By Orita Bailey

Celebrations to commemorate the 200th Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade were held in many parts of the world on the 25th March 2007. In Africa, the Caribbean, the UK and at the United Nations in New York, many prominent persons spoke about the work of the abolitionists in persuading the government of King George III to end the transportation and trade in Africans. Of course, this did not end the actual owning and enslavement of Africans for many years.

When we speak of reparation we are not simply speaking of the experience of enslavement. What some conveniently choose to forget is that the European colonial powers remained in their African and Caribbean territories long after slavery was abolished and continued to pillage those countries of their natural resources. When slavery was finally abolished, enslavers, including the Church of England, were compensated ‘500 pounds sterling per person’ for the loss of the people they had enslaved. Were the enslaved people compensated? Not yet!!

The oldest independent former black African colony, Ghana, is just 50 years old this year. Ghana’s independence occurred in the same era as the Jewish holocaust. If it was appropriate to make reparation to the Jews for Hitler’s atrocities, it is just as appropriate to make reparation to the descendants of the enslaved Africans, even 200 years later, for the atrocities inflicted on their ancestors.

The forced removal of 15 million Africans from Africa could be said to be a determining factor in the under-development of that continent. Indeed, some economists and population scientists believe that the de-population of sub-Saharan Africa could be the cause of more than its under-development. There is an argument that in order to develop the necessary infrastructure, a large population is a prerequisite. America was developed not only with forced African labour, but also with huge influxes of migrant workers from Europe, China and other states. It is obvious that the depletion of such high numbers of people from the continent of Africa could not have had a beneficial effect.

In his address to the United Nations entitled “THE TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE AND SLAVERY: THE PSYCHIC INHERITANCE,” Professor Rex Nettleford, Emeritus Professor and Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, states: “This is arguably a main point of the Reparation advocacy – we are by no means seeking a hand out of 500 pounds sterling per person to descendants of the oppressed, but rather positing serious investment by countries which have been enriched by the heinous crime of the Slave Trade and Slavery, in the human resource development of countries that suffered, preferably through the education and preparation of their young to enable them to cope with the inheritance of a continuing unjust world. And above all, for them to be able to understand their own history and help plug the knowledge gap which the Honourable Representative from St. Vincent and the Grenadines so eloquently emphasized in the UN debate of last November. For as a well-known African proverb goes: ‘until the lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter’.”

The devastation caused by the actions of the British and other Europeans in carving up the African continent in such a way as to exacerbate and perpetuate tribal conflict and maximise their pillage is still being experienced today in Sudan, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and many other African countries. We in the Caribbean may be fortunate to be spared such turmoil, but the legacy of the plantocracy, racism and asperity still exists.

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