Remembrance, and the Reparatory Ethos, 2025

(Being text of keynote by Professor WOLE SOYINKA to the United Nations’ annual ceremony in observance of the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, under the theme: “Acknowledge the past. Repair the present. Build a future of dignity and justice,” held March 25, 2025 at UN Headquarters in New York. The ceremony was held as an official plenary meeting of the UN General Assembly)

Madam President, Honorable members of the General Assembly. 

There is a compelling relevance in my recalling prior occasions when I have had the honour of addressing this gathering. The most memorable, without question, took place during the final phase of the dismantling of the South African slave encampment that went by the name of Apartheid. One vivid image I still retain from that session was that of Archbishop Desmond Tutu breaking into a solo dance routine in the middle of his intervention. His sudden possession by Terpischore, the Grecian Muse of Dance, was however instigated by Ogun, the Yoruba Muse of Liberation, Equity and Justice, obviously, since that impromptu turn occurred at that point when the revered man of God attempted to convey the sensation of what it felt like when a man, at his advanced age, a spiritual leader anywhere, cast a vote for the first time in his life.

Another occasion worthy of recall happened through surrogation, since you neither heard nor saw any of the participants. We were not physically present in this chamber, yet we were, and most intensely so. We were active within stone’s throw, just across the street on First Avenue,  addressing you from a session organized by CREDO, a Human Rights organization. The purpose was to place on trial an African dictator of a decidedly racist orientation, whose plantation overseers, known as the Janjaweed had placed millions of African autochthones under arbitrary disposal. Just as in its sister, more notorious encampment further south, this existence of millions under mass subjugation was actualized on their own ancestral soil. Our mimic event took place in an apartment with a room-length glass window which overlooked this very building, positioned so that the flags of all nations fluttered – as they do up till now -  in the background, providing us a United Nations symbolic supervision.

The foregoing suffices, I hope, to propel us towards a seizure, if not exactly an unassailable definition, of how it feels to undergo an approximate experience of the existential actualities of enslavement. It means - no matter one’s age, gender, faith or social status - to be subjected to the will of others. It means to be denied, as a very condition of daily existence, the fundamental human asset known as – Volition. That condition is captured in more than one instance from the film Django Unchained, where the villain of the piece, incensed by an attempt to outsmart him in a human trade-off, viciously squeezes the face of that female commodity  and snarls:

“This is my property. I can do whatever I like with her.”

Now, that slave owner happened to be an out and out sadist. He not only ran a domestic amphitheatre of death, he was more than willing to diminish his capital by setting his killer dogs on a would-be escapee, just to prove that cardinal point – he owned that fugitive, dead or alive. 

I shall share with you an earlier, real life pronouncement, uttered during the struggle to oust my own nation’s contribution to the case file of the master-slave typology. That outburst in real time leapt unbidden to mind when I watched and heard the actor di Caprio’s savage declamation. That cinematic moment emerged as an  echo, ironically, of a pronouncement by a radical mind, a highly regarded community leader and prelate. He was venting his outrage at what he considered a hypocritical stance of the West over the judicial murder of the Ogoni Nine= who were hanged after a kangaroo trial. His words, not exact, but fairly accurate were:

“Who are these Europeans to tell an African ruler who to hang or not to hang?”

Near identical with di Caprio’s mission statement, you’ll agree. In mitigation, using a familiar expression from these parts, one knew “where he was coming from” – a lifelong anti-white, anti-western stance that derived from history and social experience in the present. Nonetheless, I confess that those words sent shivers up and down my spine.  

And that is the core of slavery – ownership, and the limitless carte blanche  that goes with it. The ownership of another being. Yes indeed, the condition known as slavery means to be owned by another human being, with or without a bill of sale, to be placed under chains, visible or invisible – it does not matter. Slavery means to be owned. The rest is mere elaboration. 

You begin to understand why the notion of one state of enslavement being more benign than others, less inhumane, while admittedly legitimate and instructive fodder for academia – sociologists and all - is fundamentally repugnant and ethically inadmissible. The field slave in opposition to the house slave. Open concubinage against punishable miscegenation. Sahara or Mediterranean. Sahara against the Atlantic/Caribbean. Trans-Indian ocean versus the rest. Each arm of the triangulation  - Capture/Transit/Relocation – reads, comprehensively, Dehumanization on an unprecedented scale in the annals of  black human cargo. 

