Should Africa take any blame for slavery?
| 15:00 UK time, Friday, 23 April 2010
., an influential African-American professor at Harvard has in the NY Times today. It's on the issue of reparations but with a new twist. Gates describes reparations as: 'the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors' unpaid labor and bondage'
Talk of reparations is always contentious but Gates goes one step further by exploring Africa's role in slave trading and asks whether blame should also be appropriated to Africa.
Gates:
'While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today's Congo, among several others.'
Do you agree with reparations? Do you agree with Africa taking some responsibility for the history of slavery?
