Africa was not born Poor: The History the world chose to forget
By Mehluli Malisa Batakathi
WHEN the general debate of the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) opened in New York this September under the theme “Restoring trust, managing transformation: A United Nations that delivers for all”, the choice of words was more revealing than its authors may have intended. Indeed, trust is not restored by mere proclamation, it is restored by truth, and the truth that the international order has been least willing to speak is the truth about how Africa was made poor.
The Secretary-General came close to saying it in the following terms: “When the UN was founded, most of Africa was still under colonial rule,” adding that a 21st century Security Council without permanent African representation is “unjust and indefensible”. The architecture built in that moment did not merely reflect Africa’s absence, it preserved it.
There is a convenient version of history in which the West grew wealthy through ingenuity and superior institutions, while Africa stayed poor because it failed to modernise. Repeated often enough, it has acquired the appearance of truth. Yet it omits a decisive fact which is that Western development was fastened to African bodies, labour, land and minerals, and to systems that enriched distant societies while dismantling Africa’s capacity to develop on its own terms.
To put it plainly, Africa did not simply fall behind. In important respects it was held back, by force, while others advanced on wealth stolen from it.
The arithmetic of four centuries
For roughly four hundred years, the slave trades inflicted damage on African societies on a scale that conventional history still struggles to convey. The most authoritative voyage database estimates that some 12.5 million captives were forced aboard ships leaving Africa for the Americas, of whom only about 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage. Those figures exclude the many killed in raids, on forced marches and in coastal holding pens.
Those taken were not anonymous units of labour, but were farmers, builders, metalworkers, traders, healers, leaders, mothers, fathers and children. They carried the productive capacity of their communities and the generations still unborn. Suffice to say their forced and often violent removal drained societies of human capital and arrested demographic growth.
The injury went beyond numbers, giving rise to a system where foreign demand for captives rewarded kidnapping, financed warfare, destabilised political authority and corroded trust between neighbours. The economist Nathan Nunn found a robust negative relationship between the number of people exported from a given African territory and its later economic performance. Work by Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon found that people whose ancestors endured heavier slave raiding still display measurably lower trust in relatives, neighbours, co-ethnics and local government today.
The ledger on the other shore
Across the Atlantic the direction of travel was reversed. Enslaved Africans cultivated sugar, cotton, tobacco and rice without wages and without liberty. Their labour sustained planters, merchants, shipbuilders, banks and insurers, assembling the capital in which industrialisation later accelerated.
At this juncture, it should be stated that precision matters, because exaggeration invites dismissal. Slavery was not the sole engine of Western development; science, technology, coal and institutions mattered too, and historians still debate its exact weight. But it is equally indefensible to present Western prosperity as detached from enslaved African labour. Recent economic research on Britain concluded that overseas slaveholding wealth accelerated the Industrial Revolution by driving capital accumulation, manufacturing employment and the adoption of steam power, raising aggregate British income by the equivalent of roughly a decade of growth. Slavery was not only a moral blemish at the margins of modern capitalism, it sat inside its commercial, financial and industrial machinery.
President John Mahama of Ghana put the point to the Assembly this month with unusual directness. For centuries, he said, the tragedy was
“rendered in the passive voice as though millions of African men, women, and children vanished into the shadows of time. They did not vanish. They were hunted, captured, trafficked, bought, sold, exploited, and exchanged for profit.”
Their unpaid labour, he added, “built the cities, industries, banking institutions, and empires of the modern Western world”, while Africa was left depopulated and structurally broken.
Lines drawn on other people’s maps
For Africa, the abolition of slavery brought neither restitution nor peace in which to recover. As the Atlantic trade declined, imperial expansion intensified, and by the close of the 19th century , most of the continent had been partitioned among European powers.
Those borders deserve particular attention, because they are the most visible colonial artefact still governing African life. Drawn in distant capitals along lines of convenience, they severed kinship networks and trade routes while binding rivals inside states they had not agreed to share. Africa inherited nations it did not design, and has been asked ever since to explain its instability as though those frontiers were natural.
