Omissions on a Cruel Trade: The Neglected Role of African Slavers

Last month, the United Nations General Assembly was unimpeachably correct in condemning the hideous practice of slavery in a resolution endorsed by 123 votes.  Those voting either against the resolution (Argentina, Israel and the United States) or choosing to abstain (52 in all) did, nonetheless, demonstrate why grave breaches of human rights can never be extricated from the political and historical context of their perpetration.  Importantly, such resolutions are always relevant for what they omit, susceptible to trends and pressures of the moment.

The resolution emphasised “the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity by reason of the definitive break in world history, scale, duration, systemic nature, brutality and enduring consequences that continue to structure the lives of all people through racialized regimes of labour, property and capital.”  It also called on Member States “to engage in inclusive, good-faith dialogue on reparatory justice, including a full and formal apology, measures of restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, guarantees of non-repetition and changes to laws, programmes and services to address racism and systemic discrimination”.

The question of reparatory justice for victims and descendants of the slave trade, most notably in its monetary sense, remains thorny.  In September 2025, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, stated that justice in this regard had to be expansive in nature, including “reparations in various forms”.  “To be truly effective, this approach must squarely consider the web of links between the past and the present – at the individual and societal levels, in all areas of life – in order to dismantle unjust structures and systems designed and shaped by the past.”

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) report released that same month enumerates some features of reparatory justice, among them pursuing public dialogue; reviewing educational materials, monuments, memorials and markets; emphasising the positive contributions of people of African descent; issuing heartfelt apologies; ditching denialist narratives, and establishing truth commissions.

These features are sound enough but tend to ignore the vital cog in the Atlantic Slave Trade and, more generally, the globalised slave trade.  That cog becomes something of a snare on closer inspection, revealing that slavery was not so much a “break in history” as its horrific continuation, globalised by the demand of trade and markets.  How is reparatory justice to feature, for instance, without accounting for the critical role of local chieftains and potentates on the African continent in facilitating the slave trade? These figures were hardly motivated by notions of “racial chattel enslavement”, preferring that old, and still very contemporary pursuit of profits by selling those deprived of their freedom.  Will truth telling commissions account for the significance of that role in the global slave economy, let alone the memorials, books and educational materials on the subject?

The historical role of slavery in various African kingdoms is an extensive one, continental, sprawling and international. While there was demand in Europe and the Americas, there were more than willing suppliers.  There are many instances of this that require and have received scholarly attention over time.  To name but a few: the Kanem Bornu Empire spanning the current states of Cameroon, Chad and Niger, engaged in a slave trade lasting from 900 AD to the 15^th century; the Aro Confederacy covering present-day South-Eastern Nigeria (participants in the slave trade to Europe and the Americas from 1690 to 1902); and the slavers of the Ashanti Empire, which covered present-day Ghana.

The West African Kingdom of Dahomey, covering the territory of modern Benin, offers a cruel if fascinating study on the role of African powers in the Atlantic Slave Trade.  Much of this was occasioned by an expansion of the realminitiated by King Agaja in 1720s, which included taking over the kingdom of Allada in 1724 and the kingdom of Whydah in 1727.  The seizure of the former was important for securing the vital port of Porto Nuovo, responsible for West African slave trade; the latter saw the incorporation of Ouidah, a port essential to the Atlantic Slave Trade.

Slavery was, in this sense, an indispensable annex to making war, seizing territory and seizing citizens.  The prized booty lay in the enslaved.  “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people,” claimed King Ghezo of Dahomey in the 1840s.  “It is the source of glory of their wealth … the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery”.

Having abolished the Atlantic Slave Trade in 1807 and enslavement in the British Empires in 1833, the British took it upon themselves to affect a policy of broader abolition and impairment of the trade through negotiating with West African kingdoms and targeting the vessels of countries (Spain, Portugal and the United States, for instance) still involved in the market.  Naval officer Frederick E. Forbes of the frigate HM Penelope was tasked with abolishing slavery in Dahomey in the late 1840s, hoping to convince King Ghezo to acquiesce.

Ghezo baulked at the demands, given the reliance of his kingdom’s economy on the trade with Europeans.  He also faced a domestic faction favouring abolition.  Showing how trafficking in human flesh might be substituted for some other product, the monarch suggested a gradual abolition if Britain were to encourage investment in Dahomey palm oil at the expense of the neighbouring Egba state of Abeokuta, against whom a war was being waged at the time.  With Forbes refusing to bite, the Royal Navy commenced a blockade of the kingdom’s ports in March 1851.  Ghezo, wishing to salvage the situation, offered to end enslavement if restitution for lost income could be provided.  Such compensation had, after all, been made to the sum of £20 million for its own slaveholders and administered by the Bank of England.

Might and a contingent morality were the order of the day, and Ghezo acceded to Britain’s wishes in January 1852 by agreeing to terminate the transport of slaves from Dahomey ports though continuing the market by transporting people to neighbouring states from which the slave trade could still continue.  A vicious, commercial cunning has always found its way into the slave market, and in the late 1850s Ghezo, feeling less accommodating to the British, would resume the very practices he had eschewed.

Any accounting of slavery and its complex, odious influence would also have to consider the lucrative trans-Saharan slave trade which began in Egypt and its Muslim conquest by the Rashidun caliphate in 641 AD.  While the Atlantic Slave Trade remains the foremost target of protest by many African and Caribbean states, the trans-Saharan route transported millions from Egypt to Asia, oiled by the interests of such powers as the Ottoman Empire.

More recently, the neglected dimension of African slavers has received attention in the writings of Nigerian journalist and novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, whose Igbo great-grandfather, Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku, traded in tobacco, palm produce and humans.  His slaves were purchased through the ports of Calabar and Bonny.  The author warns against judging her enterprising ancestor by current standards.  “They were simply living the life into which they were raised.”  The broader issues of African ambivalence and amnesia on the subject was further discussed by Nwaubani in the Wall Street Journal in September 2019.  She noted remarks from the former governor of Calabar, Donald Duke, whose own ancestors profited from the slave trade. “I’m not ashamed of it,” he declared with confidence, “because I personally wasn’t directly involved.”

These are the sorts of arguments, regularly employed by Western countries built on slavery yet eyeing their budgets with miserly concern, that would sink any claim for reparations and financial restitution.  The importance, as ever, is in the understanding and the acknowledgment.

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