{"id":302157,"date":"2025-07-29T20:56:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T20:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/302157\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T20:56:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T20:56:10","slug":"us-grammy-winner-ciara-becomes-citizen-of-benin-under-new-slavery-descendants-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/302157\/","title":{"rendered":"US Grammy winner Ciara becomes citizen of Benin under new slavery-descendants law"},"content":{"rendered":"

“This act, which is symbolic, humane and historic, is not merely an administrative gesture. It is a gesture of the soul, a return to one’s roots, a hand extended to those whom history, in its brutality, had torn from this land,” the government said in a statement on Monday, following the ceremony.<\/p>\n

By enacting the My Afro Origins Law last year, Benin joined countries like Ghana and Guinea-Bissau in offering citizenship to people with an African ancestor who was taken from their homeland as part of the transatlantic slave trade.<\/p>\n

Descendants can apply to become a citizen via a recently launched website, external<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Just last week, Benin appointed renowned American filmmaker Spike Lee and his wife, Tonya Lewis Lee, a seasoned producer and author, as its ambassadors for African-Americans in the US<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Benin’s coastline is part of what was once known as the Slave Coast – a major departure point for enslaved Africans shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas.<\/p>\n

Between 1580 and 1727, the Kingdom of Whydah, a major slave-trading centre located on what is now Benin’s coast, is estimated to have exported more than a million Africans to the US, the Caribbean and Brazil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“This act, which is symbolic, humane and historic, is not merely an administrative gesture. It is a gesture…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":302158,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3940],"tags":[4080,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-302157","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302157\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}