Exercises in comparative misery merely end up with censorship, subtle and coy to overt and institutional.  It is totally irrelevant that one enslaved victim ends up marrying a scion of the house of his owners or becomes a companion and paraclete of spiritual avatars, mostly converts under duress. Exceptions hold out the torch of humanistic possibilities, but do not ignite the flame of  universal enlightenment. That task is left to us, successors to generations of human despoilation. 

It is either one accepts that this is a viable foundation for a vision harmonious co-existence or else a delusion. Some illusions are still with us, after centuries. They morph, change colour, texture, motion, even nomenclature. Undetected for what they really are, they become a way of dealing with history, to be protected and sustained by other social constructs. They prove quite seductive, even compel adoption by society’s greatest thinkers - from economic theorists to religious expositors. Slavery is one such permissive foraging ground for revisionists, and the African continent remains the dedicated, indeed consecrated  – in more senses than one -  consecrated material base for the blood transfusion that continues to. sustained the aberration. When eventually, and for whatever reason, the warps in the  conceptual template of perpetrators and beneficiaries on the one hand, and/or victims on the other, are ironed out, the ledger book of profit and loss is bought out, dusted down and dormant claims are brought to the fore. 

However, a problem is provoked: how does one reckon compensation for an aberration that endured over four centuries, engorged and spewed out an estimated fifteen million humans westwards, eastwards, northwards, a crime that endures till today in both its crude, material and legally backed forms, and its more ambiguous, subtly degrading characteristics? Compensaion for the waste of humanity is a long call from itemization of fauna and flora after an oil spill. The task is obviously beyond value attributions and itemized correlations, no matter in what currency - including trading concessions, technological assistance, or direct economic aid. The mind seizes up in the attempt, and not even the all-knowing Artificial Intelligence can work it out. All we can do is approach any such notion of justice symbolically, gesturally, commencing where all forms of restitution begin: an admission of the obvious – the existence of the crime, recognition of the perpetrators. the collaborators and the beneficiaries and - the victims. Concerning that last, the Diaspora displays the indisputable manifest across generations. 

To reinforce that self-evident base, the sordid business is not yet over.  Extant slave markets endure in notable parts of the world, including, most ironically, within the resource centre itself – the African continent. Establishing this for Doubting Thomases is easy tnough – we can lead you to them, physically.  Often more difficult to establish however is the condition itself that constitutes slavery. Yet we must address it. We musf, since one is fed by, and feeds on the other, creating a vicious cycle.  The agent of that condition can be an individual, a community, a class, a race, or a religion. 

When, for instance, two hundred and seventy-nine school pupils, all female, are kidnapped from within a supposed sanctuary of learning, taken into a forest, divided up among their captors and scattered to all corners of the world, we need no instruction in conceiving their fate. Captives of an undeclared war, subject to commodity negotiations, bound to the whims and caprices of successive intermediaries and owners, their fate is to succumb to sexual duties, even where underage. These are the twenty-first century horrors that spice the humdrum fare of daily existence.

A b efitting moment to interject yet another recall of my prior intrusions into this rarefied space of world leadership   – this was on the anniversary of United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child. For that event, I read a poem that was specially commissioned on behalf of this body – It was titled “The Child before A Mirror of Strangers”. The relevance of those lines, in effect a child’s lament and accusation of gross dereliction by the adult world, deserves to remain an eternal burden and a blot on world conscience. Off to school, and straight into captivity, dispersal and enslavement?  Three hundred youths in one fell swoop? Abominations  in su h dimensions  surely earn centre place in any Rites of Remembrance. 

On reflection however, should we truly have been taken by surprise? The self-acclaimed world religions worked hand in hand with militarism for the promotion of the lucrative trade on the African continent, as did the instrumentality of laws and edicts. Keeping faith with the profit motif, royalty, prelates, bankers and nations granted patents, regional monopolies, outfitted ships, legislated who qualified to be enslaved and who were exempted, with the ironic template of Religion which acted against its own mission of soul harvesting. I refer here to edicts that forbade further evangelical activities, since infidels were legally designated fair game, but not the converted. Thus, religious conversion had come to constitute a serious trade hazard, since it dried  up resources. The mission of the spirit cravenly ceded supremacy to market forces. 

