The Yoruba language identified distinct categories of stupid; Oponu, the wilful stupid, is at the top. By Oponu was meant a person with mashed up reasoning. According to some highly placed Oponu, Britain did not benefit economically from the transatlantic slavery despite the fact that Britain spent 400 years doing the slavery. Indeed, Britain and Portugal accounted for 75% of all Africans transported from their homes to the Americas. Britain only stopped the transatlantic slavery because it had so depopulated the Yoruba coastal towns and villages that there were no more people available to enslave.

In the 1800s, taxes on goods from the British slave owning colonies contributed 70% of the government’s total income. Rewards of the transatlantic slave system were visible everywhere: from ‘the urban fabric of slave ports, to the grand homes of those made wealthy, to the jobs created in industrial cities, to the coffee and tobacco shops dotting British cities.’ By the turn of that century, the slave plantation economy was so enormous that it made Britain the most powerful economic force on Earth. 

Profits from Yoruba enslavement were felt throughout Britain, financing banks, including the Bank of England, and notable buildings, including of the West India Docks in London. Finance houses grew rich from fees and interests earned from merchants who borrowed money for their long voyages. Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, and London were the key ports for trafficking the enslaved Yoruba across the Atlantic. Slave transport was restricted to these ports under the 1799 Slave Trade Act. The merchants, shipbuilders, metal manufacturers and sailors who directly furnished the slave trading expeditions were a major source of income and wealth for these port cities, as well as for people whose economic activity was in the slavery support trades. The city of Birmingham, for example, sold well over 100,000 guns per year to the slavery economy.

Britain owes the Yoruba bigly. Britain’s slaves came from the West African coast. The Yoruba were the predominant inhabitants. Rather than seek solace in the revisionism of the Oponu, the wilful stupid, Britain should begin to explore ways of creating wealth on the West Coast of Africa. We at The Yoruba Party in the UK (YPUK) envisage a Marshall type plan from Britain, concentrated on developing the maritime economy of the Yoruba coast. Britain needs overseas markets to survive. Britain can help itself by developing the Yoruba Nation as promised in the still extant Treaty that Queen Victoria concluded with Oba Adeyemi, the Alaafin of Oyo, on 23 July 1888.

Only the YPUK can make this happen. Join us and donate at PayPal.me/YorubaParty.