Time to pay Africa for past wrongs

Goree Island feels more Mediterranean than African, with its narrow streets, occasional plazas, colonial architecture and bougainvillea. At the hilltop of the island there are huge cannons, last fired during the second World War. There are clear views of Dakar, three miles away on the Senegalese mainland. George Soros, the financier, has a villa here and a few other Europeans have residences, hidden behind high walls and trees. There are a few museums, some fine restaurants, a Catholic church almost 200 years old, and a mosque.

Bill Clinton came here a few years ago on one of his African trips and so did Nelson Mandela and Francois Mitterrand and several other "dignitaries". It was not for the views that they came. It was because of the significance Goree has for Africans and, particularly, for African-Americans. For it is claimed that from Goree came a large proportion of the millions of Africans who were shipped across the Atlantic in the 300 years from the middle of the 16th to the middle of the 19th century.

To mark one of the most awful crimes against humanity in human history - the Atlantic slave trade - there is a museum in Goree that recalls what happened. La Maison des Esclaves (The House of Slaves) is a two-storey building with low-ceilinged cells on the ground floor and a small corridor leading to a door which opens to the sea. The guide tells visitors that here slaves were housed in impossibly cramped conditions before being put on ships for America through this door. A horseshoe-shaped staircase leads upstairs to fine high-ceilinged rooms, which the European slave traders occupied.

Revisionist historians have disputed the centrality of Goree to the slave trade but it hardly matters, for the facts are now well established. At least 11 million Africans were enslaved. At least six of our European partners (Portugal, Spain, France, Holland, Britain and Denmark) were engaged in that trade.

The Portuguese transported over 4.6 million slaves, Britain 2.6 million. Almost half the slaves were taken from two regions of Africa, Sengambia (what is today Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea and Sierra Leone) and Congo-Angola. (These figures are taken from The Slave Trade by Hugh Thomas). Millions more were killed before they left Africa or during the crossing. And throughout there was the most extraordinary cruelty and heartbreak. Sometimes whole families, including children, were enslaved but almost always families were dispersed, never to see each other again.

There had been slavery in Africa before the Atlantic slave trade and Africans themselves were among the prime movers of the trade. But it was Europeans who transformed the slave trade into an industry and who profited massively from it. The profits financed later voyages of discovery around the world. They built canals in Britain and elsewhere that drove the industrial revolution; they built the cotton and the cloth trades.

Arguably, the slave trade was the first instance of globalisation. Slaves from Africa were taken across the Atlantic and put to work on cotton plantations, the cotton was exported from the Americas to Europe, where it was woven into cloth and the cloth was sold back to Africa in exchange for slaves. There is a lively appreciation of that dimension to the slave trade in Senegal, as I found out on a visit two weeks ago. There is an ironic appreciation of how suddenly globalisation doesn't suit Europe any more as the doors of the European Union, a union founded in part on slavery, are now closed to Africans.

Europe, which despoiled Africa of its natural resources, which enslaved millions of its people for its enrichment, which continues to operate discriminatory trade practices that further impoverishes Africa (the world Bank has estimated that if the West eliminated barriers to African trade, the region's exports would rise by $2.5 billion), which propped up and armed corrupt dictators when it suited Europe, has turned its back on the continent.

Senegal is one of the bright hopes of Africa, along with Ghana, Uganda, Botswana, Mozambique and Tanzania. There was a peaceful change of government last year with the defeat in free elections of Abdou Diouf, who had been president from 1980, by an old adversary, Abdoulaye Wade, whom Diouf had imprisoned on several occasions. There is evidence of vigorous enterprise, at least in Dakar. And the rebellion in the southern part of the country, the Casamance region, has seemed containable.

But a human disaster is unfolding which could yet engulf Senegal. It is the spillover from the civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. This has caused hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee to Guinea, which itself has been destabilised, and a rebellion there has erupted into a new war. There are more refugees and displaced persons (over 400,000, according to the Catholic relief agency, Caritas) in a tiny pocket of Guinea, than the influx of refugees and asylum-seekers into the EU last year that caused justice ministers such alarm.

Without help west Africa may become engulfed in war and further desolation. Europe surely has some obligation to the Africa it ravaged, surely has an obligation to finance humanitarian aid, to remove barriers to African trade with Europe, and, above all, to open its doors to the peoples it so grievously wronged.

vbrowne@irish-times.ie