oDotO

You say we should be honest about the whole history and not just the convenient parts. I agree so let's do that. African rulers and merchants did sell captives into the Atlantic trade. Nobody serious denies it and plenty of Africans have faced it openly. Benin's president, Mathieu Kérékou, apologised for his country's part in 1999. Ghana spent years building reconciliation projects with the diaspora around exactly this history. Africa has been looking at its own role for a long time. The question is whether Britain is willing to look at its own with the same honesty. Because the scale was never equal. The ships were British, French, Portuguese and Dutch. So were the insurance, the financing, the ports, the sugar plantations and the laws that turned human beings into property. British vessels alone carried more than three million Africans across the Atlantic. A local chief selling captives on the coast didn't build Bristol or Liverpool. The demand and the machinery came from Europe and Britain sat near the top of it for most of the 18th and 19th century. You mention Britain's role in ending the trade and that part deserves credit. The rest of that story matters too. When Britain abolished slavery in 1833 it paid £20 million in compensation, around 40% of the Treasury's annual budget at the time. Every penny went to the slave owners. The enslaved received nothing and were made to keep working for their former owners as apprentices for years afterwards. That's the part of the history people find inconvenient. Then there's your point about taxpayers. You say nobody alive today should pay for something that happened generations ago. British taxpayers were paying off the loan that funded that compensation until 2015. The Treasury confirmed it so British taxpayers today have already paid for slavery. They paid to compensate the people who owned human beings. The descendants of the people who were owned are the only ones who have never received anything. If the argument is that the present shouldn't pay for the past, the British state already settled that question when it chose who to pay. On debt relief, I'm the last person who'll defend corrupt African and Caribbean elites. I spend most of my time criticising Ghana's leaders for mismanaging our country and I'll keep doing it but writing off debt in the 2000s was never reparations. Most of that debt was owed to Western lenders in the first place & much of it on terms that kept poor countries dependent on selling raw materials. Cancelling some of it was the lenders tidying up their books. It wasn't anyone acknowledging the centuries of extraction that left these economies where they started. Tony Blair expressed deep sorrow in 2006. Sorrow is something you express at a funeral you weren't responsible for. Caribbean governments are asking for a formal acknowledgement from the state that profited which is a different thing entirely. CARICOM's plan asks for an apology, help with public health and education and debt cancellation. Calling that global welfare tells me you haven't read it @KemiBadenoch As for looking forward and not backwards the Asante gold looted from Kumasi in 1874 was still sitting in British museums until 2024 when some of it was lent... not returned to the Asantehene for his jubilee. The past isn't behind anyone while Britain is still holding it in glass cases. Nobody is asking the average British worker to feel guilty for what their great-great-grandparents did. We're asking the British state, the same institution that ran the trade and compensated the slave owners to deal honestly with what it did. A country that's proud of its history should be able to handle all of it....the part where it ended the trade and the part where it built its wealth on it. You're right that the Commonwealth should look forward. It just can't do that properly while one side keeps insisting the other has nothing to complain about @KemiBadenoch