Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

Is an Irishman like Bob Geldof in a position to assert that Africans are eternally shamed? Is the story of Ireland so uniquely pure among the history of nations that it places Geldof in a position to cast this kind of aspersion on an entire continent? No, of course it is not. There was slavery in Celtic Ireland long before the English arrived – this justifies nothing the English did of course; Irish merchants collaborated in selling Irish people to traders as early as the Vikings. Anglophile Irish chiefs collaborated with the English in their conquest of Ireland, and Irish merchants and landowners forcefully stole land from ‘their own people’ in the midst of the worst famine in modern European history.22