Benin Ambassador Apologizes for Slave Past
By Associated Press

June 28, 2003, 12:11 PM EDT

BATON ROUGE, La. -- Benin's ambassador has a message for all descendants
of African slaves: His nation apologizes. 

"It's so easy to say white man did it to us, but we share in the
responsibility," Ambassador Cyrille Oguin told an audience Friday at
Southern University. 

Baton Rouge is the first of several U.S. cities where Oguin is formally
apologizing for his country's role in the slave trade that brought
Africans to America. Other leaders from the nation have made similar
addresses in recent years. 

Benin, a country of 4.7 million people, was called Dahomey in the 17th
century, when it was a major supplier of slaves for white exporters
shipping from what was called the Slave Coast. Some accounts say Dahomey
rounded up more than 3 million people for sale to slave traders. 

Many Africans suspect the descendants of slaves in the United States and
elsewhere still harbor ill feelings toward Africa because of it, Oguin
said. 

Reconciliation, he said, is the first step to healing old wounds and
opening economic development. 

"The president of Benin, the people of Benin have asked me to come here
and apologize for the government, for the Benin people and for Africa
for what we all know happened," Oguin told the audience. "Where our
parents were involved in this awful, this terrible, trade." 

Benin President Mattieu Kerekou has made reconciliation a priority,
Oguin said. 

"He knows the damage on our side that came from slavery," Oguin said.
"He knows how this robbed our own society at home, how it turned us
against each other." 

In 1999, Kerekou called a conference to discuss reconciliation between
nations involved in the slave trade and the descendants of slaves. 

"During that conference, apologies were made and reconciliation was
started," said Van Dora Williams, of the Reconciliation and Development
Corp., which grew out of that conference and is temporarily based in
Louisiana. "This was a move that people wanted but didn't know how to
articulate." 
Copyright © 2003, The Associated Press

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, visit:

        http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/aam.html

AAM Website:  http://www.danenet.wicip.org/aam
----------------------------------------------------------------------------