African Guy

You have managed the remarkable feat of being condescending about a distinction you are too ignorant to understand. Nobody said Africa lacked sovereign kingdoms before colonialism. The point, since it has apparently escaped your sanity is that those kingdoms were not identical to the countries on today’s map. Thanks to the wickedness of European colonizers, who, after centuries of conquest and plunder in the Americas, met in Berlin to establish the rules for carving up Africa, existing kingdoms and communities were subsequently sliced across colonial borders, while previously separate societies were bundled into the same territories. Communities whose villages were raided and whose people had been captured and sold into slavery find themselves enclosed within the same colonial borders as the powers that had preyed upon them. Take my country Togo for example. The country known as the Republic of Togo today has over 40 ethnic communities. One of the kingdoms that conducted the raids was split between Nigeria, Benin and Togo and its population does not even make up 5% of Togo’s population today. But many of the ethnic communities that were raided are also in modern Togo. As a result, both victims and perpetrators were forced to live in the same country because of colonialism and this has been the root of political crisis to this very day.

Genocide was very common throughout human history. So why did Germany ever have to pay reparations to Jewish victims of the Holocaust? Why should Germany be held accountable for something that had been practiced by so many civilizations before it? After all, at the beginning of that same 20th century, Germany had already committed genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia decades before the Holocaust. Massacres, ethnic persecution, enslavement and extermination were hardly new inventions of the Nazis. So why single out Germany? Why demand accountability for something that was common at the time? War was equally common in the 19th and 20th centuries. So why was Germany and Japan forced to pay reparations after the World War? Why should any country compensate another for the consequences of war when human beings have been fighting wars since the beginning of civilization? Does this reasoning sound intellectually bankrupt to you? Good. Because this is precisely the reasoning we are subjected to whenever we raise the issue reparations for the transatlantic slave trade. Suddenly, we are reminded that slavery was common at the time, that Europeans were not the only people who practiced it. Can anyone name another system of enslavement besides the transatlantic slave trade that forcibly uprooted millions of people, transported them across oceans and left generations of their descendants permanently displaced from their ancestral homelands? If so, let us demand reparations for its victims too! For centuries, European nations codified slavery into their laws, protected it through state institutions and made human beings legally recognized property. France’s infamous Code Noir, introduced in 1685, legally classified enslaved Africans as movable property, made slavery hereditary and authorized brutal punishments, including mutilation. It was only in 2026 ( yes this very year) that France’s Parliament voted to formally repeal this legislation. We are talking about state-sponsored crimes, written into law and enforced for centuries. Why should the states responsible be exempt from accountability? If your argument against reparations is that everybody was doing it, then you are not offering a historical defense. You are simply suggesting that atrocities should become exempt from accountability once enough people have participated in them.

This is what happens when historical ignorance is accompanied by an astonishing degree of intellectual arrogance. First, there were no “West African countries” during the transatlantic slave trade. The region comprised kingdoms, empires, city-states and independent societies. Applying modern national identities to centuries-old history is an extraordinary display of ignorance. Second, Europeans did not arrive in Africa as benevolent abolitionists. For centuries, they financed, institutionalised and industrialised human trafficking, supplying weapons that fuelled wars and slave raids, creating an enormous market for human captives, and codifying racial slavery into their laws. African collaborators existed, but their complicity does not absolve the European empires that sustained this monstrous commerce. Entire African communities were devastated, populations displaced, villages destroyed and societies destabilised. Millions were deported across the Atlantic, while countless others suffered captivity, violence and death on African soil. Africa was itself a vast crime scene, not merely the departure point of enslaved people. And perhaps the most remarkable historical fraud is how European nations have managed to present themselves as the liberators of the very people they spent centuries enslaving. I grew up in a former French colony in Africa being taught from primary school that slavery was abolished by a Frenchman named Victor Schœlcher. It was only in 2026 ( yes this year ) that I discovered that people in former British colonies had been taught a remarkably similar story, except that their white saviour was an Englishman named William Wilberforce. Yet long before Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833, enslaved Africans in Haiti had fought a revolution, defeated European armies and proclaimed their independence in 1804. Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines were central to that struggle. In 1816, Haitian President Alexandre Pétion supplied Simón Bolívar with weapons, ammunition and military assistance to support South America’s liberation struggles, on the condition that he advance the emancipation of enslaved people. And he went on to free more than half a dozen Latin American countries. And what was Haiti’s reward for daring to liberate itself? Diplomatic isolation and, in 1825, a crushing indemnity of 150 million francs imposed by France, effectively forcing formerly enslaved people to compensate the descendants of their enslavers for the loss of their supposed property. Meanwhile, Britain compensated slave owners with £20 million following abolition, while the enslaved received nothing. Where are these stories in the European narratives of abolition? Where are Nat Turner, who led an enslaved uprising in Virginia in 1831, Queen Nzinga, who resisted Portuguese expansion and slave raiding in Central Africa, or the countless African rulers, communities and freedom fighters who resisted enslavement? Black people fought for their freedom. They rebelled, resisted, organised, sacrificed and died for it. Their liberation was never simply a gift bestowed upon them by benevolent Europeans. There is something profoundly tragic about descendants of enslaved Africans, born and educated in the lands of their ancestors’ enslavers, regurgitating sanitised colonial history, seemingly incapable of distinguishing historical scholarship from imperial propaganda. The greatest triumph of colonial indoctrination is when the descendants of its victims become the most zealous defenders of its mythology. What a pity!

