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Daily Independent Story on Slavery By Tunji Balogun This is a rejoinder to the Daily Independent story (Nov 17, 2005) on the meeting between the Nigerian Culture and Tourism Minister, Ambassador Frank Ogbuewu and Portugal’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Joao Gomes Garinho in Abuja, during which the minister claimed 75 percent of enslaved Africans came from Nigeria. The story, which DI's Abuja Correspondent, Orkula Shaagee described as a "starling (sic) revelation" is unfortunately not true. I do agree that the Minister is probably not an historian; hence handicap with the history of the slave trade, but that is even the more reason why he should not throw out misleading figures. More troubling is the failure, first by the reporter to check the statistics, and the Newspaper editor to verify this claim before going to print. Rather than help Nigeria's image, this claim is a disservice, again when this took place while hosting a Portuguese official. For the information of the public, the Portuguese carried off a substantial number of African slaves and were second only to the British in terms of role in the transportation of slaves. More than that, Portugal was the pioneer European power to engage in slave trade in Africa and it remained in business until the last years of the trade in the 1860s. So I am sure that Mr. Garinho would have chuckled at the ignorance of the minister, and this has implications for the nation’s image. The truth is that many Nigerians (we should say people from the Nigerian region, because there was no Nigeria was yet to be established) were captured and exported during the era of the slave trade. However, the number came far behind export figures from Central Africa, especially the region we now call Congo and Angola. In the case of the Atlantic slave trade, which the Minister seems to have in mind, while around 2.3 million slaves from the region of modern Nigeria were enslaved, West-Central Africa lost well over four million. When we factor in exports from other regions spreading from Senegambia valley to parts of Mozambique, we might suggest that enslaved Nigerians could not be more than 30-33% of the total export from Africa.
Thank you Tunji Balogun New York
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