 1807 (but not the trade in English and other European captives carried out by North Africans from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries).

The Cambridge World History of Slavery estimates that in 1804 there were 45 million enslaved persons around the world, of whom 37 million were in Asia. When the British sought to end the slave trade from 1807, African rulers resisted, for they had found that selling their fellow Africans to be a useful and lucrative source of income which they were loathe to abandon. The Asante kingdom, for example, which occupied much of modern-day Ghana, was a major participant in the slave trade, an inconvenient truth conveniently ignored by the current government of Ghana, which is a leading voice in the campaign for compensation from Britain. Further more, Britain spent a gigantic sum freeing the slaves of her empire and then patrolling the high seas to liberate remaining captives. It is curious that these governments are not demanding apologies from Arab nations which were continuing to enslave blacks well into the twentieth century. These oil-rich kingdoms have even more money at their disposal, but no, it is Britain they choose to harange. 

It seems that these nations are simply scrounging free money. Had African leaders better cultivated their resource-rich lands, addressed the appalling levels of corruption and administered their countries according to the rule of law rather than fighting internecine civil wars and tolerating the semi-official fiefdoms of regional warlords, they might now be economically advanced and seriously wealthy. Instead, they are leaking vast quantities of their populations to the West, and to Britain, that wicked land which owes them so much.

British governments have an irritating record of giving away the wealth of the British people in the form of 'foreign aid’ and the subsidizing of foreign nationals with no legal right to be enter the country. I hope that on this matter, at least, His Majesty’s Government will stand its ground. Foreign aid has been described as taking money from poor people in rich countries to give it to rich people in poor countries; 'slavery reparations’ is allocating money from people who never owned slaves to give to people who never were slaves. There is a technical term for this: theft. The slave trade was immoral and wicked, for it robbed the enslaved of their labour, time and dignity. Demanding huge sums of free money from British taxpayers is a reverse enslavement: British working people hand over their taxes to people on the other side of the planet for nothing in return.