Yesterday, the UN assembly passed a (symbolic and non-binding) resolution on “declaring the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and the Racialised Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime Against Humanity”
The resolution “urges member states to engage in dialogue on reparations, including issuing formal apologies, returning stolen artefacts, providing financial compensation, and ensuring guarantees of non-repetition”.

Although the full text is not yet available online, excerpts of it, the introductory speech by Ghana’s president, and most importantly, the results of the vote, have begun to filter onto the web.

These few elements alone, however, hint at an abyss of hypocrisy, sloppiness and opportunism that had rarely been reached in the Glass Palace.

Votes in favour

Scrolling through the list of more than 120 countries that accepted the declaration, some inconsistencies are striking.

First of all, all the current African states voted ‘yes’. But if indeed the trafficking of enslaved Africans was ‘the gravest crime against humanity’, the greatest culprits should be their own predecessors.

In the modern age, in fact, at least 10 million slaves were permanently for sale on the African market, mostly destined for the Arab and Turkish trade – even if we were to take the frightening figure of 18 million sold to Europeans over three centuries as true.

The Dagbon and Ashanti kingdoms themselves, which stood on the territory of present-day Ghana, became rich by selling the inhabitants of the region as slaves.

Ironically, in his introductory speech, the Ghanaian president cited two or three examples of European travellers who in their diaries praised the architecture and cleanliness of some African capitals: thus, without realising it, he gave the best proof that the African coastal kingdoms were civilised, developed and capable of entering into trade agreements as equals with slave buyers, imagining that they would make money.

Insisting on the example of the Dagbon and Ashanti kingdoms, until 1872, when the British conquest began, the human trade continued undisturbed. And even after 1901, when the conquest was completed, slavery survived where British authority was weakest.

Should, then, African countries pay reparations to themselves?
And should the UK be owed reparations for stopping and outlawing slavery?

Islamic slave trade that still lasts

The Arab world and Turkey also voted wholeheartedly ‘yes’ to a resolution that, in theory, should condemn their own crimes.
Between 10 and 18 million Africans over a millennium ended up in chains in their own countries or in the Islamic regions ofIndia, which depopulated the Horn of Africa to procure habshi, i.e. Abyssinian slaves, until the British prevented them from doing so.

Let us not mention that, in the Middle East, there are still forms of work without any protection and in humiliating conditions that often involve people of African origin. Saudi Arabia only last year gave up kafala, which was in fact a substitute for slavery.

Do Erdogan, Al-Sisi, Bin Salman and the others really expect to put their hands in their wallets to atone for the sins of their ancestors?

Finally, the charge of Brazil and other South American countries, also enthusiastic about voting ‘Yes’, is striking.
As if they were not literally built on black labour on plantations, both during colonial times and after independence.
Paradoxical as it may seem, Argentina, one of the countries that made the least use of black slaves, was the only one to vote against.

Is it possible that Brazilian President Lula and the others voted against themselves?

A trial against ‘first world’

The answer, of course, is ‘no’. As anyone can guess, there was a trick.

While the resolution addressed all ‘member states’ of the UN, Mahama’s introductory speech left no doubt: the ‘greatest crime against humanity’ for him was only the transatlantic trafficking run by Europeans, not the enslavement of Africans in general. Turks, Arabs and Indians have nothing to worry about.

Within the transatlantic trade, then, the African kingdoms that physically captured the slaves and profited from their sale were not to blame. The South American states that prospered on black labour were not to blame.
Only the Europeans and, at most, the Americans were in the dock.

As the EU rapporteur – the Greek Gabriela Michaelidou– noted in her bitter intervention, the resolution was not meant to “emphasise the scale of the atrocity of the transatlantic slave trade, the importance of remembrance and the need to continue combating slavery in its contemporary forms”.

It was meant (we assess) to make low propaganda against the countries of the current ‘first world’, portraying them as the sole agents of evil in history and trying to sponge off a few compensatory donations with the leverage of guilt.

It was meant to push the myth of an African identity and solidarity among Africans that are rarely seen in reality, and it served to align around the anti-European grievances an unlikely coalition of powers that still often make use of African slaves (first and foremost Russia in its drone factories).

Europe’s abstention: enough is enough

Trump’s America, involved in a battle against ‘woke’ and guilt-ridden rewritings of national history, voted against without regret.
All the more so since the Ghanaian president had put the USA in his crosshairs, dwelling in his speech on some school materials explaining to American children how slavery had always existed and abolishing it was a courageous deed (how dare they!).

As for the European states, they chose to abstain, including those that had never had anything to do with the African slave trade (proving that the resolution was an invocable piece of rubbish even for those with no skeletons in the wardrobe, so much so that Canada and Japan also made the same choice).

There were three official reasons for abstaining.

First: declaring that a crime against humanity was “the gravest” makes no sense and hurts the victims of the other crimes (Israel‘s vote against is well understandble in this light).

Second: international law forbids demanding reparations for an action that was not illegal when it was committed.

But perhaps the most important reason is the third: ‘The role of the General Assembly’, as Michaelidou put it, ‘is not to replace academic debate among historians’.

Truth cannot be decided by a majority. The past cannot be prostituted to propaganda.

For a European, this is a red line, a cultural assumption so profound that it prevails over all the relativism, wokism and mercantile desire for good neighbourliness that had made us in recent decades mould our relations with Africa into self-flagellation.

It was, moreover, a bourgeois way of continuing to feel the famous white man’s burden on us: they only victims and we only executioners, they only oppressed and we only oppressors, they only objects and we only subjects: at the end of the day, it always came back to ‘they inferior and we superior’.

With yesterday’s abstention at the UN, perhaps a slow coming together has begun.

Who will compensate us?

Who knows, maybe one day Europe will learn to play these same dirty games, go on the counter-attack and demand its reparations for the slavery it has had to endure.
After all, it would be entitled to at least as much as Africa.

From the early Middle Ages onwards, the Church forbade the sale of Christian slaves: thus, those millions of Europeans who were dragged off to Turkey, North Africa and Central Asia until the early 19th century were all captured by naval raids or land incursions. No European merchant gained from this, unlike in Africa. No benefit ever came to our kingdoms and republics.

The Ghanaian president described the atrocious condition of black women on the plantations of the Americas, who sometimes – in violation of canon law – suffered sexual violence at the hands of their masters.
Well, in the exact same years, white female slaves in the countries of Islam were destined by definition to perpetual sexual slavery, while their male companions were most often emasculated.

When we are mature enough to shake the burden of white man 2.0 off our shoulders, we will think about the events of the past with more clarity.
But today, unfortunately, too many of us still feel the need for a comforting position of superiority, which, since it can no longer be based on civilisation, has begun to be based on morality.

The rest of the world knows this. And, while it lasts, it takes advantage of it.