slavery

On March 25, the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the United Nations General Assembly passed a landmark resolution. Proposed by Ghana, it recognised the transatlantic slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations. A total of 123 countries supported the resolution; three opposed it, including the United States and Israel, while 52 abstained, Britain among them, and several European Union countries.

The UN’s slavery resolution is a historic moment, but what comes next is even more important. Leading up to the resolution, the African Union urged its 55 member states to pursue slavery reparations through formal apologies, the return of stolen artefacts, financial compensation, and guarantees of non-repetition.

This raises a question the resolution does not directly ask: reparations from whom, and to whom? If the answer is simply from European governments to African governments, then the reparations movement risks ignoring the long history of European engagement with Africa, and in doing so delivering justice to the wrong people.

What the reparations debate misses

The contemporary framing of the reparations debate is seductive in its simplicity: Europeans arrived in Africa, Africans were enslaved, Europeans grew rich, and Africans became impoverished. Therefore, Europe owes Africa. This narrative carries moral force, but it risks flattening the complex history of European engagement with the continent.

While European actors undeniably drove the demand for enslaved labour, African political and economic elites were not passive victims. They played a significant role in capturing, transporting and selling enslaved people to European traders.

In some cases, African states, seeking to expand their treasuries and consolidate territorial power, preyed on neighbouring communities, condemning them to enslavement for profit. The Oyo Empire, a powerful Yoruba state in what is now south-western Nigeria, expanded significantly in the eighteenth century through its participation in this commerce. Across the region, African elites who had the means sustained the system by exchanging enslaved people for European goods such as alcohol, textiles and other manufactured commodities.

None of this diminishes European culpability in the slave trade. The demand was European. The ships were European. The plantation system was European. The racialised ideology constructed to justify slavery was European. But it does complicate the story.

The transatlantic slave trade was not solely a narrative of African victimhood and European perpetration. It is a story of elite collaboration, which did not end when the slave ships stopped sailing.

The historical argument: three phases, one logic

European encounter with African societies can be understood in three broad phases, each distinct in form but similar in the underlying logic of collaborative extraction.

The first phase was slavery. Europeans extracted human labour from Africa, often with the active participation of African political rulers. Britain emerged as the world’s leading slave-trading country, transporting roughly 3.4 million Africans across the Atlantic between 1640 and 1807. The abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 marked the formal end of this phase. But abolition did not disrupt the underlying logic of the elite collaboration. It reshaped it.

The second phase was colonialism. A less understood aspect of European domination in Africa is how seamlessly some African rulers transitioned from collaborators during the slave trade to intermediaries in the colonial period.

In Nigeria, for example, regional African rulers became intermediaries for British administrators. As Nigerian historian, Moses Ochonu, demonstrates in Emirs in London, a study of Northern Nigerian Muslim aristocrats who travelled to Britain between 1920 and independence in 1960, these African figures were far from passive subjects of British rule. They actively leveraged their relationship with British authorities to reinforce their own authority at home. Such sponsored travel to the imperial centre helped solidify personal ties between Nigerian elites and British administrators, reinforcing the system of indirect rule.

The third and current phase is the postcolonial era. While formal empire has ended, the structure of elite alignment endures. In countries such as Nigeria, the majority of citizens remain largely excluded from political and economic power. The institutional successors of intermediaries and collaborators during the eras of slavery and colonial rule are now running the African postcolonial states.

Rather than dismantling extractive systems, many have repurposed them. Similar patterns of exclusion and extraction that defined earlier periods have been reproduced, leaving the majority of Africans short-changed by a system that continues to serve elite interests.

Nigerian President Bola Tinubu’s state visit to the United Kingdom last month – complete with royal ceremony, photo opportunities and symbolic gestures – reflected this relationship whose origins lie in the very history the UN resolution condemns. While the majority of Nigerians face difficult socio-economic conditions, the British government announced that Nigerian companies would create hundreds of new jobs in the UK.

This is not an anomaly but a continuation of the extractive logic that shaped the slave trade and colonialism. It endures, now recast in the language of diplomacy and partnership.

Reparations are just, and Britain’s debt is undeniable. But direction matters. If compensation flows from one set of elites to another, the oppressed majority of Africans will once again be excluded. True justice must run in two directions: from European states to formerly colonised societies, and from African elites to the citizens they continue to exploit.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

History textbooks often include the story of the Underground Railroad, an organized network of secret routes, places and people that guided enslaved populations from the South to abolitionist Northern states.

However, less is known about the underground railroad that ran southbound to Mexico. But one live-looped musical is unearthing that hidden history, one beat at a time.

Co-created and performed by Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson, “Mexodus” tells the fictional story of Henry, who evades his capture by fleeing Texas across the Rio Grande. After a near fatality, he is saved by Carlos, a farmer and former combat medic battling his own trauma from the Mexican-American War. Together they form solidarity, despite social, racial and political strains plaguing both sides of the border.

Following its off-Broadway run at the Daryl Roth Theatre in New York City, the hip-hop and bolero-infused musical directed by David Mendizábal will open at the Pasadena Playhouse stage July 8 and run until Aug. 2. But for history buffs and musical enthusiasts alike, a sonically richer version filled with sound effects of the musical airs exclusively on Audible today, April 16.

