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

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 still exist today as tribal networks, as to the victims relatives.

It was even alleged that the current Beninese president and author of the citizenship law Patrice Talon is descended from these native slavers.

Whatever the case may be, Benin will grant citizenship to anyone over the age of 18 who can use DNA evidence, family records, or sworn testimony to prove their ancestors came from sub-Saharan Africa.

Many have taken Benin up on the offer, though it requires one to hold a provisional certificate of nationality valid for three years, during which time they have to live in the country for at least part of that.

“By legally recognizing these children of Africa, Benin is healing a historical wound. It is an act of justice, but also one of belonging and hope,” Justice Minister Yvon Détchénou said at the ceremony when Ciara received her citizenship.

Famous for chart-toppers like “Goodies,” and “Level-Up,” but also her philanthropic work, Ciara said that she “experienced a profound return to what truly matters,” following a visit to Benin where she experienced some of the “memorial tourism” Benin has attempted to develop.

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This includes sites like Ouidah’s “Door of No Return,” a gate through which slaves were loaded onto the ships, and which can also be found at Ghana’s cape coast castle.

The citizenship law is not the first time Benin has acknowledged its role in the slave trade, something which few others admit to, AP reports. In 1990, the country hosted a conference sponsored by UNESCO that explored the avenues and methods by which the slave trade was developed and carried out in the country.

In 1999, on a visit to Baltimore, Beninese president Mathieu Kérékou fell to his knees in a church and begged forgiveness for his native land’s involvement.

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But the law isn’t only for African Americans seeking to connect with their lost heritage. AP spoke with one woman from Saint Martinique in the Caribbean who settled in Benin and opened a travel agency with her new citizenship in July.

“A lot of the people reminded me of my grandparents, the way they wore their headscarves, their mannerisms, their mentality,” she said.