Kudos to Mahama

We hail the 123 nations that still held their consciences dear and voted for it. Our special praise goes to President Mahama for reminding the world that a certain time in the history of humanity, a whole race of people, defined superficially by the colour of their skin, were subjected to killing, maiming, and defilement. They were picked up in their homes, on the road, on their farms, in parties or banquets, with hunting gears and fishing hooks, in their sleep or on bush paths, and taken with impunity away from their homelands. They were chained like animals and placed on ships for monthslong journey to the Americas without a goodbye to family and friends, forever.

During the journeys, their sufferings were well-documented. They had no bathroom breaks. No bathrooms. They soiled themselves. They were in chains all through the journey and ate strange meals just enough to sustain them till the next. Those who were sick and not strong enough to abide the pains and floggings were thrown overboard to sharks or the inclemency of the sea.

It was their own practice of the theory of natural selection. Only those whose physiques could survive the physics and crucible of the journeys made it to the plantations of the Americas, including the United States.

The criminals were the state. So, it was lawful to degrade a fellow human. Women were natural toys of the white male slavers. They were sexually abused at will, and they had no justice except those of their oppressors.

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If this lasted for about 400 years, what other crime in human history can compare? That is why it is indeed a shame that Israel, of all nations, could speak with its conscience when it voted against it. The Holocaust, one of the sordid chapters of human history, has been condemned by Africans. But even the holocaust, in scale and intensity of suffering, cannot be overstated. All the ingredients of the Nazi crimes against the Jews were present in the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas. Yet, the Nazi horror did not outlast a decade.

It is therefore painful to read the EU making a case against voting for it on the basis that it was described as the gravest crime. We would want the august union to name what crime was worse in human history in scale and intensity.

What we saw in the act of the EU nations is a vote against immigration. It was a disguise that did not work. They could not abide the open contradiction of voting for the resolution at a time when they are treating migrants with xenophobic contempt and legal alienation.

The United States under Donald Trump only played to type. At a time he wants to abolish birthright citizenship and wants to whitewash the nation into a single racial category it would have been out of character to vote for the Mahama position. We thank the United States, the nation borne of equality as the icon of liberty for all free peoples. We thank them for their honesty.

 The United Kingdom also abstained, and the woman who heads its Conservative Party, The Tories, cried out that the country should have joined the three nations that voted against it. Kemi Badenoch’s argument was that the U.K. led the fight to abolish it. True. But the point she would not know is that when the U.K, and some religious fighters like William Wilberforce and their cause started to gain traction, it was because the industrial west had begun to find slavery less useful than raw materials from Africa. Abolition was therefore an act of enlightened self-interest. It was not a work of charity. It was greed in another form.

Also, UK and the West owe their prosperity and splendour to the toils of slaves. They want fruits but would not admit the sins on African flesh.

The vote is significant because the majority of the world’s conscience is still intact. The pangs of globalisation are still biting on the cultural level, and the positions of western nations towards alienating darker skinned folks only reinforces the glories of Mahama’s vision.

Some have made the point with logic that Africans aided the whites in their onslaughts on the African communities. We can only deny this, as Professor A.I. Akinjogbin stated, only if we want to glorify our African past. But we must note that the crime was created by the whites who set the tone for the trade and the savagery that attended it. 

We must, however, say that Mahama is standing on the shoulder of a giant. Nigeria’s own Moshood Kashimawo Abiola blazed that trail when, in the 1980’s and 1990’s, he set in motion the idea that Africans must be paid reparations for the injustices of the slavery era. His campaign was fervent, and it inspired seminars, conferences around the world and stoked high-stakes meeting in top political chambers, including the United States Congress.

He did not live long enough to establish the momentum as a legacy. The idea still simmered in consciences, and President Mahama is an inheritor of its nobility. Nigeria, of course, voted with Ghana having suffered a large number of persons shipped away from shores of ‘no return.’ 

It is poignant to note that we still have slavery in the world today, and those who voted not to condemn it may have encouraged such servitude that the U.N., and the western nations continue to condemn. Hypocrisy has its limits.