All servants imported and brought into the Country. . . who were not Christians in their native Country. . . shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves within this dominion. . . shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resists his master. . . correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction. . . the master shall be free of all punishment. . . as if such accident never happened.

Virginia General Assembly declaration, 1705

History, the story of the past, the road to discovering what happened before we, and sometimes our fathers, were born. Sometimes what you get from History depends on whose story it is. History can be manipulated to serve a particular purpose; sometimes it could be created to cover the truth. If we do not get involved in writing our history some will do us the favor even if we do not solicit their help. Black History, the story of the black man and his travails, usually start with his connection with others, especially the Europeans.

It has been said that before the first Europeans set foot on Africa slavery existed. Kingdoms were at war with kingdoms and the victorious ones took as slaves the inhabitants of the vanquished. Yes indeed, there were slaves but they were not chattels, they had their own community and they had kids and they marry their hosts.

From all indications, these African slaves in Africa worked for the masters for a particular period and are set free after fulfilling their obligation.

One could say then that when the Africans sold their brothers as slaves to the Europeans they had no means of knowing that slavery as they knew it was drastically different from what was obtainable in Europe and America.

If Africans who traded their kind could be excused at the beginning of slavery because they were not aware of the horrors the people they sold into slavery were going through, former slaves in Americas and Europe, who after gaining their freedom, engaged in slave trade cannot claim such ignorance.

In her essay Dr. Amanda Lee Brooks shed lights on the activities of Captain Paul Cuffe, a black New England sea captain, his dad, Mr. Cuffe Slocum, Mrs. Betsy Walker (A.K.A Fu-seng Be), a slave in one of the Southern colonies and Madam Tinubu, a Nigerian of the Yoruba extraction, whom I was taught in school was a nationalist but could not remember being taught that she was a slave trader. I might be wrong, maybe I was taught she was but my young mind was not developed enough to appreciate what slave trade entails. You can find Dr. Amanda Lee brooks write up here.

Joseph Cinque (A.K.A Sengbe Pieh) a member of the slaves aboard a ship called the Amistad who revolted to secure their freedom while being transported from one Cuban port to another, was also rumored to had engaged in slave trade after gaining freedom.

I was taught about slavery, at least slaves in Africa and probably Trans Atlantic slave trading. Perhaps due to the immaturity of my brain as a child, I did not see anything wrong with it or maybe I should say I did not appreciate the inhumanity inherent in such a practice. I saw root as a child and was always waiting for the next episode when it was shown as a TV series in Nigeria, to us as children, it was just an entertaining TV show.

My understanding of slavery did not occur until I started reading about it on my own and about the outraged of the black people in Diaspora against the practice. I listened to Peter Tosh’s  “no matter where you come from, as long as you’re a black man, you’re an African”. To me the song was nothing but just that, a song, the message in the song is to the effect that black men are not indigenous to whatever country they find themselves today, they were forcibly and cruelly uprooted from their homes and taken to a land that was not only foreign but hellish. 

Before he contested for presidency in Nigeria, Bashorun M.K.O Abiola talked about reparation for Africa by Europe and America for slavery I was however not aware of its movement in the US until I came to this country. Africa, if it were not such a poor continent, made so by its corrupt leaders should have been the first to pay reparation.

I gave some considerable thought to slavery and came to the conclusion that Africans must have aided and abetted the white man in selling their brothers into slavery. This conclusion was supported by various accounts of writers of the slavery phenomenon, some of which I subsequently read.

“European slave buyers made the greater profit from the despicable trade, but their African partners also prospered. Many grew strong and fat on profits made from selling their brethren. Tinubu square, commercial centre of today's Lagos and home to Nigeria's Central Bank, is named after a major nineteenth century slave trader. Madam Tinubu was born in Egbaland and rose from rags to riches by trading in slaves , salt and tobacco in Badagry. She later became one of Nigeria's pioneering nationalists.” Tunde Obadina, director of Africa Business Information Services, wrote in his essay entitled “Slave trade: a root of contemporary African Crisis”.

Concerning the trade on this Coast, we notified your Highness that nowadays the natives no longer occupy themselves with the search for gold, but rather make war on each other in order to furnish slaves. . . The Gold Coast has changed into a complete Slave Coast. - William De La Palma, Director, Dutch West India Co. September 5, 1705

From time immemorial, from all accounts, African elites have been the greatest enemies of Africa and Africans; they have been the irredeemable clogs in the wheel of its progress and that of its people.

Historian Walter Rodney estimates that by c.1770, the King of Dahomey was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol. There’s a Yoruba adage that says “biku ile opani tode ole pani” which translated literarily means “if the death in your house doesn’t kill you, outside death can not”. Applied to this situation, the conclusion would be if black people had not so shamelessly sell off their own, the Europeans might not have succeeded in enslaving them.

The so called elites were and still are insensitive to the plight of their people, unapologetic for stealing their money and generally unconcerned about the progress going on in the world in general. They are content with buying luxury cars that they feel no shame driving on death traps they call roads, they build mansions with so many rooms that they and their family cannot fully occupy in cities that have fallen into decay driving their hungry country men and women, who can barely scrape enough food together to keep themselves and their children alive, off the roads and into the gutters.

These power drunk individuals have no idea as to how to move their respective countries and their continent at large out of the doldrums of poverty and diseases. They walloped in ill-gotten wealth while their country men die of curable diseases like malaria and their children from chickenpox while others become cripple since they have no way of fighting or preventing polio.

