Recently I was invited to be associated with the official plans to recognize or co-ordinate the various events to observe the bicentenary of the 1807 abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Trade in captive Africans.

You know – participation in certain groups or “committees” can either be positive, productive and stimulating, or stressful, exasperating, disappointing. Being less than Frank for now, I’ll hide my complete response to my “inclusion” on one committee by saying that so far it has been, at the minimum, interesting.

Are you all aware, however, that this coming Sunday – designated by the United Nations as International Day for the commemoration of the 200th Anniversary of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade – is a day set aside, by a resolution promoted vigorously by the UN’s Caricom member-states, to recall when this uncivilized trafficking in African human beings was outlawed by a majority of British law makers? Do you know? Or care?

You might be as ebony African – the sub-Saharan descendent of a Sierra Leonean original slave or of Ghanaian stock and not that interested in Sunday’s significance, given life’s daily challenges in this economy and culture. I’ll understand that. I’ll try to attract your attention, awaken your interest however, with my findings and perspectives on the issue. One of historical and international dimensions as much as it should concern all people of “colour.”

Firstly please appreciate that this trade, this trafficking in African human beings okayed by the British in the early 1400s through to the late 1800s, represents 400 years of the worst capital crimes against humanity. I share the view that the European Slave Trade and enslavement of Africans surpass by light years the Jewish Holocaust of six million, barbaric as threat European/German-engineered savagery was. Africans were procured and uprooted from their continent, their existence and culture destroyed and millions – 50 million, 100 million, 200 million? – killed or enslaved. (Perhaps when one sees African-descended folks around the world essaying to preserve and promote residual African customs, they are trying desperately to recapture and perpetuated their “Africaness” wherever they are!).

But why the trade?

Simply economic greed and power. Whatever the rationalizations these days, the slave trade happened because Portugal, Britain especially and their rival European “colleagues” wanted, labour for their appropriated colonies.

And yes, I can understand a few European rationalizations of the times. Right now I have a well-read, knowledgeable Christian-oriented friend who wants to explain to me that the Christian God himself prescribed enslaved servitude for a certain errant group! Divine slavery? The earliest European lawmakers of the thirteenth – fourteenth century used religion as an excuse to amass wealth and power through the “fruits” of an insidious trade and its free labour. (Ironically, if logically, it would be the Christian evangelicals – the “rebels” of the Established Christian Church who propelled the early 1800s abolition).

The European Slave Trade evolved into a racist enterprise of course. For though there was white slavery in Britain, African and Asian Slavery in the respective national/cultural/social structures, the British and Portuguese targeted Africa for human cargo for the Caribbean and American colonies. Black Sub-Sharan Africans! The merchant – slavers did not go to the vast “markets” of India, China or the Middle East first. Besides “trading routes”? Why?

Conscience and economics end it