African Collaborators do not Absolve British Institutions

By Dennis A. Minott, PhD.

October 7, 2026

History, responsibility and the courage to atone

My old friend Everald “Warmy” Warmington deserves a patient answer. Jamaica’s Parliament deserves an accurate one. His reported contention that white people did not capture Africans, but merely bought people whom black people had captured, contains both a historically untenable generalisation and a conclusion that does not follow from its premise.

Let us begin with the admission that makes a serious argument stronger: some African rulers, merchants and intermediaries participated knowingly in the slave trade. Some profited substantially. Their conduct deserves scrutiny and condemnation. But their participation neither establishes the collective guilt of Africans nor extinguishes the responsibility of European purchasers, transporters, plantation owners and supporting institutions.

Responsibility is not a fixed quantity which diminishes whenever another perpetrator is identified.

I welcome Michael Williams’s Jamaica Observer intervention, “Debunking the myth of African complicity in the slave trade”. However, the most defensible rebuttal distinguishes the documented complicity of particular Africans from the myth of collective African culpability. We need neither universal African innocence nor universal European guilt to establish the responsibility of identifiable British institutions.

This discussion carries me back more than half a century to my undergraduate formation under the late Grenadian historian, Professor Fitzroy André “Fitz” Baptiste. I excelled in African History under his distinguished tutelage and became deeply conversant with Basil Davidson’s work. Those studies helped me recognise the difference between examining evidence and repeating a convenient slogan.

My gratitude to Fitz remains profound. UWI’s own tribute records his central contribution to consolidating African and African Diaspora history at St Augustine and his meticulous, dedicated teaching. I remember him with affection and intellectual respect. The tribute I owe him today is to bring that same seriousness to a debate too often impoverished by political repetition.

Davidson’s Black Mother, published in 1961, also known through editions titled The African Slave Trade, belongs near the beginning of the reading list. It examined the African–European encounter and the slave trade long before today’s controversy. Its date matters: this scholarship was available when I studied under Baptiste in 1969–70. Parliament is not encountering a newly manufactured historical objection to Warmington’s reasoning.

Davidson’s significance extends beyond documenting transactions. His scholarship belongs to the foundational examination of the slave trades’ effects on African societies: their political institutions, economic development and social relationships. Africa enters this history as a continent of human communities whose lives and futures were disrupted, rather than merely as a departure point for European shipping.

Warmington’s categorical denial of European capture cannot withstand historical examination. Historian Arlindo Caldeira’s account of the Portuguese slave trade records Portuguese navigators capturing people on the Mauritanian coast between 1441 and 1444 and transporting them to Portugal. Direct European capture therefore occurred. That fact does not prove that Europeans personally captured most people subsequently trafficked across the Atlantic; it does disprove the absolute assertion that they did not capture Africans.

But even if every captive had been purchased from an African intermediary, the proposed exoneration would still fail. Purchasing a human being, confining that person aboard a ship and transporting them into coerced labour remain consequential acts. Who first seized the victim does not settle who subsequently violated the victim’s humanity.

A scientifically disciplined approach requires us to test each proposition separately. Was there African participation? Yes. Was there African resistance? Yes. Did Europeans capture people directly? Yes. Does African participation establish British innocence? No: that conclusion requires an additional argument, and the mere existence of African sellers supplies none.

Sylviane A. Diouf’s edited collection, Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies (2003), broadens the evidence substantially. Its contributors examine protective migration, the redemption of captives, political organisation, attacks on ships and trading establishments, and shipboard revolts. The collection challenges assumptions of African passivity and general complicity. It does not require us to pretend that collaborators never existed.

Nor should we collapse captors and captives into one morally responsible population because both were African. A continental description cannot turn a kidnapped child into an accomplice of the merchant who sold her. Shared skin colour provides no evidence of shared consent.

King Afonso I of Kongo supplies particularly revealing evidence. In his correspondence with Portugal’s King João III in 1526, he protested the seizure and sale of free people, including nobles and relatives. Yet the correspondence also describes official procedures for distinguishing free people from captives who could be exported. Afonso’s record therefore combines protest against destructive kidnapping with acceptance of forms of enslavement.

We weaken our case if we transform him into an uncomplicated modern abolitionist. Linda M. Heywood’s research, “Slavery and Its Transformation in the Kingdom of Kongo: 1491–1800” (2009), explains how distinctions between protected freeborn Kongolese and foreign captives eroded amid political conflict and institutional breakdown. This is a history of changing power and vulnerability, demanding careful interpretation.

The same care applies to African slavery generally. Its institutions varied across societies and periods. We should not romanticise them as uniformly benign, temporary or non-hereditary. Equally, recognising their existence cannot excuse the racialised plantation regimes imposed in the Americas.

Nathan Nunn’s Shackled to the Past: The Causes and Consequences of Africa’s Slave Trades (2010) adds quantitative evidence. His analysis finds a robust relationship between historical slave exports and subsequent poverty, and tests explanations that might otherwise account for that relationship. It supports the argument that the trades impaired long-term development. It neither calculates Jamaica’s reparations entitlement nor resolves every question of causation. Scientific authority includes acknowledging what research does and does not establish.

The British institutional record is equally deserving of attention. UCL’s Legacies of British Slave-ownership research documents Parliament’s grant of £20 million in compensation to former slave owners. The Bank of England’s own account states that it distributed compensation as the government’s banker and that the formerly enslaved received nothing. These are identifiable institutional acts, supported by records.

That is why I advocate Atonement by British Institutions.

I am asking institutions to examine their histories, acknowledge established wrongs and negotiate meaningful repair. Present-day British people do not acquire personal guilt merely through ancestry. Institutions, however, can retain records, assets and public responsibilities across generations. The case for repair must examine those continuities individually and honestly.

Historical evidence alone does not settle every question of present legal liability. Moral responsibility, legal obligation and negotiated redress require distinct arguments. Jamaica should pursue each rigorously.

Atonement should include accessible archives, truthful public education, explicit acknowledgement and practical commitments agreed with affected communities. Scholarships, research partnerships, public-health capacity and grants for renewable energy and resilient infrastructure could help repair enduring disadvantages. Such programmes must have transparent governance, independent evaluation and safeguards against elite billioneering capture.

Repair must strengthen people’s capacity and sovereignty. It should not arrive as another expensive loan, another dependency or another ceremony whose principal beneficiaries stand nearest the cameras.

Warmy, your parliamentary intervention had the quality of a parakeet’s refrain: familiar words repeated without the historical examination they require. I make that criticism of the argument, while inviting you, as an old friend and legislator, to reconsider it.

Read Davidson. Read Diouf. Read Afonso’s correspondence alongside Heywood’s scholarship. Examine Nunn’s evidence and Britain’s compensation records.

Fitz Baptiste helped prepare me to take African history seriously. I honour him by insisting that Jamaica’s Parliament do likewise.

African collaborators must answer to history. Their existence does not release British institutions

from the courage to atone.

*All graphic artistry illuminating this article was provided by Our Today Magazine Jamaica.