They steal money they borrowed from developed nations, under the guise of providing basic necessities for their impoverished citizens, and guiltlessly ask for loan forgiveness, prying to see if they could borrow more in the name of their countries, steal some more and fatten their corruption enabled foreign accounts.

They are detached from the poor and blind to reality. They will rather spend billions of dollars on medical expenses abroad then fix the various mortuaries they refer to as hospitals in their own domains. Foreign medical check up is a class thing and how can they flaunt their wealth if they upgrade their hospitals?

Western countries are not free from blame in the abyss that Africa has fallen into. They are criminally liable for all the atrocities being committed by these vagabonds in power. If they are not guilty as perpetrators they are guilty by aiding and abetting these criminals. They supply them arms to kill their own while they buy cheaply the people’s God given natural resources.

The primary concern of the western world should be the people, if they are really and genuinely interested in their plights, and not the thieves, most of who stole power and lord it over their country men. Democracy that the west is trying to sell to Africa cannot flourish in the midst of poverty. As long as there is poverty the people will be manipulated to go to war against each other, believing that if they can eliminate their opponents there will be enough resources to go round amongst the conquerors.

That corruption is the bane of Africa’s problem is obvious even for the blind to see. According to one of the leaders in Africa, Former President Jerry Rawlings of Ghana:

“Admittedly, Africa may have had some notably corrupt leaders and governments.... Let us ask ourselves: where do the proceeds of this corruption end up? In the vaults of the financial and banking institutions of the Western world. For every dollar of corrupt money that is kept in Western banks, one African child dies, two African children starve and three African children suffer from disease and ignorance. There will be less corruption in Africa if there is no place to hide the proceeds of corruption or if the proceeds of corruption, once uncovered, are returned to their real owners, the people of Africa.”

One of the good things that deserve commendation is the trial of leaders who committed genocide in their countries by the international criminal courts, there is need to extend the jurisdiction of that court to include trial of corrupt leaders and those who keep the proceeds of crime for them, after all it is a fundamental principle of criminal law that those who receive stolen property are liable to be charge for the same offence as the principal perpetrators.

As long as there are no sanctions against African leaders who stole monies from their people and their cronies they will continue to steal and the people will continue to be subjected to abject poverty.

Any African leader that seeks to deposit money in a foreign bank should be made to furnish the bank with prove of how they came about it failing which the crime should be reported to the United Nations and I dare say that the jurisdiction of the court should be extended to cover all third world countries in this regard as they are the ones prone to stealing blindly from their poor countries. This will go a long way to ensure that resources are used for the benefit of inhabitants of third world countries and thus take pressure off resources of advanced countries where people run to when everything goes south in their countries.

They will of course try to steal by proxy; the media should be given free hand to obtain information regarding all government officials in these countries with view to exposing the bad eggs amongst them, the people should have the power under the law to seek redress should the government refused to prosecute especially where it involves someone in power. Office holders in these countries should be stripped of immunity.

Secondly, when monies are burrowed for a particular project some machineries should be put in place to ensure that the monies are used for the purposes stated in applying for the loan which was burrowed in the name of a sovereign country and for the benefit of the people, there ought to be a way of ensuring such monies were utilized and not diverted.

With regard to slavery, Africans at home suffered the same pains as those who were forcibly taken away for those who lost husbands, wives, children, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunties and cousins must have felt the pains of the loss.

 History should be put in the right perspectives even if it becomes apparent that those the elites put forth as heroes and heroines are villains. People like Dr. Amanda Lee brooks should be applauded for their courage in seeking the truth. Slavery happened years ago but we can learn from its lessons and people living presently should be made to see that what they did today shall be subjected to scrutiny even after they were long dead.

Africans sold their own to slavery it was an atrocity that cannot be erased, it may be forgiven but it would be a crime to sweep it under the carpet and pretend it ever happened or to down play the agony those who were at the receiving end must have felt or to dramatize something that excruciating. I can feel the indignation of Dr. Brooks at Africans for making heroes and heroines out of people who committed the atrocious act of feeding fat off their brothers’ sorrows.

Africa must be the first to tender an unreserved apology to descendants of their brothers they sold to foreigners to be taken to foreign lands. It is not an excuse that those who perpetrated these hideous acts were not aware of the horrors those they sold into slavery encountered. The fact that they took their freedom from them and collected blood money on them as if they were chattels, which they actually were labeled, is ipso facto an abominable act.

Some of the black people, now citizens of other countries, have every right to look at Africa scornfully and resolve not to have anything to do with people who were so dubious as to sell their kind for material acquisitions, what can be more evil and scandalous than that.

Africa, under the auspices of Organization of Africa unity, should take steps to actively and genuinely unite Africans home and abroad. African passports should be issued at no cost to descendants of their brothers that they sold away so that they will not require visas to visit a continent that they have as much right to as those who are presently regarded as indigenous Africans for if not for the shameless act of selling them off they will be as indigenous as anyone that lay claim to that continent. Having them ask and pay for visas is like adding salt to injury.

If we seek for Africa to be united, we, black men that God in his infinite wisdom deemed fit to put in that geographical location, must first unite. I apologize on behalf of our forbears to our brothers everywhere. They should take solace in the fact that some of them are better off, Africans are still be sold into slavery due to lack of economic advancement of that continent, at least they don’t have to leave loved ones to live in a foreign country where they undergo all sort of humiliation just to survive.