The date is not an accident
Every 23rd of August, the United Nations and UNESCO mark the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition. The date commemorates the night of 22–23 August 1791, when enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue — now Haiti — rose against their captors and began what became the Haitian Revolution.
UNESCO asks educators, artists and communities to use the day to reflect on the causes and consequences of the transatlantic trade.
I want to accept that invitation seriously. And I want to do it as a mother, a nurse and a parent coach rather than as a historian.
Because the question I keep returning to is not how did it happen? It is what part of it is still happening?
The chains were the cheapest part
Here is what I have come to believe after nearly two decades in nursing, midwifery and mental health work across continents.
Physical bondage is inefficient. It is expensive. It requires ships, iron, overseers, garrisons and constant force. It provokes resistance, and resistance eventually wins — which is precisely what 1791 proves.
Belief costs nothing.
A belief installed early enough in a human mind needs no guard, no wages and no maintenance. It replicates itself. It gets passed from mother to daughter as advice. It arrives dressed as common sense.
That is why I say the trade did not end. It got cheaper.
Six places you can see it
One: the hair.
Walk into any salon in Lagos, London or Atlanta. Notice how often the hair that grows out of an African scalp is treated as the raw, unfinished state — the thing you deal with before you are presentable. Notice how often “doing your hair” means covering it with hair from another race.
I am not condemning any woman’s choice. Adornment is ancient and African. Our grandmothers threaded, wrapped and braided long before anyone sold us a standard.
I am asking a different question: is it a choice, or is it a default you inherited without inspecting? Those are not the same thing, and only one of them is freedom.
Two: the currency.
Fourteen African countries use the CFA franc. It was created in 1945, in the closing years of formal French rule.
The system has been genuinely reformed. In December 2019, France and the eight West African member states agreed to end the requirement that the regional central bank deposit half its foreign reserves with the French Treasury, to remove French representatives from the governing bodies, and to rename the currency the Eco. France ratified that in 2020, and the French government states plainly that it no longer holds those reserves or sits in governance.
That is real, and honesty requires me to say so.
But look at what survived. The currency remains pegged to the euro at a fixed rate. Its convertibility is still guaranteed by France. The Eco has still not properly arrived, seven years on. And the six Central African states remain further behind.
So the sharper version of the argument is not “Africa pays a colonial tax.” It is this: a monetary policy set to suit the eurozone is not a monetary policy designed for African economies. A fixed peg makes imports cheap and exports expensive. It rewards buying and punishes making. That is not a fee. It is a shape — and the shape outlived the fee.
Three: the banknotes.
Many African countries do not print their own money. The notes in our hands are produced by a handful of Western commercial printers, then shipped in, at considerable cost in foreign exchange.
Think about that for a moment. Sovereignty is supposedly the power to issue your own currency. If you cannot physically manufacture it, how complete is that power?
Four: the uranium.
For decades, uranium mined in Niger fed the reactors that give France one of the highest shares of nuclear electricity in the world.
Meanwhile, Niger has one of the lowest electricity access rates on earth. Most Nigeriens still cannot reliably switch on a light.
The resource left. The light stayed behind.
Five: the crude.
Nigeria has pumped oil since 1958. For most of that time we have exported it raw and imported it back refined, at ruinous cost, subsidised out of the public purse, while our own refineries sat idle.
Then a Nigerian built a refinery on Nigerian soil. And the conversation changed — almost overnight — to concentration and monopoly.
Now, I want to be careful here, because this is where people stop reading and start shouting.
Monopoly concern is legitimate. A single dominant supplier in a market as essential as fuel is a genuine risk to consumers, and any serious economist will tell you so. I am not asking anyone to abandon that principle.
I am asking us to notice when the principle gets invoked.
We lived under a monopoly for sixty years. It was called import dependency. It transferred enormous value out of the continent. No emergency panel was convened.
The alarm sounded when ownership changed hands.
I am not saying the problem is the monopoly. I am saying we should be honest about who is permitted to hold one.
Six: the feed.
And this is the one that reaches your kitchen table.
Not one of the major platforms shaping your teenager was designed in Africa. Not one of the recommendation systems deciding what she sees next was built by someone who has ever eaten your mother’s food.
Somebody else decides what beauty looks like.
Somebody else decides which story about Africa reaches her before she is old enough to argue back.
Somebody else decides what “normal” is.
This is the most efficient version of the old arrangement ever devised. It requires no ships. It costs the operator nothing. And we carry it in our pockets voluntarily.
I call the whole of it Slave Trade 2.0. Not to be provocative. Because it is accurate about the mechanism: the target is no longer the body. It is the mind.
