Africans voice anger 200 years after slavery abolished

AFRICANS voiced their anger at a ceremony in Ghana to mark 200 years since Britain abolished the slave trade yesterday, with some saying they could not forget how the “white man” maltreated their ancestors.

Ghana, which celebrated 50 years of independence from Britain this month, commemorated the bicentenary with a ceremony at a whitewashed former slave fort at Elmina with singers and performers from Africa, the Caribbean and London.

Many expressed outrage at the brutality of a trade that shipped more than 10 million — some estimates say up to 60 million — Africans into bondage. Many did not survive.

“It was so bad the way they maltreated our forefathers, the way they chained them and imprisoned them for so many years,” said Anthony Kinful, aged 38, a storekeeper. “If I see white people now, I think badly of them.”

Britain’s first black cabinet minister Baroness Valerie Amos, herself a descendent of slaves, who was born in Guyana attended the ceremony with South African jazz icon Hugh Masekela and Jamaican-born reggae dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson.

The anniversary has raised awareness of modern-day forms of bondage, from illegal chattel slavery still practiced in some nations in Africa’s dry Sahel belt, to mafias which traffic African girls as prostitutes to the West.

“The main point is for us to realise that it is wrong to think this belongs in the past,” said Ghanaian poet Kofi Anyi Doho, who addressed the afternoon ceremony.

“The traffic in human beings is clearly not over. There are no boats to anchor next to a slave fort, but people are being forced into . . . a form of enslavement all over the world.”