Tom Heyes

This is what happens when historical ignorance is accompanied by an astonishing degree of intellectual arrogance. First, there were no “West African countries” during the transatlantic slave trade. The region comprised kingdoms, empires, city-states and independent societies. Applying modern national identities to centuries-old history is an extraordinary display of ignorance. Second, Europeans did not arrive in Africa as benevolent abolitionists. For centuries, they financed, institutionalised and industrialised human trafficking, supplying weapons that fuelled wars and slave raids, creating an enormous market for human captives, and codifying racial slavery into their laws. African collaborators existed, but their complicity does not absolve the European empires that sustained this monstrous commerce. Entire African communities were devastated, populations displaced, villages destroyed and societies destabilised. Millions were deported across the Atlantic, while countless others suffered captivity, violence and death on African soil. Africa was itself a vast crime scene, not merely the departure point of enslaved people. And perhaps the most remarkable historical fraud is how European nations have managed to present themselves as the liberators of the very people they spent centuries enslaving. I grew up in a former French colony in Africa being taught from primary school that slavery was abolished by a Frenchman named Victor Schœlcher. It was only in 2026 ( yes this year ) that I discovered that people in former British colonies had been taught a remarkably similar story, except that their white saviour was an Englishman named William Wilberforce. Yet long before Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833, enslaved Africans in Haiti had fought a revolution, defeated European armies and proclaimed their independence in 1804. Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines were central to that struggle. In 1816, Haitian President Alexandre Pétion supplied Simón Bolívar with weapons, ammunition and military assistance to support South America’s liberation struggles, on the condition that he advance the emancipation of enslaved people. And he went on to free more than half a dozen Latin American countries. And what was Haiti’s reward for daring to liberate itself? Diplomatic isolation and, in 1825, a crushing indemnity of 150 million francs imposed by France, effectively forcing formerly enslaved people to compensate the descendants of their enslavers for the loss of their supposed property. Meanwhile, Britain compensated slave owners with £20 million following abolition, while the enslaved received nothing. Where are these stories in the European narratives of abolition? Where are Nat Turner, who led an enslaved uprising in Virginia in 1831, Queen Nzinga, who resisted Portuguese expansion and slave raiding in Central Africa, or the countless African rulers, communities and freedom fighters who resisted enslavement? Black people fought for their freedom. They rebelled, resisted, organised, sacrificed and died for it. Their liberation was never simply a gift bestowed upon them by benevolent Europeans. There is something profoundly tragic about descendants of enslaved Africans, born and educated in the lands of their ancestors’ enslavers, regurgitating sanitised colonial history, seemingly incapable of distinguishing historical scholarship from imperial propaganda. The greatest triumph of colonial indoctrination is when the descendants of its victims become the most zealous defenders of its mythology. What a pity!