Falola, Toyin. "Africa and Slavery in a Transnational Context". In The African Diaspora: Slavery, Modernity, and Globalization, by Toyin Falola, 29-52, Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2013.

Falola, Toyin. "Africa and Slavery in a Transnational Context". In The African Diaspora: Slavery, Modernity, and Globalization, by Toyin Falola, 29-52, Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2013.

• Africa's connection to the rest of world is characterized by dependence and power imbalance, of which the existence of the slave trade was the best example and most important historical element. African contributions to world history between the 17th and 19th Centuries are dominated by the impact of the slave trade (29).
• Many of the stereotypes regarding Africa have their earliest references during the period of the transatlantic slave trade, and the legacy of dependency during slavery continues to marginalize both Africa and the African diaspora through negative attitudes (30-31).
• The transatlantic slave trade made possible the colonization of the Americas by Europeans, as the former provided the majority of the labour which allowed the Americas to become productive and wealth-creating. European dislike for enslaving fellow whites meant that Africa, not Eastern Europe, was the source of slaves (37-38).
• Most contemporary African institutions were created either during slavery or colonization, meaning that modern African states are still very much affected by the unequal and exploitative institutions of earlier decades, which have not yet been replaced (40).
• Scholarship and activism does not pay adequate attention to the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trade, which are often ignored because of the lack of extensive plantation systems supporting them, their smaller scale, and the integration of many descendants of slaves within Arab societies. Arab slaving countries are usually left out of demands for reparations, despite their immense damage to many areas of East Africa and the Sahel (33).
• The role of Africans in creating the slave trade is often overemphasized as a way of downplay European guilt. The nature of African slavery is contested, but it certainly did have to transform from the 1600s onward to meet European demands for the mass export of slaves. Moreover, African involvement in the slave trade does not mean that Africans did not overall suffer from the trade, as its benefits were highly concentrated among a tiny elite (33-35).
• European colonization of Africa had mixed effects of the slave trade and slavery in Africa, as, although colonial government abolished slavery, they also introduced capitalist pressures for commodity exports which actually drove and sustained plantation slavery in Africa, a practice which colonial officials ignored or participated in (40-41).
• Slavery has continued into the late 20th Century in some areas of Africa, particularly in the forms of labour used by colonial government, which exploited indebtedness or control of land to recreate slave-like conditions, most notably in South Africa until the 1990s. Full-fledged slavery never ceased to exist in Mauritania and Sudan, and pre-colonial institutions continue to be used to oppress blacks into the 21st Century (41-45).
• The idea of reparations for the slave trade first became popularized within the pan-Africanist movement led by W. Du Bois, although its popularity and economic feasibility are weak in the Americas outside of radical black nationalist groups. In the 1980s, the African Union adopted this concept, asking for reparation directly to African states (48-49).