The idea for “Mexodus” first came to Brian Quijada — playwright, actor and composer behind “Where Did We Sit on the Bus?,” “Kid Prince and Pablo” and “Somewhere Over the Border” — when reading a 2018 article on History.com about the estimated 5,000 to 10,000 enslaved individuals that escaped the American South for freedom in Mexico, though some researchers estimate that number to be higher.

“My parents crossed the border undocumented in the late 1970s, so I think I’ve always been fascinated with writing immigration stories,” Quijada said. “The reason that this story attracted me was because it’s like a reverse border story, but I also knew that it wasn’t my story to tell so I sat on it for a long time.”

Quijada bookmarked the article until he met Robinson — a performer at Berkeley Rep, Baltimore Center Stage, Shakespeare Theater Company, Mosaic Theater and writer and composer of “Santa Claus Is Comin’: A Motown Christmas Revue” and “R&J: Fire on the Bayou” — at an actor-musician conference weeks before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. They were the only actors-musicians of color in the room, listening in on conversations about how one should audition for musicals like “Once,” “Million Dollar Quartet,” which typically center white storylines.

“We kind of looked at each other and we’re like, ‘we don’t really belong here,’” said Quijada, who invited Robinson to take part in “Mexodus” during the pandemic shutdown. The first iteration of the project was as a mixtape.

The musical edge of “Mexodus” hinges on live looping, a recording and playback technique where a sound is repeated and then layered (think Justin Bieber’s solo performance of “Yukon” at the 2026 Grammy Awards). Physically, both Quijada and Robinson’s characters have to pick up a guitar, record it, then play the drum set and run to the bass. “ It’s pretty labor-intensive,” Quijada said.

“I think Brian and I are artists in this way, like various people of color, where it’s like, no one else is gonna do it for me, so I can do it all by myself,” Robinson said.

There’s also a more dramaturgical, meta reason for the loop, which follows a four chord structure throughout the piece, set in both 1851 and present day.

“The looping shows you that there’s not much difference between 1851 and 2026,” Robinson said. “We just keep finding ourselves in a loop and like maybe a sound is in that wasn’t there before. Maybe another sound is added, but it’s still the same four chord structure that has been happening in this country for all existence.”

In 2010, the U.S. National Park Service outlined a possible runaway route stretching on the Camino Real de la Tejas between Natchitoches, La., to Monclova, Mexico. Still, it is unclear how organized the underground railroad heading to Mexico truly was, the Associated Press reported in 2020, with archives destroyed in a fire and sites along the path abandoned.

In 2024 the Jackson Ranch Church and Martin Jackson Cemetery in San Juan, Texas — which are part of a ranch owned by interracial couple Nathaniel Jackson and Matilda Hicks — were recognized by the U.S. National Park Service for serving as a gateway to freedom in Mexico.

Other Texas couples alongside the border— including interracial abolitionist couple Ferdinand Webber and Silvia Hector — aided enslaved people in their pursuits to reach Mexico, which had abolished slavery in 1829, while Texas was still part of the country.

Fears surrounding the Mexican government’s attempts to abolish slavery led to the formation of the Republic of Texas in 1836 and its eventual annexation to the United States by 1845; records also show that American slave owners would head down to Mexico to kidnap formerly enslaved individuals, according to USC historian Alice Baumgartner, who wrote about it in her 2020 book “South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War.”

A database by the Texas Runaway Slave Project, which found listings for 2,500 runaways across various Texas newspapers from the 1840s through the 1860s, also documents the frequented journey to Mexico.

Slavery in the U.S. wouldn’t be officially abolished until 1865 with the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.

“I was also really intimidated by the amount of research that I would have to do to write this piece because at the time back [between 2017 and 2020], [researchers] were just beginning to uncover a lot of this,” Quijada said.

Themes of racism — including anti-Blackness in the Latino community — oppression and resistance are woven throughout “Mexodus,” which since its debut in 2023 at the Baltimore Center Stage/Mosaic Theater Company in Washington, D.C., has been making viewers aware of the little-known history.

Robinson recalled how one Black woman came up to him after the show to let him know she believed in Trump’s border wall.

“I got nervous, but she was like, ‘after seeing this, I’m realizing that there’s something trying to convince me of that.’ And I’m like, yes!” said Robinson. “I’m like, this is good. This is good. We started you somewhere. Wow.”

The pair hope that amid all the dark news circulating around the world — and the traumatic, historical themes interlaced in “Mexodus” — the existence of this piece of art can be a glimmer of hope and joy for the future of both Black and brown communities.

“ I need you all to see the truth, but we’re gonna try and dance anyway,” Robinson said.

Slavery has been declared the gravest crime against humanity in a United Nations resolution. Argentina, Israel, and the United States were the only countries that voted against it, with many others abstaining. So what does this resolution mean, and why won’t the countries that built their wealth on slavery agree to a path for justice? Al Jazeera’s Marthe van der Wolf explains.