justice; and all this for the purpose of carrying on this detestable Traffick; for the purpose of transporting them to a foreign coun- try to slavery for life. I say, there is nothing which resembles these cruelties in all the ancient history of this world. “And so what has been said of slavery having existed in all ages,
I have admitted to it. But where do you find the account of any of the cruelties I have just stated? And I have by no means stated them all. I am confident you will find nothing like them, or any of them, in the whole history of Asia. It would be in vain to look for them in Europe, nor indeed in any other place... Why all this misery should be continued in compliment to a few persons con- nected with the West Indies, I cannot conceive...” Mr Fox then hit the nail on the head, at least for the cause of
today’s slavery reparation activists: “An Honourable Gentleman [Mr Manning],” Mr Fox said, “has said that ‘the African Slave Trade reproaches not us, it is a Trade carried on under British law, and that it is, to all intents a British Trade’. “It certainly is so; and therefore it is a Trade within the jurisdic-
tion and control of the British Parliament. When the Honourable Gentleman says ‘you have encouraged this Trade’, I do not deny the fact; I am bound to admit it. But then, by so much more do I
say, it is your duty to atone for it, and to put an end to the mischief which you have thereby occasioned. And if anybody suffers by the adoption of that course of justice, and the injury is satisfactorily made out, let a compensation be made to the party who sustains it. And here I would observe that I would not consider so much the magnitude of the compensation as the justice of it...”
The voting Te question was then put, and strangers withdrew. In the Com- mons the Resolution was carried, Ayes 114, Noes 15, Majority 99. When the debate was taken up by the House of Lords on 24 June 1806, it voted 41 to 20 for the Resolution, the substance of which was then duly passed into law with the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. So, in the end, the Mother of Parliaments decided that Great Britain, as a nation (and by extrapolation the other Euro- pean slaving powers), was guilty of sanctioning and encouraging the African Slave Trade via the many Acts of Parliaments it had passed over four centuries. Now, in the year of our Lord 2011, it is the turn of the slavery
reparation activists to take up the gauntlet and make Britain and the other former slaving powers pay for their sins.
New African | October 2011 | 33
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