Slavery: getting history wrong

Tens of millions of Africans lived and died as slaves over the centuries without ever leaving Africa.

Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Ghana's foreign minister, pictured March 26, 2022, at a 3 Music Awards event in Ghana, recently said: 'We denounce and totally reject those claims that Africans are as guilty and complicit as those who masterminded this whole atrocity.' He’s wrong, of course, but it’s still a common delusion, writes Gwynne Dyer. Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Owula Kpako

Opinion

BY GWYNNE DYER

August 20, 2026

LONDON, U.K.—“I think that there's a strategy to divide and conquer and to create a very contrived confusion,” said Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Ghana’s foreign minster. “We denounce and totally reject those claims that Africans are as guilty and complicit as thos...

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