A Realistic View of Slavery & Slave Trading

White people commonly respond to demands for reparations for slavery and slave trading by pointing out that it was whites who abolished these things...

The reason they get no credit is that black people don’t see the abolition of slavery and slave trading as quite the boon for humanity that white people do. If Africans had wanted slavery and slave trading to be abolished, they could have abolished them themselves very easily, just by ceasing to indulge in them. Instead, they met white attempts at abolition with fierce resistance. This was quite natural. Slavery was their way. As for slave trading, it gave them a good profit, and they saw nothing wrong with it...

No, the reason black people go on about slavery and slave trading is not that they deplore them but that they see that white people deplore them, who might therefore be made to feel so guilty about their forefathers’ involvement as to give black people large amounts of money in restitution...

The transatlantic slave trade lasted only a fraction of the time that Africans spent selling each other to Arabs, and the number of slaves bought by whites - perhaps ten or 12 million - was a fraction of the number bought by Arabs....

According to two independent estimates by nineteenth-century Scottish explorers, about three-quarters of the sub-Saharan African population were slaves...

Black people's affinity for slavery can still be seen today, as in the many African countries where it still flourishes...

I wonder what it will take to set the record straight.