A hard case worth sitting with
I want to raise something difficult, and I want to do it carefully, because a family is grieving.
Professor Jason Arday became the youngest Black professor at the University of Cambridge in 2023, at 37. He was autistic, did not speak until he was eleven, did not read or write until he was eighteen, and rose from a Clapham council estate to a professorial chair. That story mattered to a great many people.
In the summer of 2026, allegations were raised about plagiarism in his academic work. Nathan Cofnas, an American academic then at Ghent University, published claims comparing Arday’s thesis against other texts. What followed was weeks of intense media scrutiny that widened from his scholarship into his qualifications, his medical history and his personal biography.
Arday denied plagiarism. Liverpool John Moores University upheld its decision to award his PhD. Cambridge initially defended him robustly, with a spokesperson describing a campaign to undermine his credibility, before later opening its own investigation citing new information. He resigned in early August, writing that the relentless accusations and public commentary had taken a profound toll on him and those he loved, and that his resignation should not be read as accepting the narratives around him. He was found dead in London on 14 August, aged 41.
I want to be scrupulous. The allegations were serious and remain formally unresolved. Some may prove to have merit. I am not in a position to adjudicate them, and neither is anyone writing a blog post.
Two things can be true at once, and both matter.
Cofnas is himself a contested figure. Cambridge’s Emmanuel College ended its association with him after students raised concerns about blog posts in which he argued that in a genuine meritocracy Black people would largely disappear from high-profile positions outside sport and entertainment. He states he is not a racist and is in legal dispute with the college. Ghent University has now suspended him pending a preliminary disciplinary investigation, and said in its statement that Arday’s death should prompt reflection on how we treat one another when someone becomes the subject of public controversy.
That is Ghent’s language, not mine, and I think it is the right note.
Here is why I am putting this in an article about the slave trade.
Scrutiny of a scholar’s work is not persecution. It is how scholarship functions, and Black academics are not owed exemption from it. Any argument that says otherwise insults us.
But there is a difference between examining a body of work and dismantling a human being and the second thing happened in public, at volume, with a racist chorus attached to it that nobody serious denies was there.
The old system needed a ship to remove an African from the world.
The new one needs a news cycle.
I hold no certainty about what happened in Jason Arday’s final days, and neither should anyone else. What I hold is a question I cannot put down: what does it cost, psychologically, to be the first and the youngest and the proof — and to know that if you fall, you fall for everyone who looks like you?
That weight is not distributed evenly. Our children will carry it. We should prepare them for it, and we should also make sure they never believe their worth is conditional on being flawless.
If you or someone you love is struggling, please reach out. SURPIN (Nigeria) 0800 078 7746 · Samaritans (UK) 116 123 · 988 (US and Canada). You do not have to carry it alone.
So what do we actually do?
I am a coach, not a commentator. Analysis without action is just a well-dressed complaint. Here is the work.
Build. Our refineries. Our mints. Our archives. Our platforms. A continent that only consumes will always be governed by whoever produces. Every African child who learns to build software rather than only scroll it is a small act of decolonisation. This is not sentiment — it is the entire premise of my free guide, From Screen Time to Skill Time.
Audit the defaults. Sit with your daughter and ask, without judgement, why she does what she does with her hair. Not to shame a choice. To make sure it is a choice.
Teach the question. The single most protective habit you can install in a teenager is this: Who made this, and what do they want from me? Apply it to an app, an advert, a headline, a hairline. A child who asks it habitually cannot be quietly formed by anyone.
Feed her the other story. She will not find pre-colonial African kingdoms on her For You page. She will find them in your voice, at your table. Tell her whose descendant she is. This is exactly why I am building You Come From Kingdoms — because a child who knows she comes from somewhere is very hard to sell an inferiority to.
Learn. Unlearn. Relearn. And do it in front of her. Let her watch you change your mind about something. That is how she learns that a mind is a thing you own and operate, not a thing you receive.
Tomorrow
The Parents Teens Summit 2026, founded by Ameenah Ali, opens tomorrow with virtual sessions running from 24 to 27 August, and an onsite Grand Finale on 29 August at the EKO FM Marquee, Ikeja, Lagos.
I am proud to support it, and I will be speaking to exactly this: how we raise African children whose minds belong to them.
They freed the hands in the nineteenth century.
The mind is still being negotiated.
Let us go and win that one.
Latifah Ajetunmobi is a certified parent and teen coach, registered nurse, midwife and mental health nurse, and author of The Phone-Free Teenager and Beyond the Goat Pen: An African Woman’s Journey.
Child safeguarding: Cece Yara 0800 800 8001 · Lagos DSVA 0800 033 3333