Benin official offers apology for nation's role in slavery

customwire.ap.org ^

[chance33_98]

Benin official offers apology for nation's role in slavery

MOBILE, Ala. (AP) -- An official of the Republic of Benin has offered an apology to students at a Mobile school for his country's participation in the slave trade.

In 1859, Benin, on Africa's west coast, sold 116 slaves to a Mobile sailor aboard a ship called the Clotilde - the last slave ship to arrive in America. Slavery was still legal in the United States at that time, but importing slaves was not.

Simon Pierre Adovelande apologized Tuesday to the students at the Mobile County Training School.

Thirty of the slaves from that last ship eventually created their own settlement in northeast Mobile, and it became known as AfricaTown. The area is now known as Plateau.

"We want to connect with you," Adovelande told the middle school students. Adovelande is with the Beninese Agency for Reconciliation and Development, designed to improve relations between Benin and the United States.

He plans to meet with business and community leaders during his visit to discuss increasing trade and tourism between Benin and south Alabama.

Adovelande said that while he wanted to teach the children about their roots, he also wanted them to understand that his people are not much different from the people of Mobile.

"I want to eliminate the images that Africa means war, that Africa means disease, that Africa means everything that is bad," he said.

[aynrandfreak]

Is he going to apologize for the child slavery that still exists in some parts of Benin?

[blackdog]

Ya know, it's odd the way slavery had been viewed. In nice WASPY European countries and America, we as a people went to enormous expense to build prisons for criminals. We took our enemies of the state and locked them up. We then had the same public who paid for the prison system and enforcement subsequently house, feed, clothe, and educate the spouse and children of the person in prison.

Africa and other such slave selling nations peppering the globe had no such justice system. A criminal, debtor, enemy combatant, political troublemaker and his family were either killed or sold into slavery.

While this is a concept that outrages western nations who are self annointed as "civilized", how else does a poor country in the third world deal with it's criminal element in a real and cost effective manner?

If they just don't, you get Somalia, Rhodesia, Congo, and such. The ones who have some assemblance of order with a sparse justice system rely heavily on a brutal dictator and his military to dispatch the problematic rabble along with their entire families. A much more cost effective approach to governing a nation with an element of animals.

A United Nations, given the choice to pony up some funds to build prisons in countries who cannot or will not afford them, or to let that country sell it's criminals off into slavery, will gladly keep their cash and bless the practice.

[mamalujo]

MOBILE, Ala. (AP) -- An official of the Republic of Benin has offered an apology to students at a Mobile school for his country's participation in the slave trade.

Be careful what you say mr. official, an apology may lead to reparations.

where is jesse?

[Lucky Dog]

Be careful what you say mr. official, an apology may lead to reparations.

Logically, if anyone is going to be saddled with so-called reparations, it should be those who first deprived individuals of their freedom and sold them into slavery. However, reparations claims beg the question of who is justified to collect them. No one alive today in the US was ever a slave in this country. Therefore, there are no reparations due for slavery in the US.

However, as was noted in an earlier post, slavery is still practiced in other countries. Let those who wish to campaign for reparations go to those countries and demand reparations to, and for, the people are currently enslaved.

[mcg1969]

From http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/gift.html:

Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon Granted to All Persons of European Descent

Whereas, Europeans kept my forebears in bondage some three centuries toiling without pay,

Whereas, Europeans ignored the human rights pledges of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution,

Whereas, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments meant little more than empty words,

Therefore, Americans of European ancestry are guilty of great crimes against my ancestors and their progeny.

But, in the recognition Europeans themselves have been victims of various and sundry human rights violations to wit: the Norman Conquest, the Irish Potato Famine, Decline of the Hapsburg Dynasty, Napoleonic and Czarist adventurism, and gratuitous insults and speculations about the intelligence of Europeans of Polish descent,

I, Walter E. Williams, do declare full and general amnesty and pardon to all persons of European ancestry, for both their own grievances, and those of their forebears, against my people.

Therefore, from this day forward Americans of European ancestry can stand straight and proud knowing they are without guilt and thus obliged not to act like damn fools in their relationships with Americans of African ancestry.

Walter E. Williams, Gracious and Generous Grantor

[per loin]

In 1859, Benin, on Africa's west coast, sold 116 slaves to a Mobile sailor aboard a ship called the Clotilde

Benin is still selling slaves. That's where those 250 slave kids on the Etireno were being shipped from in 2001.