Reparations

ONLY mankind is brutal to its own species. A passage from Mani Shankar Aiyar’s latest book A Maverick in Politics (2024) scrapes the scab of memory, reminding one of the horrors of the African slave trade. Visiting Senegal in the 1990s, Mani is taken to Gorée island where the first slave auction was held in 1536. For the next 300 years, it became the staging point from where millions of Africans were exported — by the French, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British. It is itself an indictment that no one from these countries knows for sure how many able-bodied men and women (who had to be healthy to become workhorses) they uprooted from their homes and transported like unfeeling cargo across the Atlantic. Estimates vary from 20 million to 40m. Six million — the equivalent of a Black Holocaust — died in transit. Mani notices a modern sign above what was once the tiny Gateway of No Return: “Lord, give my people who have suffered so much the strength to rise above their suffering.” Independent Africans are attempting to forgive. They cannot forget. British collections bulge with artefacts taken after military exploits in India. Black Americans sought a...