How could such cynicism fail to sear collective memory when, as in recent instance, a supernumerary local ruler in that same traumatized country of mine, breaks through the cocoon of time to ban the procession of traditional African religionists through the streets of their ancestral land, cultures and world view. Such sights, he declared, were offensive to his sight and retrograde in essence. The responses, one is heartened to say, were swift, but the danger has not passed. And so, just as one speaks today of neo-colonialism, it would be wise to take note of the eruption of neo-theocratism, powered by antiquated notions of master-slave relations. The ancillary question is thus: can we speak with one voice on the moral imperative of reparatory justice, when the converted take up cudgels on behalf on their own spiritual enslavers? It reminds us that the work of this august body remains incomplete. There exists a grave lacuna in the concept of crimes against African humanity. It is time that we either speak holistically in our approach to slavery or else issue certificates of retroactive immunity to all, and for all time. Yes, there is an ocean-borne crime to expiate, and there is also the desert borne. Local courts thrive in places which adjudicate cases of disputed slave ownership – the records are there – meticulous case-files of a new generation of abolitionists – such as SOS Esclaves, among others.

Let me however, also cast this conciliatory line. There is no compulsion to carry the errors and crimes of one’s ancestors as an overwhelming burden of conscience. Those ancestors acted within the limitations of their times, their historic and social conditioning, their limited understanding of the full panoply of what we, today, cognize as human. The line must be drawn however when, in a modern age, and advanced understanding, arrogant and provocative attempts are made to sanitize and perpetuate the legacy of such limitations, to profit from the imbalance of historic encounters, engage in new blood transfusions, largely through that seductive toxin that we know as power, the axial end in eternal opposition to the attribute of  -human freedom. That is where the problem arises and every individual is then called upon to answer the name of his or her ancestors. 

It is so frustratingly obvious: if I cannot walk on my own ancestral soil, to my own inner and outward rhythm, to my own chants, in celebration of my spirituality, then, what am I but just another   commodity among other spoils of conquest? Yet, the efforts persist. If descendants of Druids in the United Kingdom choose to parade through the streets of London and intone their chants  all the way to Stonehenge, just what does this subtract from, or how does that contaminate the spiritual domain of the Archbishop of Canterbury? Why do some embark on retrograde steps that diminish the shared heritage of humanity? And so, we assert, the slavery era is by no means over, only morphed in structure and sustaining practicalities. The slavers are next door, and in the ascendant.

Is it hyperbolic to warn that we are witnessing the inauguration of a twenty-first century slave trade? That we are being coerced to become collaborators in the new slavery venture?  Unlike the originals who took risks, today’s slave raiders simply wait until defenceless children are gathered together in one place at the behest and/ or compulsion of governance, parents and guardians, for the purpose of learning. The hyenas swoop upon the unsuspecting prey, cart them off, sequester them in forest and other holding pens, then call on families and governments to come and negotiate for them. The world, including its global institutions had better wake up to the fact that the slave trade is back on African soil with a one-sided ferocity, all the more obscene and blasphemous for being camouflaged as a religious mandate. Chibok – plus its insatiable clones and enabling environment – places a searing  question mark on Africa’s authentic self recovery after centuries of being  mere annotations in the histories oi others, to be expunged at will. 

Indeed those others have evolved the name calling ploy to ward off, or wrong foot  alternative propositions on such a vast land mass, and to such an extent that I have sometimes wondered if there was an undeclared contest for the most exotic or disingenuous. The Dark Continent. Terra incognita. The White Man’s Grave. The Slave Coast…and so on. Curiously, and perversely however, my favourite remains one that appears to have  given the most offence. I.cannot mouth it in full, not in these d chambers where our late elder, The Archbishop Desmond Tutu, did his sublime dance of liberation. Let’s just formalize it as  -that continent of SH countries.

Well. addressing you today is a fully grounded, unapologetic citizen of one of those SH nations, born into a history that has no record of lynching humans misnamed slaves, burning some even while still breathing. Our ancestors did not capture such picnic sessions on early black and white postcards for vicarious participation by absent friends and relations. We have no history of injecting others with the syphilis virus in the name of scientific research, of amputating and castrating members of other races for failure to understand the condition of slavery as a divine blessing and thus took to the hills and forests in pursuit of freedom. We dud not cimmit the crime of the millennium, then seek to close the book of reckoning with a  down payment of forty acres and a mule. 

