(Bloomberg) -- Present-day Benin, from where more than a million people were shipped to the Americas at the height of the slave trade, has approved a law that makes their descendants eligible for citizenship in the small West African nation.
The law, passed on Sept. 2, says that any person who can trace their ancestry back to a victim of the transatlantic slave trade, and who doesn’t hold an African nationality, “may acquire Beninese citizenship by recognition.”
Applicants can provide various forms of documentation proving that ancestry, including a DNA test showing sub-Saharan African lineage. If approved, they would be conferred Beninese citizenship, which would be transferable to their own descendants.
Benin is home to the town of Ouidah, where Portuguese traders built one of Africa’s most active slave-trading ports in the 18th and 19th centuries. Over two centuries, men, women and children were captured, chained and loaded into ships mainly destined for what would become the United States, Brazil and for the Caribbean.
“Our brothers and sisters of the Diaspora, uprooted by force during the dark days of the transatlantic slave trade, must find their place once again within the African community,” Benin’s Foreign Minister Olushegun Adjadi Bakari said in New York Saturday during his address to the General Assembly of the United Nations.
Benin has been facing its history of slavery in recent years by building museums and memorial sites, but it’s a complicated past: European traders bought captives from African middlemen in what was then known as the Kingdom of Dahomey.
Nearby Ghana, where Europeans also left behind several slave trading posts, has granted citizenship to more than a hundred African Americans since 2019, including the legendary Stevie Wonder earlier this year.
“By recognizing their right to return, we are saying to them, ‘you have never ceased belonging to this land,’” Bakari said.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.