Biden thinks the issue needs further study, but few issues in history have received more attention.
During the colonial era, a white man on the run could take refuge in sub-Saharan Africa, where fear of contracting yellow fever, malaria and other maladies kept most outsiders from traveling inland. It was in this spirit, perhaps, that President Biden ventured to Angola shortly after the unpopular pardon of his son Hunter over the weekend.
Many black Americans trace their ancestry to Angola, a former Portuguese colony, and Mr. Biden spoke of the countries’ “shared history, an evil of human bondage,” during his remarks Tuesday at a slavery museum in the capital city of Luanda. “We remember the stolen men and women and children who were brought to our shores in chains and subjected to unimaginable cruelty.”
More than 90% of enslaved Africans were sent to the Caribbean and South America between the 16th and 19th centuries, while only about “6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America,” according to historian Steven Mintz. Although the trans-Atlantic slave trade receives far more attention today, the trans-Saharan slave trade—which involved Arabs transporting captives from black Africa across the Sahara Desert and the Persian Gulf to the Islamic world of North Africa and the Middle East—involved a larger number of African slaves and lasted for a much longer period.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
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