On every 25 March since 2007, the United Nations has observed the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
We must first note that African Stream refers to this event as the European slave trade, as we put the responsibility on the people who forced slavery upon our ancestors rather than blaming the body of water through which the ships sailed.
Europeans kidnapped and forcibly transported between 10 million and 12 million Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas to be sold into slavery beginning in the late 15th century.
The Portuguese started trading Africans, but the Spanish, Dutch, English and French soon joined. The trade reached its peak in the 18th century.
Slavery allowed European settler-colonists to till occupied land in the Americas for the raw materials needed to make products to sell worldwide, allowing the burgeoning economic system called capitalism to evolve from mercantilism to industrialism to the finance capitalism we see today. Meanwhile, the trade depopulated parts of Africa while creating a comprador class of African leaders who sold out their people.
As the trade came to a close, European powers carved up Africa during the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, providing certain European states with control over different parts of Africa to loot the continent’s resources. The racial hierarchy that slavery imposed exists today, with Western financial institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, imposing austerity, labour deregulation and currency devaluations that loot wealth and lower living standards.
CARICOM, a Caribbean regional body, now claims $33 trillion from Europe. Meanwhile, a US consulting firm, Brattle Group, calculated in 2024 that all enslaving countries owed between $100 trillion to $131 trillion to 31 countries.
As we remember the victims of the horrific European slave trade, we should not forget that imperialist shackles remain in Africa and the Americas.
Sources
https://bvinews.com/caribbean-asks-europe-for-33-trillion-in-reparations
https://www.britannica.com/topic/transatlantic-slave-trade
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1837/slavery-in-plantation-agriculture/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zxt3gk7/revision/1
https://actionaid.org/publications/2023/fifty-years-failure-imf-debt-and-austerity-africa
https://www.un.org/en/observances/transatlantic-slave-trade