Colonialism did not merely raise foreign flags, it appropriated land, imposed taxes, compelled labour and reoriented production towards minerals and export crops demanded elsewhere. Railways and roads connected mines and plantations to ports rather than integrating African economies. Some of that investment later yielded local benefit. But a railway built to carry copper, cocoa or rubber to a harbour was an instrument of extraction, not an act of generosity, and research indicates that export-oriented colonial infrastructure pushed processing and manufacturing offshore and entrenched spatial inequality that survives even today.
Trade was structured to deny African producers the value of their work. In parts of French colonial Africa, markets dominated by a handful of European buyers, backed by coerced labour, stripped producers of much of the gains from trade; districts exposed to heavier extraction remain poorer now.
Indentureship extended the pattern. Between 1834 and 1920, almost half a million indentured labourers arrived from India through Mauritius’ Aapravasi Ghat to replace emancipated workers on sugar plantations. Indenture was not chattel slavery, yet penal sanctions and restricted movement tell their own story. The legal vocabulary changed; the appetite did not.
The hypocrisy of the clean slate
When independence came, “sovereignty” did not dissolve these inheritances. New African governments inherited administrations built for colonial command and economies tethered to a narrow band of raw commodities. While the flag came down; the economic architecture of the colonial state stayed up. Most of it stands today, which is why Mahama could tell the Assembly that the structural legacies of these crimes still sustain “a global financial architecture weighted against Africa”, in which developing nations borrow at interest rates up to eight times those available to industrialised states and governments must choose between servicing predatory debt and serving their people.
Africa was nonetheless judged as though 1960 had been a fresh start, as though every nation reached the same starting line with equal capital, infrastructure and bargaining power. That is where the argument about self-inflicted poverty collapses into hypocrisy. One cannot help design a system, profit from it for four centuries, decline to dismantle it, and then present its outcomes as evidence of the victim’s incompetence. To diagnose Africa’s present problem without naming its genesis is not analysis, it is a desperate attempt at an alibi.
I will concede that none of this excuses Africa’s own failures. Independence transferred responsibility to African governments, and leaders who loot treasuries, rig institutions and preside over avoidable conflict cannot shelter indefinitely behind colonial history. Nor should the complicity of some African rulers in the slave trade be airbrushed away. But African culpability does not cancel Western culpability. A corrupt postcolonial administration cannot retrospectively absolve the traders, planters, colonial governments and corporations that built fortunes on coercion. A family robbed across generations is not unrobbed because one heir later squanders what survived.
Atonement, not charity
This is why reparatory justice cannot be buried. The General Assembly resolution tabled by Ghana on 25 March 2026 declared the trafficking and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans the gravest crime against humanity, and affirmed that claims for reparations are a concrete step towards a remedy. One hundred and twenty-three states voted in favour, three against, and fifty-two abstained, among them the United Kingdom and members of the European Union. That abstention column is itself a historical document. The African Union and CARICOM have since adopted a nineteen-point plan whose later stages include formal apologies, debt relief and compensation, and at a side event in New York this September, co-hosted with France and Germany, the restitution of looted heritage moved from grievance to negotiation.
Reparations need not mean cash alone, they may mean apology, the return of stolen artefacts and archives, investment in institutions and education, fairer trade and debt arrangements, and compensation where a sound legal and historical claim exists. What they cannot mean is silence purchased with expressions of regret.
Africa must still own its future: educate, industrialise, trade within itself and hold its leaders to account. However, remembrance must never harden into a theology of helplessness. Equally, accepting responsibility for tomorrow does not require surrendering the truth about yesterday.
For centuries Africa supplied labour without wages, resources without value and land without consent. Others accumulated capital; Africa inherited demographic loss, fractured institutions and economies still facing outwards. To celebrate Western development while reducing that history to a footnote repeats the original theft, taking not only Africa’s people and wealth but its rightful place in the story of how the modern world was built.
Africa was not born poor. It was impoverished, and then asked to account for its poverty as though history had nothing to do with it.
The author is a Constitutional Lawyer and Lecturer, he writes in his personal capacity as a public interest and civic education initiative.