When you talk about reparations, some of the first people who come to oppose them are ignorant Africans whose confidence far exceeds their intellect telling you, “We don’t need reparations.” Do you people even understand what you are rejecting? Do you think reparations mean a workers’ compensation cheque, that we are all going to queue at the bank and receive $100 or $500 for the suffering inflicted on our ancestors? Or that those our corrupt leaders receiving a $1billion check to acquire their next mansion in Dubai or Monaco? Is that really the extent of your imagination? Reparations mean repairing structural harms left by the slave trade and its immediate child colonialism and it takes multiple forms. Economic reparations include changing trade laws and agreements that keep formerly colonised economies supplying cheap raw materials while making it difficult for them to develop industries of their own. They can include preferential access to markets, removing tariffs that penalise processed goods, supporting local manufacturing, and changing procurement rules so African businesses can compete for valuable contracts. Reparations can include tax advantages for building businesses: tax credits for productive investment, relief for new enterprises, incentives for research and manufacturing, and measures that help businesses owned by affected communities accumulate capital. They can include debt cancelation, investment funds and ownership stakes that help people build lasting wealth. They can include returning identifiable stolen assets, millions of acres land, mines, confiscated gold reserves ( More than 2/3rd of the French gold reserve was taken from African countries since the colonial era). Cultural reparations can mean returning looted artworks, sacred objects, royal treasures, manuscripts and human remains ( The German are still holding onto tens of thousands of African skulls they massacred in Namibia for ex), with the resources necessary for their preservation under the authority of the communities to whom they belong. You cannot steal somebody’s heritage, charge admission to see it, and then present a temporary loan as generosity. Repair can also include funding museums, libraries, publishing houses, theatres, film and cultural institutions whose development was obstructed or whose work was treated as inferior. Historical reparations can mean opening colonial archives, returning records, identifying burial sites, documenting atrocities and supporting research led by the communities concerned to restore the names and lives of people reduced to numbers in those shipping registers. Linguistic reparations can mean investing in reinstating African languages as languages of education, science, administration and intellectual life. That includes training teachers, producing textbooks, and recovering knowledge that colonial institutions dismissed because it was transmitted in a language they refused to respect. Our nations have been so tied by debts that the IMF and our western debtors slash our educational budgets leaving our schools underfunded, making such reforms financially impossible. And this was intentional! Reparation means our Children should be able to learn through their own languages and acquire other languages without being taught to despise the first words through which they understood the world.Reparations means revising our school curriculums, both in formerly colonised countries and in the countries that profited from their subjugation. These measures require negotiation, enforceable commitments and public accountability. But listen to how quickly some of you ignoramuses dismiss the entire demand before making the smallest effort to understand it. The ignorance is sickening !

I have always been fascinated by a particular breed of African politicians in Europe who seem to have made it their life’s ambition to be more British than the British, more French than the French, and more hostile to Africans and immigrants than the most rabid nationalists in their adopted political circles. You find them in Britain, France, Belgium and across Europe, particularly in countries that once colonized Africa. Many are the children of African immigrants, sometimes the first generation born in Europe, whose parents arrived in those countries as foreigners. Yet their children have somehow developed an almost religious devotion to the most reactionary interpretations of European nationalism. They speak about immigration as though their own parents descended from the heavens with citizenship certificates in their hands. And I am not talking about Africans who happen to be conservative. I am talking about those who appear determined to prove their loyalty to their political constituencies by expressing a degree of contempt for immigrants, Africans and their own ancestral history that would embarrass even some European conservatives. The irony would be hilarious if its consequences were not so serious. Because these politicians occupy a particularly convenient position in the racial politics of Europe. Their African ancestry gives certain political movements an opportunity to present deeply contested positions on immigration, race and colonial history through someone whose very presence is then offered as proof that racism could not possibly be involved. It is the political equivalent of the racist who insists that he cannot be racist because he once dated a Black woman. Except that this time, instead of producing a Black girlfriend, they produce a Black politician with an African surname and a spectacular appetite for defending their ideological prejudices. What particularly disgusts me is the historical revisionism that sometimes accompanies this performance. Imagine being so desperate to demonstrate your European patriotism that you begin defending an imperial history whose victims included people who looked like your grandparents. And for what? To prove that you are sufficiently British? Sufficiently French? That your African ancestry has been politically disinfected to the satisfaction of your audience? I find this obsession with proving oneself more authentically European than Europeans themselves intellectually fascinating and morally disturbing. This is the context in which I examine Kemi Badenoch’s politics. Badenoch is entitled to her conservative convictions, just as anyone else is entitled to challenge them. But her Nigerian heritage does not make her interpretation of British colonial history more credible, nor does it make her positions on race and immigration immune from criticism.

