Black History

Hugh Muir makes a career of apologizing. ‘Tax Payers money spent on community relations enhancement via the medium of face paint ?’...”Yes I know it sounds silly but come on all join in , its only a little blah blah” . That’s his style . No surprise then ,that he is quick to pen a defense of meretricious left wing apologies .
Gordon Brown and Kevin Rudd will be rending their garments about British children sent to the colonies , Brown apologised for way gay second world war code-breaker Alan Turing was treated and so the breast beating goes on. Today black but posh Muir repeats the standard nonsense about slave trade which he describes as .."appalling acts committed, with pretty much malice aforethought, by governments. ... abuse of the power of the state against people who were in no position to raise significant objection or defend themselves ..”
Leaving aside the anachronistic assumptions there are at least two lies here , one outright the other implied by the context of "Apology"
1 The State – No the state was not involved the slave trade happened before Empire in Africa and had been abolished by Europeans (only) by the time we were there
2 Evil white people enslaved good black people – No blacks enslaved blacks mostly
*.Of the 11m - 15m African slaves transported across the Atlantic between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, all but a few thousands had been captured and enslaved by fellow Africans in a cultural practice that pre-dated by centuries the first sight of a European on those shores. Their pre-European market had been the Gulf and the Arab states. Right up until abolition, Europe hardly had a foot ashore in Africa; the vast continent was only colonised post-abolition, when Quinine prophylaxis, the breech-loading rifle and steam gunboats made it possible.
My eldest boy is one of few mixed race children at his Primary and I smirked slightly when ‘black history awareness month’ was trailed . I expect they’ll just dress up and dance around a bit , hope so , as an ancestor of both slaves and Henry Morgan , who owned plenty he may well end up apologising to himself.
*(Tip`o the hat to Raedwald where I pinched this bit from , you can tell by the flowing prose )