'Africans had been enslaving other Africans for centuries'

HAT’S more, the tale of a “white establishment” exploiting innocent African victims is a divisively racist caricature of the truth. The “black establishment” was even more to blame. 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.

- Nigel Biggar

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 4,000 and 8,000 “pieces” [slaves] annually. Three hundred years later, Fulani Africans were running vast slave-plantations in the Sokoto Caliphate in what’s now northern Nigeria, exploiting the same number of slaves — some four million — as in the whole of the United States.

Meanwhile, the British had repented of their involvement in slave-trading and slavery, and in the early 1800s were among the first peoples in the history of the world to abolish them. They then used their imperial dominance to suppress them.