Global Africa: From Abolitionists to Reparationists

Abstract

I am greatly honored to be giving the first Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola Distinguished Lecture. I am grateful to the African Studies Association (ASA) of the United States for giving me this role. Although the first Abiola Lecture is being given today, the decision to launch such an annual event was taken by the ASA more than a year ago. That was of course before Chief M.K.O. Abiola entered the presidential race in Nigeria from which he seemed to have emerged the victor—but the results were never officially confirmed. But there is another side to Chief Abiola's concerns. This is the crusade for reparations to be paid to black people for hundreds of years of enslavement, exploitation and degradation. Africa has experienced a triple heritage of slavery—indigenous, Islamic and Western (Robertson and Klein 1983). The reparations movement seems to have concluded that although the indigenous and Islamic forms of slavery were much older than the trans-Atlantic version, they were much smaller in scale and allowed for greater upward social mobility—from slave to Sultan, from peasant to paramount chief. Indigenous systems of slavery were uniracial—black masters, black slaves. Islamic forms of slave-systems were multi-racial, both masters and slaves could be of any race or color. Indeed, Egypt and Muslim India evolved slave dynasties. Western slave systems were the most racially polarized in the modern period—white masters, black slaves (biracial) (Winks 1972; Klein 1986; Lewis 1990).