A Sorry State?

Apologies for any offence the next few paragraphs may cause.

It's not that I'm particularly aiming or expecting to offend anybody, but I thought I'd get it over with now and save future generations the anguish and shame. We, as a nation and as individuals should not apologise for slavery. What would it achieve? Would it make everything alright now? Would it free the white race from guilt?

Well, for a start, with the oily grey silt in my veins I have benefited not at all from the slave trade. Okay, maybe the fact that I am typing this out on a laptop owes some small part to the wealth the nation built on the ships into Bristol but I personally feel no guilt for the slave trade. Anything I have owes an awful lot more to the dank mills and factories, the unforgiving railway and the bone-wearying farm labour that kept my family in gainful penury for generations. I don't want an apology from the mill owners and entrepreneurs and I offer none to the descendents of the slaves.

My lot fought for a piece of the pie; got at least the illusion of a share, got some benefits from it. They established an identity as they took a part in the economy they had helped to found. Just as the black population did in the Caribbean and later in the UK; just as they did in the United States. There were people getting crapped on and by and by they at least got their heads out of the crap pile. It's a lot more about class than it is about race.

The Africans demanding apology do so in English, in their Western clothes and through First World technology: all benefits available to them through the relationship that historically existed between Europe and Africa. Black Europeans have no excuse for griping on this matter; they really have enough to get angry about with the racism that still pervades our society: and it is entirely appropriate that they take a keener interest in the way Africa is exploited today. Slavery of the Africans is not a thing I advocate, nor can I imagine myself ever advocating it; but perhaps 200 years ago I would have done. I probably would have enjoyed an evening at the badger pit or an afternoon at the hanging too. I'd like to think we have evolved since then; and there is no more point apologising for past attitudes than there is in decrying our further ancestors for picking fleas off each other to eat.

Of course, European involvement in the slave trade was about buying into and improving that which already existed. Black African sold Black African and usually creaming off the top dollar were the Arabs of North Africa. The slave trade still continues in Africa on a much smaller scale; the pertinent point is that it is in Africa, not exporting to Europe or the Americas. At the top of the tree still sit Arabs of course. The carnage of Darfur, the rampage of the Arab militias indicates the contempt which many (not all, obviously) of the Arab people hold for Black Africans. There is a lot more genocide than there is slavery.

Without the slave trade perhaps the history of Africa over the past 400 years would have been entirely one of genocide. The Arabs and the Ottomans from the North. The Europeans expanding East and protecting the Atlantic trade routes. A continent of gold, diamonds, ivory, furs and timber with only an economically useless population of Black Africans in the way. Rather than an eradication programme like those in the Americas and Australia, some Black Africans were paid to let other Black Africans be taken. The descendents of those taken have made a life elsewhere and some are now taking the best the West has to offer back to Africa: and doing a lot more good that way than demanding we apologise for the actions of our long dead uncles.