‘Find Their Place’

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Benin has approved a law that would allow the descendants of African slaves taken to the Americas to become citizens of the small West African nation, a move that comes as the country grapples with its own role in its history of slavery, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

According to the new law, which was passed by the legislature last month, any person who can trace their ancestry back to a victim of the transatlantic slave trade and who is not a citizen of another African country “may acquire Beninese citizenship by recognition.”

Applicants can provide a variety of documentation as proof, including a DNA test confirming sub-Saharan African lineage. The applicant can also transfer their Beninese citizenship to their descendants.

Many European traders bought captives from African middlemen in what was then known as the Kingdom of Dahomey. The port city of Ouidah in modern-day Benin was one of the region’s largest slave trading hubs between the 18th and 19th centuries, where more than a million men, women and children were captured and put onto ships headed toward the Americas, including the United States and Brazil.

“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 Saturday in an address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Over the past few years, Benin has explored its transatlantic slave-trading history, building museums and memorial sites to document its complicated past.

In neighboring Ghana, which also contains the remnants of European slave trading posts, more than a hundred African Americans have been granted citizenship since 2019, including the iconic musician Stevie Wonder earlier this year.