African elites who gained from slavery must also pay back

The UN’s slavery resolution is a historic moment, but what comes next is even more important, writes legal historian Dr Femi Owolade in an Al Jazeera analysis. Leading up to the resolution, Owolade says, the African Union urged its 55 member states to pursue slavery reparations through formal apologies, the return of stolen artefacts, financial compensation, and guarantees of non-repetition. ‘This raises a question the resolution does not directly ask: reparations from whom, and to whom? If the answer is simply from European governments to African governments, then the reparations movement risks ignoring the long history of European engagement with Africa, and in doing so, delivering justice to the wrong people.’ Owolade believes that the contemporary framing of the reparations debate is seductive in its simplicity. ‘Europeans arrived in Africa, Africans were enslaved, Europeans grew rich, and Africans became impoverished. Therefore, Europe owes Africa. This narrative carries moral force, but it risks flattening the complex history of European engagement with the continent. While European actors undeniably drove the demand for enslaved labour, African political and economic elites were not passive victims. They played a significant role in capturing, transporting and selling enslaved people to European traders.’

Owolade notes in the Al Jazeera analysis that in some cases, African states, seeking to expand their treasuries and consolidate territorial power, preyed on neighbouring communities, condemning them to enslavement for profit. ‘The Oyo Empire, a powerful Yoruba state in what is now south-western Nigeria, expanded significantly in the eighteenth century through its participation in this commerce. Across the region, African elites who had the means sustained the system by exchanging enslaved people for European goods such as alcohol, textiles and other manufactured commodities. None of this diminishes European culpability in the slave trade. The demand was European. The ships were European. The plantation system was European. The racialised ideology constructed to justify slavery was European. But it does complicate the story.’ Owolade points out that the transatlantic slave trade was not solely a narrative of African victimhood and European perpetration as it is a story of elite collaboration, which did not end when the slave ships stopped sailing. ‘In Nigeria, for example, regional African rulers became intermediaries for British administrators... These African figures were far from passive subjects of British rule. They actively leveraged their relationship with British authorities to reinforce their own authority at home.' Owolde says sponsored travel to the imperial centre helped solidify personal ties between Nigerian elites and British administrators, reinforcing the system of indirect rule.’

Owolade states that the institutional successors of intermediaries and collaborators during the eras of slavery and colonial rule are now running the African postcolonial states. ‘Rather than dismantling extractive systems, many have repurposed them. Similar patterns of exclusion and extraction that defined earlier periods have been reproduced, leaving the majority of Africans short-changed by a system that continues to serve elite interests.’ Owolade says in the Al Jazeera analysis that Nigerian President Bola Tinubu’s state visit to the UK last month – complete with royal ceremony, photo opportunities and symbolic gestures – reflected this relationship whose origins lie in the very history the UN resolution condemns. ‘While the majority of Nigerians face difficult socio-economic conditions, the British Government announced that Nigerian companies would create hundreds of new jobs in the UK. This is not an anomaly but a continuation of the extractive logic that shaped the slave trade and colonialism. It endures, now recast in the language of diplomacy and partnership.’ He concludes that if compensation flows from one set of elites to another, the oppressed majority of Africans will once again be excluded. ‘True justice must run in two directions: from European states to formerly colonised societies, and from African elites to the citizens they continue to exploit.’