I am thoroughly exhausted by the intellectual gymnastics and extraordinary moral cowardice that emerge whenever Africans and people of African descent raise the question of reparations for slavery and colonialism. Every time we discuss the transatlantic slave trade, someone rushes to remind us that Europeans were not the only people who enslaved Africans. There was the Arab slave trade, they say. Africans sold other Africans, they insist, as though they have just unearthed some extraordinary historical revelation capable of absolving Europe of centuries of organized human exploitation. And what exactly is the argument here? That because several people participated in a crime, none of them should be held accountable? That the involvement of an African merchant somehow diminished the suffering of the African who was sold? What a spectacular bankruptcy of moral reasoning. Yes, some Africans participated in the slave trade. Some African monarchs, merchants and elites profited from the trafficking of human beings. These are historical realities that deserve serious examination. We can even discuss the Afro-Brazilian returnees who settled along the West African coast. Some were formerly enslaved Africans who had obtained their freedom in Brazil, returned to Africa and subsequently participated in the very trade that had once deprived them of their own liberty. Joaquim d’Almeida, for example, was enslaved in Brazil, obtained his freedom, returned to West Africa and became a slave trader. Francisco Félix de Souza, a Brazilian-born merchant, built an immense commercial enterprise around the trafficking of enslaved Africans from Ouidah. We can examine the royal families, merchant dynasties and political institutions that benefited from this commerce. We can investigate the fortunes accumulated, the properties acquired and the privileges transmitted across generations. I have absolutely no objection to holding African historical actors accountable for their participation in slavery. But now that we have identified some of the sellers, can we please return to the people who were SOLD? Can we talk about their descendants? Can we talk about the millions of human beings whose bodies became commercial merchandise, whose children were born into captivity and whose descendants were subsequently denied access to land, education, property, political equality and economic opportunity for centuries? The participation of an African king in the slave trade does not absolve the European merchant who purchased human beings, the shipowner who transported them, the banker who financed the enterprise, the plantation owner who extracted their labor or the governments that legalized and protected the entire system for centuries. And then comes my favorite exhibition of historical illiteracy, the claim that Europeans today cannot be expected to pay for the sins of their ancestors. How convenient! Apparently, nations can inherit the wealth of their ancestors, the institutions of their ancestors, the territories acquired by their ancestors, the commercial advantages secured by their ancestors and the accumulated prosperity produced by centuries of exploitation. Oh they can even compensate the slave owners for freeing their slaves. But the moment we discuss the obligations attached to that inheritance, history suddenly becomes irrelevant. You can inherit the estate, but apparently the debts buried beneath its foundations must remain with the dead. What an extraordinary understanding of justice!

Kemi, congratulations on leading a major British party as a Black Woman. It takes real talent to rise to where you are and deceit is what it takes to rise as a Black leader in a western Conservative Party. It is a pity the climb did not leave room for a history book and since you chose to argue in the language of history, let us do the history. Let’s dissect your verbal diarrhea point by point. Everyone participated." Slavery existed on every continent. So did war, and nobody calls a village feud the World War. The transatlantic trade ran for 366 years (1501 to 1866) and put about 12.5 million Africans on ships, of whom about 1.8 million died before they saw the Americas, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. It ran through joint-stock companies, chartered monopolies, Lloyd's underwriters and acts of Parliament. It was hereditary, because the law made the child of an enslaved mother property from birth. It was racial, because a whole continent was defined as chattel. No other system in history combined those features at that scale. Dissolving all of it into "people from every continent" is far worse than intellectual dishonesty. Britain was a market leader, not a participant. British ships carried about 3.2 million Africans, second only to Portugal and Brazil. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) gave Britain the asiento, a thirty-year monopoly to supply 4,800 enslaved Africans a year to Spanish America. The Royal African Company, chartered in 1672 and headed by the Duke of York, later James II, branded its captives "DY". During Edward Colston's years in its leadership it shipped about 84,000 people, and roughly 19,000 died on the way. You say British taxpayers should not answer for what happened before they were born. They did. In 1833 Britain borrowed £20 million to compensate slaveholders, and taxpayers serviced that loan until 2015, including the descendants of the enslaved. So the principle you invoke was not applied when the cheque went to slaveholders. It only appears when the cheque changes direction. "Navel-gazing" is a curious charge from someone whose party spends more energy on the past (Empire nostalgia, culture war crusades) than most of those you accuse. Defend Britain if you must. But do not use your Nigerian name as the permission slip for arguments Nigerians know better than anyone.