African nations want slavery reparations. NR Tells the Truth

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A group representing most of the world’s African and Caribbean nations recently called for “a formal apology for transatlantic slavery” from every country to benefit from it. This demand hardly stands alone. As I noted back in November 2025, the African Union also launched “a new push for slavery and colonial reparations,” demanding tens of billions of dollars to compensate for “transatlantic slavery and the slave trade.” The General Assembly of the United Nations, meanwhile — a body generally sympathetic to Third Worldist demands — voted in March 2026 to recognize the white-run Atlantic portion of the historical slave trade as the “gravest crime” in all of human history.

To point out the politically incorrect obvious, there is an almost amusingly large logical problem with all of this. The list of every country “to benefit from slavery, colonialism, and conquest” at some point includes virtually every state in Africa — if not the world. As I noted in an earlier piece, most of modern Ghana — the nation that brought forward the apology resolution to the UNGA — is the territory of the “still-legendary Ashanti Empire . . . whose national economy was based almost entirely on trade in precious metals and in slaves.” Per a note in one scholarly resource, the sizable Ashanti army functioned primarily as “an instrument for capturing [slaves] in war.”

Modern-day Benin, for her part, is composed of the former kingdoms of Dahomey and Benin, which were some of the most legendary slave-trading states in history. Dahomey was long ruled over by the ruthless King Ghezo (1818–1858), who was responsible for perhaps the most widely cited quote about African slaving: “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and glory of their wealth. The mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery!” Ghezo also, negotiating with European trading partners, once stated his market position as this: “We want three things — gunpowder, [musket] ball, and rum. We have three things to sell: men, women, and children.”

For her part, today’s rising regional power of Nigeria was home to the well-armed Aro Confederacy — which operated as “one of the leading exporters of slaves to Europe and the Americas from 1690 to 1902 [!],” selling almost 900,000 battle captives and other enslaved persons — and the even more formidable Sokoto Caliphate. Following its 1804 establishment by the Muslim general and scholar Usman dan Fodio, the caliphate grew by conquest to incorporate huge chunks of modern-day Niger, Burkina Faso, and Cameroon. More notably for our purposes, Sokoto is generally considered to have been the second-largest slave society in modern world history. At its peak, the massive overall population included between 1.1 and 2.5 million slaves.

Paler North Africans, whose countries are also part of the African Union, were as bad or worse historically. Algeria, “in particular, was the home base of the legendary Barbary Pirates, who were huge players in the [global] slave trade, enslaving both Africans and Europeans.” The pirates were so global a problem, for such a long time, that they directly inspired the “Shores of Tripoli” line in the United States Marine Corps Hymn.

Egypt, too, has been described as “[moving] human chattel overseas at least as far back as 641 AD, following the conquest of that ancient state by the Rashidun Caliphate.” That strikes me as a conservative estimate: I note in my own previous writing that “they didn’t build those pyramids with backhoes.” Morocco, similarly, was known for capturing and selling not only black Africans and other Caucasian Muslims but also “Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Greeks, Portuguese, Italians, the Irish, Scandinavians, Russians, Georgians, and any other nationalities sailing in inadequately armed sea-faring vessels.”

As all of this indicates, the global slave trade was a good deal more multicolored than it has recently been conventional to think in middle-class America. Ohio State professor Robert C. Davis famously estimates that perhaps 2 million white Europeans, in total, were sold to Muslim and/or black African masters during the course of the Barbary slave trade.

An even more fascinating and awkward point regarding historical slavery is that the West’s truly unique contribution to the global bondage trade was ending it. As a wise man once said, “While white European countries were no better than any others for most of history . . . the scope of their unique and solitary commitment to cleaning up this ancient vice during the past two centuries should never be under-estimated.” By 1808, the United States had banned the slave trade, while Britain established an entire West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy to “do battle with slavers and freeing slave captives.” Over five decades, the Squadron set 150,000 to 180,000 slaves free — while losing more than 2,000 men.

In contrast, where the Wicked Colonizers™ never landed, or stayed only briefly, slavery — and similar practices such as serfdom, debt peonage, and actual caste systems — persisted far longer. Far away from the (straight, two-edged) sword and the Cross, Bhutan banned slavery in 1957, Niger in 1959, and Saudi Arabia and North Yemen in 1961. Oman did so in 1970, Papua New Guinea in 1982, Niger in 2003, and Mauritania (in practice) in 2007. Chad did not fully criminalize the Peculiar Institution until 2017 — and Afghanistan just brought a “mild” version of it back following America’s withdrawal under President Joe Biden.

Tragic, to be sure. But, given the fact that fairly major nations practice slavery today, and that roughly 50 million human beings are slaves now, it also seems obvious that the white-led portion of the historical slave trade alone was not definitively The Worst Thing in History. It would, in fact, be impossible to actually define any such thing. As legendary Chicago columnist Mike Royko once said, in a joking column about whether “toughest man of all time” Cassius Clay could actually take down Saladin — or “Ung the Rock Eater” — all time is a very long time.

The Atlantic slave trade, which involved the transshipment of at least 12 million enslaved Africans to the New World (400,000 to the young USA) was obviously a horrific crime by modern moral standards, or any standard. But, speaking frankly, it does not stand out hard against the red record of human history. The Mongol conquests — which defeated China, Russia, Iran/Persia, Iraq, Korea, and every “Stan” — killed so many people that they cooled the planet by 2–3 degrees. World War II, in our own time, took 60 million to 85 million lives and included the Holocaust. The conquest of the New World, led by ambitious knights such as Cortés and Pizarro, wiped out 95 percent of a sizable indigenous population.

While it feels more than a bit tacky to “rank” in this fashion, the Atlantic slave trade was not even the largest or worst human slave trade. The Arabic/trans-Saharan trade lasted far longer, and included at least 17 million Africans along with millions of other human beings. The ancient Romans owned tens of millions of slaves across the lifespan of their empire and treated them far more harshly than even the coldest Confederate or Moorish master — often making half-naked prisoners of war fight literal lions and hippos in Rome’s famous arenas. Real-life gladiators could not, one recalls, leave or change jobs at will....

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