| Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed Britain’s “deep sorrow and regret” yesterday for the country’s role in the slave trade as events take place to mark the anniversary of its abolition in the British Empire.  | | Ghanaian actors perform a show on slavery at Elmina castle in Cape Coast on Sunday, to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slave trade in Britain. Photos/REUTERS | However the second most senior cleric in the Church of England said the government should make a formal apology for the trade which was abolished by parliament exactly 200 years ago on March 25, 1807. In a recorded message for celebrations in Ghana – a source of many of the slaves – marking the bicentenary of the abolition, Mr Blair said it was right that the occasion was marked across British cities which had played a role in slavery. “It is an opportunity for the United Kingdom to express our deep sorrow and regret for our nation’s role in the slave trade and for the unbearable suffering, individually and collectively, it caused,” Blair said. Earlier this month, Mr Blair said he was “sorry” for Britain’s role but Archbishop of York John Sentamu said Mr Blair still needed to go further. “A nation of this quality should have the sense of saying we are very sorry and we have to put the record straight,” he told the BBC. “This community was involved in a very terrible trade, Africans were involved in a very terrible trade, the Church was involved in a very terrible trade ... it’s important that we all own up to what was collectively done.” On Saturday, Archbishop Sentamu joined about 3,600 others in marches through central London as part of a series of events in Britain to mark the anniversary of the abolition of the brutal trade. “The easiest thing in the world is to look back 200 years and say we wouldn’t have made those mistakes,” the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said. A campaign by British politician and philanthropist William Wilberforce persuaded first the church and then the public and finally parliament that the lucrative trade was abhorrent and should be banned. Although the practice was outlawed, the lucrative trade continued for many years with ship captains, facing heavy fines, not hesitating to dump their human cargoes overboard if they were caught. “We must act to tackle the many forms of modern day slavery, the forced recruitment of child soldiers, human trafficking and bonded labour,” he said. “There is a great deal more to do.” Meanwhile, in Elmina, Ghana, descendants of slaves and dignitaries gathered at a white-washed former slave fort to remember the more than 10 million Africans – some estimates say up to 60 million – sent on slave ships to the New World. “Through this dark era of human history, the mystery of it all ... was the indomitable human spirit that could not be broken,” said Ghana’s President John Kufuor, his voice echoing around the castle courtyard. “Man should never descend to such low depths of inhumanity to man as the slave trade ever again.” Elmina was sub-Saharan Africa’s first permanent slave trading post, built by the Portuguese in 1492. It passed to England and by the 18th century shipped tens of thousands of Africans a year through “the door of no return” to slave ships. “It was so bad the way they maltreated our forefathers, the way they chained them and imprisoned them for so many years,” said Mr Anthony Kinful, 38, a storekeeper near the Elmina fort. “If I see white people now, I think badly of them.” After years of campaigning by anti-slavery activists like politician William Wilberforce, Britain banned the trade in slaves from Africa on March 25, 1807. It did not outlaw slavery itself until 1833 and the transatlantic trade continued under foreign flags for many years. In Ghana on Sunday, Britain’s first black cabinet minister Baroness Valerie Amos, herself a descendant of slaves who was born in Guyana, joined South African jazz icon Hugh Masekela and Jamaican-born reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson at the ceremony. Countless Africans perished on the voyage or on disease-infested plantations in the Americas. Mr Kufuor dismissed talk of reparations because of the active involvement of Africans in the slave trade. In neighbouring Sierra Leone, one of the world’s poorest countries originally founded as a haven for freed slaves, journalist Samuel Beckley said Africa was still suffering. “Slavery took away our strong men,” Mr Beckley said at a church founded in 1808 by exiled Jamaican Maroons – slaves who revolted against British rule. “The economic potential of Africa was put in reverse gear ... The only way to make amends is reparations.” The anniversary has raised awareness of modern-day forms of bondage, from illegal chattel slavery still practised in some nations in Africa’s dry Sahel belt, to mafias which traffic African girls as prostitutes to the West. “The traffic in human beings is clearly not over,” said Ghanaian poet Kofi Anyi Doho. “There are no boats to anchor next to a slave fort but people are being forced into ... a form of enslavement all over the world.” | 
No comments:
Post a Comment