ELMINA, Ghana (Reuters) – Two hundred years after Britain’s abolition of the slave trade, Africans marked the anniversary yesterday with a sombre ceremony recalling the suffering of their ancestors and the lasting scars of slavery.
Descendants of slaves and dignitaries gathered at a white-washed former slave fort at Elmina in Ghana 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 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.
Blair expresses
sorrow
In a recorded message, Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed Britain’s “deep sorrow and regret” for the country’s role in the slave trade but he appeared to fall short of the formal apology demanded by a senior Church of England cleric, Archbishop of York John Sentamu.
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. 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,” 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.”
