Grammy Winner Ciara Accepts Offer for Benin Citizenship, a New Way to Reckon with its Slave Trade

Grammy Winner Ciara Accepts Offer for Benin Citizenship, a New Way to Reckon with its Slave Trade

Grammy Winner Ciara Accepts Offer for Benin Citizenship, a New Way to Reckon with its Slave Trade Ciara gains Benin citizenship Credit: @Ciara Instagram American R&B singer Ciara has been awarded citizenship to the African country of Benin as part of a new law that aims to attract the African diaspora. Like similar initiatives in neighboring Ghana, the law is seen as a way of bringing tourism and investment, but unlike its neighbors, Benin believes it’s reckoning and atoning for its own role in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, a step too far for most other West African nations. Approximately 1.5 million Africans were captured, enslaved, and deported to the New World by the Bight Benin, a distributed state that included modern-day Benin, Togo, and parts of Nigeria. The powerful kings of the day captured and sold slaves to the Portuguese, English, and French, transporting 1 million through the coastal city of Ouidah alone. When slavery ended, those kingdoms ended the practice, but they st…