Reparations demand for colonialism is ‘cynical opportunism’, says theologian

Anglican priest and former Oxford theology professor Nigel Biggar has accused the African Union of “cynical opportunism” for demanding that Britain pay reparations for its “colonial crimes”.

While the African Union has yet to call a figure, Biggar, who has written a book with reference to slavery reparations, suggested the grouping would likely ask for even greater than the £18 trillion demanded by the Caribbean community.

Writing for The Telegraph, Biggar said that any such demands are based on “a caricature of the historical truth”. According to this caricature, thousands and thousands of helpless Africans were the victims of a rapacious horde of British colonisers and slave traders. 

The truth, Biggar argued, was moderately more complex as he called African nations demanding reparations “astonishingly hypocritical”.

He said that slavery was practised by Africans since not less than Roman times, with some entire kingdoms based on slave economies. One such was the Sokoto Caliphate, positioned in modern-day northern Nigeria.

Historian Mohammed Bashir Salau stated that the Caliphate was “considered one of the most important slave societies in modern history” and in raw numbers had an analogous variety of slaves to the United States – around 4 million.

Biggar notes that while the British “repented” for his or her role within the slave trade and devoted considerable financial and human resources to eradicating it, the African kingdoms that had also profited from the business were highly proof against efforts to finish it.

The colonisation of Nigeria by the British is a working example. Nigeria was not colonised in order that Brits could more easily acquire slaves. It was taken over to forestall repeated attempts by the locals to revive slavery, he said.

Citing political scientists, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape, Biggar said that British efforts to abolish slavery globally constituted “the most costly example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history”, with some 1,700 British sailors dying in anti-slavery operations.

“Britain’s campaign against slavery was a noble endeavour that was expensive in each lives and money,” he said. 

Biggar concluded by saying, “The African Union’s demand for colonial reparations is an act of cynical opportunism. But unless our elites learn to care less about signalling their virtue and more about doing justice to their very own country’s historical record, it is going to cost us all.”