by AMA BINEY
IMAGE/Aehnetwork
In the light of the former British Prime Minister’s dismissal of reparations, activists must push the debate further by detailing what reparations should entail. Fundamental to a reparations programme must be the fact that we transform the system of capitalism which slavery gave birth to.
Former British Prime Minister David Cameron’s insulting dismissal of trans-Atlantic slavery and his opinion that Africans and people of African descent should “move on from this painful legacy, and continue to build for the future,” would never be audaciously uttered to Jewish people by this arrogant warmonger who bombed Libya and sought to bomb Syria, but the British House of Commons voted against such action. As the African American actor Danny Glover said, the Jamaican government should tell Britain to “keep your prison, give us schools, give us infrastructure, not prisons.” [1] In addition, the Jamaican government should ask Cameron to return all the professional Jamaicans who are teachers, lecturers, health workers, IT consultants, etc. to Jamaica – instead of the criminals. Moreover, Cameron should then pay the salaries of these Jamaican professionals whilst they develop the economy of Jamaica for the almost 400 years that slavery lasted. In short, we must confront the reality that one of the reasons why there is a brain drain in the Caribbean and Africa is the lack of decent and attractive salaries to retain African professionals. Britain can foot the bill to address this inequality that sprung from slavery and colonialism.
It is necessary to advance the debate on whether Britain and the West in general (i.e. all those slave trading nations such as France, The Netherlands, Spain, the USA, Portugal, etc.) should pay reparations: what should reparations entail?
Acknowledging the atrocity and enormity of this experience is necessary in an official apology. Commentators have observed how the Maoris received an apology from the British Queen in 1995.[2] In 2008 the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised in parliament to all Aborigines for laws and policies that “inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss”.[3] It appears when it comes to Africans our lives, bodies and history do not matter. Racism will find various rationalisations (or excuses) to deny that enslavement of Africans merits an apology and reparations. Yet, we cannot erase the collective historical memory and experiences of enslavement that was wrought on people of African descent and continues with the covert and overt forms of racial discrimination that they still experience in the 21st century. Notions of racial supremacy and the inferiority of Black people are rooted in the brutal killings of Black males by white police officers in both the US and UK. Such notions stem from the legacy of slavery that gave rise to racist stereotypes harboured by racist societies that have institutionalised racism. Perhaps it should also be the case that in a programme of reparatory justice, there should be legal redress for the lives of the hundreds of Black men killed by racist police officers, as well as the people of African descent unjustly incarcerated in America’s prisons.
Whilst it is the case that no amount of financial compensation can address the psychological and emotional scars of enslavement of people of African descent, nor the horrors of the Middle Passage, nor those who remain buried in the Atlantic Ocean as a consequence of suicide, nor the 132 Africans deliberately thrown overboard in 1786 on the slave ship Zong – in order that the ship owners could claim the insurance – a comprehensive economic package needs to address the fact that the current economic and technological underdevelopment of Africa and the Caribbean is symptomatic of the impact of 400 years of enslavement. This enslavement was followed by the brief but no less damaging interlude of colonialism and must be recognised as central to any form of reparations.
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