The Church of Scotland Falls For the Big Lie

I beg people to look at the actual history.

The Church of Scotland’s apology for its part in transatlantic slavery assumes a simplistic narrative of White oppression and Black victimhood. This found expression at the General Assembly’s formal adoption on Saturday, when representatives from Ghana and Nigeria admonished the church to “walk the talk”.

Yet, Africans—not least in West Africa—had been busy enslaving other Africans and selling them to the Romans, and then the Arabs, for centuries before the British arrived. According to former anti-apartheid activist, Martin Plaut, in his 2025 book, Unbroken Chains: A 5,000 Year History of African Enslavement, the total of African slaves traded across the Atlantic, the Sahara, and the Indian Ocean amounted to more than 41 million. Of these, the British were responsible for under 8 per cent. In the early 19^th century, the Fulani people in what’s now northern Nigeria ran slave-plantations employing around 4 million slaves—more than all the British had transported in over 150 years.