We understand also, however, the affliction called ignorance and accept that it must be addressed through multiple strategies. We also acknowledge the operations of conscience, and salute those whose actions were, and remain propelled by the restless workings of conscience that ultimately sweep violators of humanity to the altar of restitution. We know that such urging to reparatory justice is alien to the visionaries and salvationists of MAGAlopolis, and other paracletes of the gospel of racial superiority all over the globe. Nonetheless we remain compulsive correctives to arrogant presumptions, and it is this that brings us to te practical question:

What do we seek from this assembly? What do we propose, specifically, for its mission of reparatory justice? Here is one project for consideration:

Undertake, or mandate and empower that appropriate body, UNESCO, to complete the task it has commenced. We shall reiterate the obvious – there is a profound difference from UNESCO’s other projects such as the Iron Route and the Silk Route which involve inert, convertible material.   This undertaking by contrast, concerns the vitalizing, transformative and creative species which however were rationalized into equivalents of those earlier named objects, accorded the additional distinction of transporting themselves as marketable commodities. The UNESCO initiatives have laid the ground work for an attitudinal corrective.  Others, within their own limitations, not only pioneered but have continued to augment such global initiatives in their own limited capabilities. The thirst for a global reparatory justice, both by victims and – let this be again conceded - even their violators or beneficiaries, offering incremental benefits along the way to a new plenum of humanized relationships, is undeniable.  It would be a pity not to crystallize all such urgings and initiatives into a self -regenerating offering. It is all set down as the major virtue of a project currently advertised as The Heritage Voyage of Return.

The Heritage Voyage of Return

In visual terms, the concept is not too dissimilar in orientation from those nineteenth and twentieth century “expositions” – Berlin, London, Manchester etc. etc  in western and other parts of the world, expositions crammed full of the spoils of rape and pillage of others. This time however, what is being proposed is a lived-in exposition as a moving Remembrance monument, a transitional warehouse of a continent’s past, present and future, a vibrant statement on a continent’s interrupted history. A special Honour Gallery will house artifacts looted from the Africsn continent but since returned under the spirit  and ethos of Restitution. Seminars. Readings. Africa themed films.  Documentaries. installations. Clinics and life style parades. Music from Africa and the Diaspora. A unique library and manuscript collection. Archeological retrievals. An exhumed slave vessel. The boat will take off from the Diaspora, make a call at representative ports of Slavery connection, positive or negative, on its way to the West African coast. A television crew on board broadcasts events to the rest of the world. Primarily for descendants of the enslaved, it is also open to others – that is, others who are equally embroiled in the quest for a new humanity that embraces, not excludes, that is curious, not foreclosed, that still lays claim to conscience as the touchstone of the rational species.

The nature of reparatory justice that befits the magnitude of Slavery wrongs can only be symbolic, gestural. Yes, but also morally and therapeutically propulsive, one that goes to the core of a continent’s humanity, vividly expressed in its arts and spirituality. It is a symbolic voyage of return, one that stands to become an annual fixture.  Effectively, it offers  no more than a continuation of UNESCO’s work on the Routes of Enslaved Peoples, beamed deservedly, at the African continent. HVR is a voyage of Learning, Leisure, and Linkage. It is not only feasible, it is imperative. Yes, such a voyage presumes to teach the world, to bring the world into confrontation with centuries of wrongs and possibly a recovery of its lost humanity. It is however not designed to be a vessel of recrimination, but a floating festival of peaceful options and neglected knowledge. Glorified tourism? Why not? But Tourism “with an attitude”. This is a return, not just to a wronged continent, but a return of the world to its holistic potential, to what it can be, shorn of irrational concepts, embedded prejudice, lust for power and domination. It will be manifested as a first furlong in a voyage towards, put simply, a re-insertion of human in that grossly depleted word: humanity. 

Wole SOYINKA

NB: The ceremony is part of the United Nations’ unwavering commitment to raise awareness of the history of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, its impact on the modern world, and its legacies, including racism and prejudice. Other speakers invited include UN Secretary-General António Guterres; President of the 79th session of the UN General Assembly Philemon Yang, of Cameroon; Permanent Representatives of all 193 UN Members States; and a dynamic youth speaker. Past keynote speakers have included Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The New York Times’ 1619 Project (2022); Lisa M. Coleman, a member of New York University’s senior leadership (2021); and the Trinidadian mixed media artist Christopher Cozier (2019).