Tendai Ruben Mbofana
He expressed his “sincere sorrow” and “profound personal regret” for the transatlantic slave trade.
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In doing so, he reflected a growing global reckoning with history.
Yet, bound by his constitutional role, he stopped short of a formal state apology.
Across the political aisle, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham went a step further by declaring an openness to a formal state apology.
While explicitly ruling out financial reparations, he proposed debt relief and economic aid instead.
These leaders felt compelled to make such statements because the chorus demanding accountability from European powers has reached a fever pitch.
This pressure is driven by African governments and diaspora communities demanding that historical debts be paid.
Yet, as African diplomats step to international podiums with moral indignation to applaud these concessions while demanding even more from Western capitals, a glaring hypocrisy echoes across the continent.
When African leaders point their fingers across the Atlantic at London, Lisbon, and Paris, four fingers point squarely back at home.
The historical truth, no matter how uncomfortable, remains indisputable.
European slave ships did not march into the African interior with nets to capture tens of millions of people.
They stood on the coast, anchored offshore, and purchased human beings from African kings, elites, and merchant warlords.
If justice is to be whole, it must be honest.
If moral integrity is the standard by which we judge European powers, then when are African states going to confront their own ancestral complicity and issue a formal apology for their role in this monumental tragedy?
For centuries, major pre-colonial African powers turned human trafficking into a booming state enterprise.
The militarized Kingdom of Dahomey did not accidentally fall into the trade.
Its royal court built an entire war economy on capturing neighboring populations, marching captives to ports like Ouidah, and exchanging them for European firearms and manufactured goods.
The expansion of the Ashanti Empire and the economic might of the Oyo Empire were similarly fueled by the procurement and sale of prisoners of war to foreign merchants.
In the Niger Delta, specialized commercial networks enriched themselves on the commodification of human flesh.
We can come closer to home.
Even the once-mighty Mwenemutapa Empire engaged in commercial and tributary exchanges with foreign traders that commodified human lives and integrated local networks into the broader mechanics of servitude.
These were not innocent bystanders coerced at gunpoint.
They were sovereign state actors, operating with agency, economic calculation, and geopolitical strategy.
They did not sell their own people in the modern sense of pan-African unity—they sold their enemies, their neighbors, and the vulnerable populations of rival kingdoms.
But to ignore this agency today is to reduce African history to a caricature of helpless victimhood, stripped of the very sovereignty we so fiercely defend.
It is deeply dishonest to demand that modern European nations confront historical wrongs while African institutions sweep their own ancestral guilt under the rug.
The argument that current generations of Europeans should account for the sins of their forefathers applies with equal force to African societies.
These societies built wealth, expanded borders, and consolidated power on the backs of abducted brothers and sisters.
The Caribbean and African diaspora communities, whose ancestors were torn from their homes and subjected to centuries of chattel bondage, are owed more than just anti-colonial rhetoric.
They are owed a complete narrative.
How can African leaders look the African diaspora in the eye and welcome them back under tourism campaigns and birthright initiatives?
They do so while refusing to acknowledge that it was African hands that locked the iron chains before European ships set sail.
Selective memory is not justice; it is political opportunism.
Acknowledging African involvement does not absolve European empires of their central, barbaric role in constructing global racial capitalism.
The horror of transatlantic chattel slavery remains one of the greatest crimes in human history, and Europe’s institutional responsibility remains absolute.
But justice cannot be asymmetric.
Truth cannot be parsed out to suit diplomatic leverage.
It is time for the African Union, alongside the successor states of these historical empires—Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and others—to break the vow of silence.
True moral authority is not claimed by pointing out the flaws of others while hiding one’s own
It is earned through unflinching self-examination.
African states must find the moral courage to publicly apologize to the descendants of the enslaved for the indispensable role played by African rulers.
Without that self-reckoning, our calls for European reparations will remain hollow and compromised by our refusal to face the mirror.
- Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to contact him on +263715667700 or mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com