In 1900, long after Britain and America abolished slavery, there were millions of slaves in Africa

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:03]Hello again.

[00:00:06]The slavery reparations racket is fast gaining speed and will soon become an unstoppable juggernaut.

[00:00:14]The prospect of free money for doing nothing is pretty well irresistible. And since the amounts being talked of here are simply astronomical, we can't really blame black people for trying to get in on the scam. Why wouldn't they?

[00:00:29]The focus for these attempts at blackmail and extortion are called Britain and the United States.

[00:00:36]The reason for choosing those two nations as a target has little to do with history and a good deal more to do with a pragmatic desire to put the bite on countries with more money than uh many others. This being simply a money-making scheme.

[00:00:54]There would be no point aiming at screwing money out of Gambia or Mali say because they are neither of them wealthy enough to make the thing worth the effort.

[00:01:04]It is white liberals who are the ones most likely to give into something of this kind because many of them already feel guilty and embarrassed whenever black people are around. And it is child's play to guilt trip them into believing that they owe black people a lot of money.

[00:01:22]But wait, there must surely be more to the case than that.

[00:01:26]Is it not so that it is Britain and America who should be disordering their illgotten gains because they are the countries which had the most slaves and made the most profit from them?

[00:01:39]Well, actually, no.

[00:01:42]There were many more slaves working on plantations in some parts of the world than there ever were in the Caribbean or the United States.

[00:01:51]The problem is that those plantations, the ones in places like Zanzibar or West Africa, were not run by white people, but by Arabs or black Africans. And these people owned far more black slaves than Britain or the United States ever did.

[00:02:07]This is awkward, of course, and so is generally hushed up and swept under the carpet, so to speak.

[00:02:14]In East Africa, the main slave trade took place in Zanzibar, which in the 19th century was an Omani colony. It grew so wealthy at that time from both the slave trade and the production of clothes that the Sultan of Oman transferred his sultanate from Oman to Zantibar.

[00:02:33]The clove tree originated in the Malaca Islands of Indonesia and was exported from there by Asian traders first to China and then Egypt and Europe. When the Portuguese and Dutch arrived in Indonesia in the 16th century, both countries attempted to establish worldwide monopoly for the market in clothes.

[00:02:53]They succeeded pretty well in cornering the market between them until the French obtained some seeds and began cultivating them on the island of Maitius.

[00:03:03]At some point in the early 19th century, seeds from a clove tree were brought to the Zandibar and grown there. The island's climate proved to be perfect for the plant, and it didn't take long for the first plantation to be established, which was running by 1820.

[00:03:20]15 years later, there were 4,000 clove trees growing in Zantar. And although the Dutch still had a strangle hold on the production of cloves, Zantar was bidding fair to being a major producer itself, a situation which persisted up to the present day.

[00:03:38]It was an agricultural venture which like often in the United States was entirely dependent on the labor of black African slaves owned by Arabs.

[00:03:50]On the other side of Africa, in West Africa, as late as 1900, the Sakoto Caliphate, which covered much of modern Nigeria and parts of Cameroon and Burkin Faso, were estimated to have at least a million, perhaps as many as 2 and a half million slaves, all black and mostly working on plantations.

[00:04:13]This was long after Europeans and Americans had decided that the use of slaves was immoral and wrong.

[00:04:20]This realization came much later in Africa.

[00:04:24]In Lagos is a city square which is named after a woman called Ephano Ginubu.

[00:04:30]A statue of her stands in the town of Abiguta.

[00:04:35]This statue is interesting because it commemorates a 19th century Yoruba woman who was something of a kingmaker and she's very famous in Nigeria, not least for the fact that much of her wealth came from the slave trade.

[00:04:51]This was not in the modern sense that perhaps a greatgrandfather had owned shares in a company which had commercial interest in the Caribbean, but rather that she herself bought and sold slaves and by doing so made a fortune.

[00:05:06]It's such a curious story it might be worth relating here. However, I'll try to keep this fairly brief. She was a slave trader, a black woman and very famous.

[00:05:22]We must observe that at no time have any Nigerians ever appeared to be ashamed of or embarrassed about the statue of this slave trader. On the contrary, they're proud of her.

[00:05:35]A sharp contrast to the way in which we now hide or destroy statues in Britain which have even the slightest connection with the slave trade hundreds of years ago.

[00:05:45]If there really is a duty on the part of countries where slavery contributed to the wealth of that country to compensate the descendants of slaves, then it really does seem that a nation like Nigeria should be ringing its hands in anguish and seeking out those whose ancestors suffered from slavery and giving them lots of money.

[00:06:07]There is so far no sign of this happening.

[00:06:12]If they aren't going to be making reparations for slavery, then why on earth should