In light of the recent controversy over the Somalis who have colonized Minnesota, bilking the state for billions of dollars in charity fraud and allegedly funneling large chunks of it back to the homeland that they clearly have greater loyalty to than the country that took them in as refugees from said homeland.
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Since I'm naturally curious, I read up on Somalia’s history and culture, of which I had little prior knowledge.
What caught my eye was Somalia’s extremely deep historical involvement in the African slave trade.
Via Wikipedia (emphasis added):
2500 years ago, speakers of the original proto-Bantu language group began a millennia-long series of migrations eastward from their original homeland in the general Cameroon area of Central Africa. This Bantu expansion first introduced Bantu peoples to southern and southeastern Africa.
To satisfy the demands of the market for agricultural produce in the Arabian Peninsula and cater to the local needs, Somali clans in the Lower Shabelle region and along the ancient Banadir coast began the procurement of Bantu slaves from Arab slave traders to provide labor and serve as client farmers for the Somali clans…
The Bantus residing in Somalia are the descendants of Bantu individuals who were taken captive and transported to Somalia by Arab slave merchants during the 18th and 19th centuries to work as agricultural laborers. The Somali Bantus belong to several ethnic groups, namely Majindo, Mnyasa, Mkuwa, Mzihuwa, Mushunguli, and Molima, each consisting of numerous subclans. Their ancestral roots can be traced back to various historical and modern African nations, including many in Central Africa, those of the Congo region (such as the then-Kingdom of Kongo, modern Angola, DR Congo and RotC), Mozambique, Malawi, and Tanzania.
Bantus are ethnically, physically, and culturally distinct from Somalis and Ethiopians and they have remained marginalized ever since their arrival to the Horn of Africa.
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Not only do the descendants of African Bantu slaves still exist in Somalia, but they are also actively discriminated against to this day.
Via Minority Rights Group (emphasis added):
Bantu communities continue to face discrimination, including verbal abuse by members of minority clans: Bantu people are still referred to as addoon, a derogative Somali term for ‘slave’. Al-Shabaab has also targeted Bantu communities because of their religious and cultural practices, and in January 2010 the National Somali Bantu Project (NSBP) reported that several Bantu people were killed for attending a traditional service in the Lower Juba region. The NSBP also reported the desecration of Bantu graves and forced compliance of Bantu Sheikhs with al-Shabaab doctrines, as well as numerous cultural attacks on Bantu dancing, the use of traditional medicines and the imposition of linguistic stipulations, including being forced to adopt Arabic names. Al-Shabaab has also reportedly recruited Bantu children as young as 10 into their militia…
Bantu communities have limited access to political representation and face many barriers in terms of achieving rights or alleviating poverty. Bantu languages are poorly recognized in Somalia, and almost no government services or humanitarian aid providers have the ability to interact with those who speak these languages when they do not also speak Maay or Mahatiri.
Somehow, I’ve never heard Ilhan Omar mention the plight of the Bantu, much less apologize on behalf of her people for their collective guilt as she insists the white American hosts she feeds upon do.
But wait, there’s more!
The only reason Somalia ever outlawed Bantu slavery in the first place, well into the 20th century, was from the Italian colonial forces, which even woke Wikipedia is forced to concede while attempting to obfuscate the issue and pin partial blame on the Italians for not fully enforcing the ban.
Continuing via Wikipedia:
The Italian colonial administration abolished slavery in Somalia at the turn of the 20th century. However, some Somali clans notably the Biimaal clan opposed this idea. The Biimaals fought the Italians to keep their slaves. From 1893, the Italian colonial authorities in Somalia did not recognize the legal status of slavery and slaves were thus legally free to leave their owners, but the Italians often returned fugitive slaves to their owners if the owners belonged to clans friendly to the Italians; in 1903–1904, after pressure from humanitarians, the Italians banned the slave trade and declared that all slaves born after 1890 were legally free.
When the Italian government took over the administration of Somalia in 1906, they did free slaves in urban territories via compensation, but did not act to free slaves in the interior of the country and in fact tried to stop the wave of fugitives who left their owners as news of the Italian emancipation reach the rural interior since it was a cause of unrest, but numerous slaves did leave their enslavers in the inland and in any cases settled in their own villages of former slaves and client cultivators of land under clans.
The Italians reported to the Advisory Committee of Experts on Slavery in the 1930s that the slavery and slave trade in Somalia had now been abolished. However, although the Italians freed some Bantus, some Bantu groups remained enslaved well into the 1930s and continued to be despised and discriminated against by large parts of Somali society.
So, back to the original rhetorical question: why isn’t Somalia on the hook for slavery reparations?
The obvious answer is two-fold:
- Somalia isn’t white or European, the only ethnicity/culture ever blamed collectively for historical wrongs
- Somalia has no money to speak of. Blood from a turnip, etc.
Of those two reasons, the first is by far the most pertinent.
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The extremely rich Arab Gulf countries, for instance, were intimately involved in the slave trade for hundreds of years, long before and long after the practice was outlawed among European nation-states and their colonial offshoots. They even practice forms of de facto slavery to this day.
Yet, immune from the self-hatred of the West, they simply refuse to play the self-flagellation game. Many entities have tried the same reparations hustle on these countries that they’ve played on the West, and the Arab states have politely declined.
Who knew it could be that simple?
