Anglican priest and former Oxford theology professor Nigel Biggar has accused the African Union of “cynical opportunism” for demanding that Britain pay reparations for its “colonial crimes”.
While the African Union has yet to name a figure, Biggar, who has written a book on the subject of slavery reparations, suggested the grouping would likely ask for even more than the £18 trillion demanded by the Caribbean community.
Writing for The Telegraph, Biggar said that any such demands are based on “a caricature of the historical truth”. According to this caricature, millions of helpless Africans were the victims of a rapacious horde of British colonisers and slave traders.
The truth, Biggar argued, was rather more complex as he called African nations demanding reparations "astonishingly hypocritical".
He said that slavery was practised by Africans since at least Roman times, with some entire kingdoms based on slave economies. One such was the Sokoto Caliphate, located in modern day northern Nigeria.
Historian Mohammed Bashir Salau stated that the Caliphate was “one of the largest slave societies in modern history” and in raw numbers had a similar number of slaves to the United States - around four million.
Biggar notes that while the British “repented” for their role in the slave trade and devoted considerable financial and human resources to eradicating it, the African kingdoms that had also profited from the business were highly resistant to efforts to end it.
The colonisation of Nigeria by the British is a case in point. Nigeria was not colonised so that Brits could more easily acquire slaves. It was taken over to prevent repeated attempts by the locals to revive slavery, he said.
Citing political scientists, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape, Biggar said that British efforts to abolish slavery globally constituted “the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history”, with some 1,700 British sailors dying in anti-slavery operations.
"Britain’s campaign against slavery was a noble endeavour that was expensive in both lives and money," he said.
Biggar concluded by saying, “The African Union’s demand for colonial reparations is an act of cynical opportunism. But unless our elites learn to care less about signalling their virtue and more about doing justice to their own country’s historical record, it will cost us all.”
