If Anyone Should Pay Slave Reparations, It’s Ghana, Not Britain
5th November 2026
Reparations are simple when the perpetrators and the victims, or their immediate descendants, are still around. The many churches built by the Normans, including an altar on the very spot where King Harold was killed, may show that the conquerors realised they had sinned. But today? Perhaps my ancestors were enserfed by William of Normandy as were those of the homeless man on the street corner. Would we both be equally deserving of cash from the French treasury? Or equally undeserving?
The problem of reparations is less one of theory than of practice. Who exactly should receive them, and who exactly should pay them? Some conscience-stricken descendants of slave-owning families have made substantial donations to Caribbean charities. But this is not what is being demanded. Governments of several states are demanding trillions of pounds unconditionally from the British taxpayer for themselves, however undemocratic, incompetent and corrupt they may be.
Leading the international campaign – which is, in effect, being directed only against Britain – is Ghana. This in itself shows the cynicism of the whole operation. Ghana was one of the biggest slave-trading countries, and many of its people took part in the traffic. It is now demanding, in fact, to be compensated for its own crimes against humanity. It was West African countries that enslaved and sold people, and made big profits. This was the original act of violence, which made human beings into property.
As for those who exploited the people thus enslaved, the Muslim world was probably the biggest and arguably the cruellest: it made women into sex slaves and castrated men to be servants (many young boys died in agony from the effects). In the Atlantic world the biggest buyers were Brazil, France (in its colony of Saint-Domingue, later Haiti) and the United States. If reparations are due, all these should pay them.
November 5th, 2026 at 23:13
So-called “Reparations” are a shake-down scheme and nothing more. Why? Because there is no such thing as inherited guilt. To use the example of Ghana and Britain, there is no British slave-holder alive today who profited from the slave trade two centuries or more ago, nor will you find a single living slave or former slave Ghananian who was traded and thereby abused.
What makes this ridiculous scheme even more ludicrous is that Great Britain – along with the United States – is one of the two nations in history to have done the most to end the slave trade. In the early 1800s, the anti-slavery movement gathered steam in Britain and ultimately the British Royal Navy, the most powerful in the world at the time, was ordered to stop and search vessels on the high seas suspected of being involved in the slave trade, impound the ships, and bring the captives back to Britain to be freed.
The Africans themselves certainly didn’t do anything to stop the commerce of slaves. Many of the tribal chieftains became wealthy because of the practice.
If the people of Ghana really want to do something positive to strike back against the profiteering of slavery even in this, the 21st century, they ought to urge the international community to go after the Muslims. The Islamic world – in particular the Muslim nations of Africa and the Middle East – have been history’s most-prolific slavers for the last 1,400 years and whoever is in second place isn’t even close.
November 6th, 2026 at 06:09
If it weren’t for slavery Michelle Obama would be sitting in a grass hut in West Africa pounding roots for supper.
To quote the bail bondsman in JACKIE BROWN: “Is white guilt supposed to make me forget I’m running a business here?”