The year long commemoration of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, passed by the British Parliament on March 25th 1807, is a sign of the progress that has been made by the people of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean. As the great American lyricist Paul Robeson has said in song, we have come over a way that with tears has been watered, we have come treading a path through the blood of the slaughtered. We can be sure that there was no remembrance observed during any of the other significant milestones especially at the 10th or 20th as slavery still existed then. At the centennial in 1907, these Caribbean islands were in the vice like grip of poverty, destitution and despair that characterized colonialism during the dawn of the 20th century when racialized eugenics passed for science in Europe and Jim Crow was law in America.
The long road that led to this international recognition was paved with the suffering and struggles of those who stepped out to affirm the dignity of Diaspora Africans and to demand the respect of their peers as men. Their names are well known from Marcus Garvey to C. L.R James to Walter Rodney even if the full extent of their work is not. Yet as great as it is that the world has finally stepped forward to begin to acknowledge the wrong that was the enslavement of Africans in the Caribbean and wider American region, we must be ever vigilant that we do not again exchange our rights for trinkets. We must ensure that the epitaph on the gravestone that is finally being erected in the world's consciousness for those millions who were murdered on the march to the coast, during the middle passage and under the weight of the whip is not merely symbolic, the empty platitude of a UN resolution or the cynical condescension of an almost apology from British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
The history of the European expansion into the American continent is a sad commentary of annihilation that was almost always perpetrated through apparently reasonable exchange. The aboriginal people of these lands shared their food and knowledge and land and gold with the visitors from the sea and got small pox and slavery and extinction in return. The same could be said for the African chieftains. They sold their friends, neighbours and posterity to the white man in exchange for what; guns and glass beads and other haberdashery that merely ensured that they continued to wage pretentious wars to feed the ever growing behemoth of slavery. The result of this abominable trade is the modern world with an economic system that generates ever larger profits of trillions of dollars that could feed, clothe and school the entire world but instead ensures that a miniscule few live in opulence while the vast majority has yet to move beyond the medieval conditions of mud huts without sanitation.
At this stage in our history we have an ever more sophisticated understanding of slavery and the slave trade. We all know that slavery had an economic rather than racial basis and many among us are sure that it is a historical artifact that we waste time talking about and use as an excuse for the problems of today. This view betrays the unwillingness or inability of many to fully come to grips with the unburied corpse of four centuries of physical, cultural and social degradation that cut Diaspora Africans in the Caribbean off from the continuity, psychological security and cultural inheritance from our ancestors that should be ours by right and which has cast its cloying stench across the last 175 years of civilization building. In international law every aspect of the slave trade and slavery constitutes a crime against humanity including forced deportation, family disintegration, forced labour and annihilation. This designation incurs specific legal and financial penalties on perpetrators that beyond any impossible attempt at compensation serve to effect the moral necessity of restitution when a wrong has occurred. Restitution is an old principle existing in both law and moral philosophy at least since the Old Testament was written. In the simplest terms restitution demands that a person who commits a wrong or becomes unjustly enriched due to committing a wrong must pay whatever he gains to his victim. It aims to re-establish the moral order of society by identifying wrong, acknowledging it as such and attempting as far as possible to correct it. This is important because the failure to demand or make restitution allows the wrong to become a part of the status quo and therefore weakens the horror of that wrong. This in turn makes it much easier for the perpetrators to repeat the wrong and weakens the capacity of victims to gain redress. Reparations are a form of restitution.
The lack of restitution, that is, reparations is the reason the issue of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery are alive and well today. It is the reason that 169 years after both have ceased to be legal they are still the paradigm through which cultural, economic and social development has occurred or rather not occurred throughout the African Diaspora. It is telling that the case of the trade in and enslavement of Africans is the only one to which there has consistent opposition to reparations. The United Nations and several countries have accepted that reparations are indeed due to the various aboriginal tribes that were met here in the region by European explorers despite the fact that many of the events for which this is appropriate happened hundreds of years ago. To this end the government of Canada, for example, has paid reparations to the First Nations people. The question must be asked then; why is it that whenever the issue is raised in relation to the enslavement of Africans there is so much opposition?
One reason is certainly that the economic and racial caste system formalized during slavery is the very much the basis of the modern world. In the globalized and services based modern economy the essential roles of master and slave remain unchanged from the previous mercantile and manufacturing arrangement. Raw materials and especially labour continue to come from the melanin doused parts of the world and many of us are aware of sweat shops, child labour, the lack of union rights and other ills that afflict that part of the planet to which we here in the Caribbean belong. To ensure that we know this we are given several names, the Third World, the Global South and so on. The wealth and power belong to the pale parts of the world. The IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, the WTO and all the other mechanisms that ensure the world economy has a top for the few and a bottom for the many are located in Europe or North America.
The same is true for the cultural elite. The way we see ourselves comes not from the verdant and self-actualizing poetry of a Derek Walcott or the glorious historical studies of our people transcribed for us by a C. L. R. James but rather from the mass entertainment centers of North America. It is a common site to see our youth and elders sporting fashions inappropriate for our climate straight from foreign music videos. The multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries that ply us with hair straighteners and creams to make us bright and clear to say nothing of the false hair made in China have turned us into a race of worshipful supplicants to the base idol of an ethnic inferiority complex. We certainly cannot deny that we are being made into the image of someone else and we know that such work belongs only to God.
It is a fact that the capacity of Africans on the continent or in the Diaspora to assume the full rights and privileges of sovereignty is not really respected in the international community. The story of Africa that is told in the establishment organs such as the Wall Street Journal and the BBC is that of the failed states ravaged by war, corruption, AIDS poor governance and crippling national debts. Africa and Africans where ever we are to be found are thought of as needing the paternalistic care of our betters to prevent Rawandan and Sudanese killing fields, demands for aid and hordes of refugees from Haiti from clogging up the legal system in the US. We know that this portrait is grossly inaccurate but until we can stand up as a people and assert our rights we will have few tools with which to correct and direct the perceptions of Africa and Africans. The right, moral, legitimate and timely demand for reparations for the Atlantic trade in Africans and the enslavement of our ancestors is the proper avenue through which to pursue our claims.
It is annoying but I know I have to explain that the issue of reparations is not about begging for money. Money is certainly owed. There are four hundred years of wages outstanding but there are much larger issues at stakes. Reparations include fair trade policies that ensure that agricultural subsidies in the US and EU no longer cripple the industry in the ACP countries, repatriation of our documents and works of art that adorn museums and royal houses in North America and Europe that we have to pay them to see. It includes economic policies that ensure the benefit of the oil industry in Nigeria raises Nigerians out of poverty and that Antigua can use modern technology to boost its economy without interference. The demand for reparations is the demand for a public and tangible acknowledgement that the kidnapping, the march to the coast, the middle passage, the branding, the forced labour, the separation of families and the murders were wrong. It is a demand for justice.
