Agbetu would continue his unusual Abbey outing with a direct address to the Queen. Another Queen Elizabeth – Elizabeth 1 – had been monarch over a Britain, which fully engaged in and prospered from the trade in Africans. Agbetu compared the British imperial adventure in Africa to Nazi imperialism in Europe. If Jewish nationals could obtain an apology and some recompense from the German inheritors of the Nazi legacy, would Her Majesty not consider a proper British apology to the African peoples? There was never going to be any immediate response from Her Majesty, of course, and as is the nature of his kind of protest, Citizen Agbetu’s great leap into history was soon silenced several sentences after it began. Unless you are Oliver Cromwell no one lets you spew out a torrent of unpalatable truths against a reigning monarch for too long. Out of the ceremonial hall, leaving on his own terms, but surrounded by guards, Citizen Agbetu would be arrested and then conditionally released.

As an iconic moment in the modern history of African emancipation struggles, Toyin Agbetu’s Westminster Abbey intervention is in rather distinguished company: There was Kwame ‘Osagyefo’ Nkrumah, in kente cloth, saying brave things about African unity at Ghana’s independence. So much hope then. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington expounding his dream of ‘one love’ and ‘one human race.’ Rosa Parks, eyes wide open, saying no by not saying yes to the segregation laws of America. And Emmett Till in an open casket chosen by his mother to show the world the disfigured head he got in 1950s America for whistling at a white girl. Emmett was young, male, behaving like a naughty boy. But he was an African naughty boy.

The racial dehumanization of the African peoples has its shameful history and the leader of the Anglican Church was right: There is a reason for the rage of Citizen Agbetu. There is a reason for an apology to Citizen Agbetu. There is a dialogue waiting to begin with Citizen Agbetu. These are some of the excuses given to deny this proper closure to the shameful legacy of slavery: Slavery is of the past not of the present… You cannot hold a people responsible for the sins of their ancestors… And some of those European and American ancestors were nearly just as deprived and oppressed as the African slaves… And was historical slavery was a unique African experience? And, anyway, many African kings at the time collaborated in the slaving of African people… And, corruption is the real problem of Africa not its history of destabilization by imperial oppression… Such excuses.

Would a detailed response to these excuses serve to silence those for whom the matter of an apology is defined only in racial and economic terms? Not likely. It suffices then to indicate that slavery, in its effects on both the enriched slave-holding lands and the impoverished African places of the enslaved, is still very much with us. It is still with diasporic Africans in its lasting disruptions to their sense of family, identity and direction. Institutional white supremacist prejudice towards the African peoples and the intellectual and moral justifications of that are mostly rooted in the experience of slavery. Too often the fact of corruption in Africa becomes the catchall excuse for those who wish to deny any kind of benefit to the continent from the international community. But Africans, including even their leaders, are not more corrupt than the other peoples of the world. Many Africans now live outside Africa, and know from experience and by means of locally available information that corruption is also prevalent in the political, social and economic systems of many developed nations. Mostly, the element of impunity by which corrupt leaderships carry out their activities in Africa is missing in these more economically advanced places, which usually have better funded and more dependable law enforcement systems. Individuals and institutions are generally not above legal sanction in these places. The benefit of functioning law enforcement safeguards against corruption aside, these other lands are economically powerful and stable enough to absorb levels of corrupt practices that would sink many African countries.

Of course, the real difficulty for many governments of former slave-holding lands is not really whether to apologize but how to apologize without having to pay compensation. It is difficult to imagine Africans getting all they want or European and American governments giving all they should in this process. But slavery was about impoverishing one people to enrich another. Compensation is a necessary part of the healing. How to effect this can be worked out in independent people to people (rather than government to government) meetings under the guidance of the United Nations. These representative people meetings may be advised by governments but remain independent of the unequal exchanges and corrupt practices by which successive African leaderships have been pressured or persuaded to serve their people poorly in their historical dealings with explorers, slave merchants, colonial and other representatives of the imperial and industrial nations.

But there is another side to the rage of Citizen Agbetu. Africa and Africans cannot in the end be a matter for others. It is a question of ownership – African ownership of the experiences, realities and fortunes of Africa, African ownership of responsibility for Africa. The remaining time of Africa is still Africa’s to employ in the construction of the African Dream. That may be easier to achieve in parts through joint venture efforts with the significant others of the international community, through a requirement that they own their historical debt to Africa and so truly commit to its reconstruction in recompense. But the Westminster Abbey experience of Citizen Agbetu demonstrates again the importance of primary African ownership of responsibility for the healing and development of Africa. Others have a role, and should own that historical role, but if they don’t, when they do or how they do, should ultimately not undermine or determine an African ownership of the African Struggle, and the African Dream. Africa is still Africa’s to win or lose, its onerous history notwithstanding. That experience of slavery, and the varying forms of colonial and continuing imperial involvement in Africa since then, can become a matter for blind, disabling anger in the conscious African – for the kind of rage that burns up itself or simply burns. It is important to know the past, necessary to address its historical ugliness, overcoming all official and informal denials of access. That was what the rage of Citizen Agbetu was about. It was about ownership, about African ownership of its part in history, about re-establishing in that ceremony at the Abbey a pre-eminent African presence and moment, taking that opportunity to say the usually unsaid in what was and always will be a profoundly African story. continues