AFRICAN royals are being urged to speak up and tell the real story about the transatlantic slave trade in Africans, and to dispel the myth that they were willingly complicit in the enslavement of their own people.

This call comes from vice chancellor, The University of the West Indies (UWI), and chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission (CRC), Professor Sir Hilary Beckles who stressed that “no group of people have been more denigrated by the historians of Europe than the kings and queens and nobles of Africa within the context of colonisation”.

“For 200 years European scholars and their political supporters have promoted a thesis that seeks to justify their criminal engagement in Africa, a literature that first emerged within the context of parliamentary debates about the criminality of the transatlantic slave trade,” he said.

According to the CRC, during the Western campaign in the 19th century to illegalise the transatlantic trade in Africans,

slave traders and their allies argued that African commercial and political interests were their business partners. This analytic perspective has gained global traction, becoming the dominant narrative. This is particularly the case in the Caribbean and the Americas where it is now commonly believed that African elites were significant partners in European trading in Africans in Africa, the CRC said.

The commission said the evidence to debunk this narrative, and to contextualise its significance, is considerable though it has not gained anywhere near the level of advocacy and academic representation.

“We now have enough information from the archives to show that any king, or queen or noble or chief who stood in the way of slave trading, who opposed the slave trade, instructions came out from Europe that that king/chief should be assassinated and removed from creating an opposition to slave trading,” Beckles said.

He said that one of the effects of this thesis that African elites were partners in the slave trade is that African political leaders, influenced considerably by global propaganda of European historians, were thrown on the defensive in respect of promoting their own African reparations movement.

“The impact of this global propaganda through colonial education in Africa, as in the Caribbean, is that Africans became unsure of their own history and began to have doubt about the specifics of their own history. We have to understand that the power of colonisation in imparting a vision of history through generations of children in schools and colleges and universities [absorbs] the propaganda of European scholars,” he said.

“In the Caribbean we were subject to the same academic forces. Caribbean historians themselves were reluctant to speak about the mythology embedded in European scholarship. It took some time for Caribbean scholars to rise up and to reject this literature. The academic tide, however, is now turning and the truth is being revealed,” he added.

Beckles stressed that African kings and queens were caught up in a well-organised system where they were forced to participate or be destroyed.

“We know that they targeted the kings, destroyed the leadership, and unleashed the people. The people became stateless without a government, without institutional form, scattered and therefore vulnerable. Within that context there were some nobles who negotiated… What European historians did for 200 years was to argue that in these instances the kings and the nobles were participants, despite the fact that they were aware of the evidence of terror unleashed against African governments,” he said.

Moreover, Beckles said one of the mandates of the CRC symposium was to reconstruct this history, noting that it is important to put history in its proper context so that “our African royal families can now be provided with a platform on which to speak because the history that came out of Europe has served as a distraction from the truth of the situation, and many of the West African royal families have been silent because they have been projected incorrectly as allies in this process. We can now construct this history scientifically and provide a platform for the royal families to speak about their history and what actually happened to their families.

“We need to have this voice. We need to have emerging out of the royal families the argument that in the age of terrorism that destroyed our states, drove our families into exile, made us leaderless because our people were captured and enslaved, that we have a right to reparations and that we can join the reparations movement,” he argued.

In her address, Her Royal Highness Princess Nikiwe Bam, Mpondomise Nation, Ngxabane clan, questioned how European scholars could go to study Africa then return with a book about the indigenous peoples’ own history, stressing that contrary to what is written in those history books, “our kings would never have given away their own people to the whites or to the colonisers”.

She noted that when the European invaders came to Africa to enslave the people, the powerful kings who were the main targets “resisted with everything that they had”, with most being killed, captured or exiled.

The one-day symposium titled ‘Reparations and Royalty, Africa and Europe: Exploding Myths and Empowering Truths’ was held in collaboration with The UWI and its Centre for Reparation Research, and the PJ Patterson Institute for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy. The symposium was attended by a high-level delegation of royal African leaders.