There was a time when the better off flaunted their status by buying mansions, driving fancy cars, and wearing top hats. Nowadays, privilege is commonly assumed to be shameful. So, Western elites prefer to sport superior moral status by championing fashionable ‘progressive’ causes. These are ‘luxury beliefs’ because they cost the elites nothing, while costing others a lot. One such cause is that of ‘decolonisation’, which defames Britain’s four-hundred years of colonial endeavour as a simple litany of racism, exploitation, and oppression—of which slavery is the epitome.
Now, however, ‘decolonisation’ threatens to become very expensive indeed. For, exploiting the West’s performative orgy of self-flagellation, the African Union has just joined the Caribbean Community (‘Caricom’) in demanding reparations from Britain for its “colonial crimes”. Caricom has already submitted its bill of £18 trillion. The African continent’s claim is bound to be even higher.
Yet, the cartoonish ‘decolonising’ tale of rapacious British colonisers exploiting helpless African victims is a caricature of the historical truth. Take the issue of slavery. Africans had been enslaving other Africans for centuries. Those they didn’t consume in human sacrifices, they sold first to the Romans and then to the Arabs. A few years before the first British slave-ship arrived on the West African coast in 1563, a Portuguese witness had reported that the African kingdom of Kongo was exporting overseas between four and eight thousand slaves annually.
Three hundred years later, Omani Arabs were running slave-plantations on the coast of East Africa, and Fulani Africans were running them in the Sokoto Caliphate in what is now northern Nigeria. Indeed, according to the historian Mohammed Bashir Salau, the Caliphate became “one of the largest slave societies in modern history”, equaling the United States in the number of its enslaved (four million).
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