Mpeli Nsekela

Western empires spent generations laundering their crimes through schoolbooks, dressing conquest as civilization, slavery as opportunity, and massacres as unfortunate footnotes to their supposed greatness. They taught their citizens to imagine that literacy, science, innovation, and freedom arrived in our societies aboard the same ships that carried their chains. Then people raised on this carefully distorted history mistake their ignorance for superiority and ask, “Why do they hate white people?” Perhaps begin by asking why your education required so much silence about the people your national heroes enslaved, butchered, raped, robbed, and killed. You cannot teach generations to celebrate an empire and then feign bewilderment when its victims refuse to applaud. The elites defending these lies know exactly what an honest history threatens: their inherited estates, stolen artifacts, accumulated fortunes, and the “respectable” family namesattached to them. So they scream “anti-white racism” and recruit the poor and working class white people to defend wealth they will never touch, persuading the exploited to identify with their exploiters because they share a skin color. They inherited the spoils and handed you a flag to guard them and you do it so proudly and ignorantly. Correcting those history books is a responsibility to your children as much as to ours, because peace cannot rest on the continued humiliation of people expected to honor the lies told about their suffering. Call us bitter, call us victims, choke on your imperial nostalgia if you must. The truth will still demand an accounting and it will prevail.

Kemi, congratulations on leading a major British party as a Black Woman. It takes real talent to rise to where you are and deceit is what it takes to rise as a Black leader in a western Conservative Party. It is a pity the climb did not leave room for a history book and since you chose to argue in the language of history, let us do the history. Let’s dissect your verbal diarrhea point by point. Everyone participated." Slavery existed on every continent. So did war, and nobody calls a village feud the World War. The transatlantic trade ran for 366 years (1501 to 1866) and put about 12.5 million Africans on ships, of whom about 1.8 million died before they saw the Americas, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. It ran through joint-stock companies, chartered monopolies, Lloyd's underwriters and acts of Parliament. It was hereditary, because the law made the child of an enslaved mother property from birth. It was racial, because a whole continent was defined as chattel. No other system in history combined those features at that scale. Dissolving all of it into "people from every continent" is far worse than intellectual dishonesty. Britain was a market leader, not a participant. British ships carried about 3.2 million Africans, second only to Portugal and Brazil. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) gave Britain the asiento, a thirty-year monopoly to supply 4,800 enslaved Africans a year to Spanish America. The Royal African Company, chartered in 1672 and headed by the Duke of York, later James II, branded its captives "DY". During Edward Colston's years in its leadership it shipped about 84,000 people, and roughly 19,000 died on the way. You say British taxpayers should not answer for what happened before they were born. They did. In 1833 Britain borrowed £20 million to compensate slaveholders, and taxpayers serviced that loan until 2015, including the descendants of the enslaved. So the principle you invoke was not applied when the cheque went to slaveholders. It only appears when the cheque changes direction. "Navel-gazing" is a curious charge from someone whose party spends more energy on the past (Empire nostalgia, culture war crusades) than most of those you accuse. Defend Britain if you must. But do not use your Nigerian name as the permission slip for arguments Nigerians know better than anyone.