Tea at Trianon: Nigeria's Slave Descendants

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, October 3, 2020

Nigeria's Slave Descendants

From the BBC:

In a tragedy reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet, a couple in Nigeria killed themselves earlier this month after their parents had forbidden them from marrying because one of them was a descendant of slaves.

"They're saying we can't get married... all because of an ancient belief," the note they left behind said.

The lovers, who were in their early thirties, hailed from Okija in south-eastern Anambra state, where slavery was officially abolished in the early 1900s, as in the rest of the country, by the UK, Nigeria's colonial ruler at the time.

But descendants of freed slaves among the Igbo ethnic group still inherit the status of their ancestors and they are forbidden by local culture from marrying those Igbos seen as "freeborn".

"God created everyone equally so why would human beings discriminate just because of the ignorance of our forefathers," the couple said. (Read more.)