Hopefully something like this can only happen in America, the land of the lawyer, but it seems some black Africans are trying to fill their pockets because of the slave trade and are sueing Lloyds!
The suit, filed in Manhattan’s federal court, seeks just over £1 billion in punitive damages from Lloyd’s, tobacco firm RJ Reynolds and banking group FleetBoston. The suit also seeks unspecified actual damages.
Apparantly they are going to use DNA to prove where they come from but why it should matter is beyond me. Everyone throughout the world knows that the slave trade was wrong. But taking into acount all the following generations there are now millions of descendants of slaves scattered all over the world. Are they all entitled to compensation?
And who is sueing the black Africans who participated in the slave trade? Who is sueing the Arabs who made huge profits from it? What about the Egyptians? Is anybody sueing them for keeping the Israelites as slaves?
Lets face some facts here. Slavery was already well established as a very profitable trade before the white man ever set foot in Africa. We just provided another lucrative market. The leaders of the stronger African tribes could now sell their slaves to the European traders as well as the Arab traders they were already selling to.
If some of the descendants of slaves are not prepared to look to the future rather than the past then why not concentrate on bringing the founders of this barbaric trade to count rather than the next link in the chain? Is it because there is no money to be made in sueing poor black Africans who just happen to be descended from these powerful tribes that started the trade?
Until that happens then any attempt to extract money form any company or corporation who profited from this trade is just an excuse to line the plaintives pockets.
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