Price of slavery

By Cameron Duodu

"The problem of the 20th century," the great African-American thinker, Dr W.E.B. Du Bois, declared in 1903, "is the problem of the colour-line — the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the island of the sea." It looks as though "the problem" will be on the agenda of international relations for the 21st century as well.

A group calling itself The African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission, meeting in Accra, has issued a declaration demanding $777 trillion from Western Europe and the Americas, "in reparation for enslaving Africans while colonising the continent".

In The Accra Declaration, the Commission said it would set up an international team of lawyers from Africa and the Diaspora to pursue all legal means to collect the money.

"All those nations of Western Europe and the Americas and institutions, who participated in, and benefited from the slave trade and colonialism" would be made to pay, the declaration said.

Africa’s external debts would be wiped off as part of the reparations package, it added: "The socio-economic deterioration of the global African society today is directly linked to the burdensome African debt crisis, which has strangled development in Africa."

The declaration followed a conference in Abuja organised by the late Chief Moshood Abiola just before Nigeria’s 1993 presidential election, which he won though the military intervened to prevent him taking office. Historians and lawyers at the conference examined practical ways of exacting reparations for slavery and colonialism.

Subsequently, the Organisation of African Unity set up a sub-committee to carry the campaign into the international arena, especially the United Nations.

The debt crisis is not the only legacy of the 400 years of Atlantic slave trade, during which millions of Africans were kidnapped from their own countries and shipped to North America and the Caribbean to slave on cotton, sugar and tobacco plantations owned by European merchants.

Millions never reached their intended destinations at all. Some were thrown overboard when they became sick from the hunger and insanitary conditions they endured during the voyage. Others were killed during insurrections against their captors.

Some threw themselves overboard rather than continue the journey into slavery.

The African societies from which they were wrenched became unimaginably poor as a result of the mass kidnappings. For it was the strongest people — those whom the slavers could rely upon to survive the long and arduous journey and be available for work — who were targeted. As they left, they took their labour, the engine of economic growth, with them.

So as Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean grew rich on the proceeds of "the triangular trade", Africa shrivelled economically. Then, any hope that it could embark on an indigenous route of economic growth was lost when a second slavery was thrust upon it — colonisation.

Some of the powers that had become rich from the Atlantic slave trade — Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Holland and Portugal — sat round a table in Berlin in 1884 and drew lines on a map of Africa.

African societies that had long existed as single units were torn into shreds to re-emerge as the "possessions" of different European powers, under different flags and with different borders.

This is how some African ethnic groups, such as the Somalis, are to be found dispersed across five or even six different "countries".

Much of the instability in the Great Lakes area of Central Africa stems from the diffuse manner in which loyalties to the nation states of the region are distributed. There are Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and the Congo Democratic Republic, for example. And Kongo peoples can be found in Angola, the two Congos, Gabon and Cameroon.

It is not surprising that dissatisfaction in one country immediately infects its neighbours. Yet these troubles are usually reported in the world press as meaningless outbreaks of atavism, not the predictable consequences of political arrangements arrived at between the colonisers and their chosen political heirs.

It is the frustrations which Africans and people of African descent feel when they observe the current state of the continent that has inspired an examination of the possibility of exacting reparations from the European and American countries that have grown wealthy not only on the backs of African slaves, but also from the proceeds of raw materials extracted cheaply from Africa to feed the industries of the colonisers.

The Accra Declaration’s demands are not as impractical as they may appear.

At the Abuja Conference, a white lawyer, Lord Anthony Gifford, who sits in the British House of Lords, endorsed the feasibility of Africa pursuing reparations.

He described "the mass kidnap and enslavement of Africans" during the slave trade as "the most wicked criminal enterprise in recorded human history" and said the crime could be tried in much the same manner as the Nuremberg trials of German Nazis at the end of the Second World War and the more recent trials of human right abusers at the Human Rights Court in The Hague, Holland.

Once it had been established that a crime had been committed, the remedy could be found, for the law abhors a crime without remedy in much the same way as nature abhors a vacuum, Lord Gifford said.

His opinion was important because there is every reason to suppose that before any reparations can be agreed, lawyers drawn from the Western school of international jurisprudence, which Lord Gifford undoubtedly represents, must agree that the case has merit.

If the case comes up for international adjudication, it will provide Africans and their brothers and sisters elsewhere with an opportunity to talk back at the white world that, for years, has pretended that Africa’s social and economic problems are of its own making. If blacks could make whites understand that the white world owes a great part of its inherited wealth to African slave labour, and that the continuing economic power of the rich nations has been predicated upon cheap raw material exports from Africa, half the battle would have been won.

As a West Indian delegate put it to me at the Abuja conference, "It’s about respect, man. Not money. Respect."

— Gemini News