Bakr’s language is designed to obfuscate the facts

Dear Editor,

Mr Abu Bakr responded to my letter which highlighted his trivialization of the Caricom reparations initiative with the same prism and circle of self-deception as did his first letter (‘Phillips’ narrative minimises the culture that made the deal possible’ Sunday Stabroek, March 23). The main premise of his letters seem to be that Africans sold other Africans into slavery and therefore there should be no reparations paid.

The language he uses in his letters seems designed to confuse and obfuscate the facts and the morality of crimes against humanity. He seems to suggest criminal enrichment is the old fashioned way to get rich. He writes in the language of the unemotional and detached intellect; Mr Bakr is not writing to educate the general public.

If so, his choice of newspaper would have been obvious. His sequence of thoughts as expressed in both of his letters supports an intellectual argument more suitable for Europeans who still live in denial and for the younger generation who are unaware because of compromised history classes and books which hide the true nature of the history of slavery and the crimes committed by their ancestors for the wealth they enjoy today.

First, I did not argue that Africans did not sell Africans to Europeans, for it is well documented that some of the 3000 tribes in Africa bargained and exchanged Africans to Europeans for guns, trinkets, cheap liquor, cloth, etc.  I find it strange Mr Bakr writes about my response to his first letter that, “Mr Phillips thus still insists, unable to deny that slavery existed in Africa, that I was wrong and that it was really a milder form of servility. Thundering “chattel slavery” was never practised in Africa, he hangs all his hang-ups and bewilderment on this factoid. Mr Bakr knows I wrote chattel slavery never existed in African culture and that European-created “chattel slavery was a crime against humanity” while African slavery was not.

To use a modern-day analogy, let us say, for example, that a man leaves beautiful France, takes a ship to Africa and ‘buys’ some products (guns) from the local warlord. He then proceeds by ship to the Caribbean where he uses his guns to commit, murder, forced migration, forced enslavement, genocide, rape and other crimes, because his government  does not have laws which prevent it. Years later, history shows he was engaged in criminal enrichment, genocide and crimes against humanity. The man then offers his ‘regrets,’ refuses to apologize because he was acting legally then blames his indifference on the legal and moral argument that their own Africans sold them to me, so the African sellers are culpable. In essence the man would be blaming the guys who sold him the guns for his crimes of African genocide, Indigenous genocide and criminal enrichment. Is this commonsense or stark indifference or the mind of someone in denial?

Surely, this cannot be what Mr Bakr is claiming. Cannot.

Surely Mr Bakr can’t be blaming African tribes for the 400 years of European organized crime.

Surely, Mr Bakr cannot blame African chiefs or the enslaved cargo for crimes against humanity.

This is the self-deception and public propaganda he is engaged in. Even the snake-oil salesman language used in his two letters would not be able to convince any court of law or the man in the street.

Mr Bakr’s second argument is Africans should not be paid reparations. Mr Bakr should perhaps answer the question for the man in the street as to whether he believes there should be reparations for Indigenous genocide and African slavery /genocide. The common man in the street is befuddled by his language in the first two letters on this question.

Perhaps I should remind Mr Bakr that before Columbus arrived in Hispaniola in 1492, the native population of North America was perhaps 40 million. By 1900, in the US less than quarter of a million remained, scattered among 1,500 remote villages. May I remind him that there are documents which clearly show the Crown asking that all Garifunas be destroyed?

Does Mr Bakr know there was an official genocidal policy against the Indigenous peoples in many parts of the Caribbean before and after the adoption of the chattel enslavement of Africans as the dominant labour policy. Michael Craton indicates that in the first phase of conquest, 1492-1730, the native population of the Lesser Antilles fell by 90%.

Maybe Mr Bakr is aware the British Crown paid £20 million (or £200 billion in today’s money) to British government officials, planters, businessmen and others for their property after emancipation, but the freed slaves received nothing.

Maybe, Mr Bakr, living in France will know (I am sure he is aware) that Haiti was forced to pay France £150 million by treaty to have the independence of Haiti recognized. This debt was forced onto free Haiti in1824 and not paid off until 1947, yes, 1947.

To put financial reparations in context (Caricom sees financial reparations as one of many dimensions of “repairing the harm”), there have been numerous reparation payments in modern times: In 1990 the US paid $1.6B to Japanese Americans; in 1990 Austria paid $25M in relation to the Jewish holocaust; in 1988 Canada restored 250,000 sq miles to Indians and Eskimos; and in 1971 the US restored 44 million acres and gave $1B to the Native Americans of Alaska.

Maybe Mr Bakr’s next argument will be it was too far in the past and time has passed on without Caricom states suing. Perhaps he will be reminded the British held the Caribbean under colonial rule from Emancipation in 1838 to the mid-1960s when Independence was granted. Surely he can’t blame Caricom nations for being inactive given the Caricom is only 40 years old. Does Mr Bakr know how much was paid to the Jewish community as reparations for the holocaust?

Does Mr Bakr know about £4 trillion which was taken out of the Caribbean in unpaid labour alone, according to researchers at the University of Birmingham, and that vast profits went to financing the construction of modern Britain.

Yes, Africans practised slavery but not chattel slavery which classified Africans as property, non-human and non-persons. This was institutionalized through state enactment of laws by European governments in some cases, and local laws in others, legalizing murder and by many investments by European royalty, the Church, businessmen and others. Europe was built on African chattel slavery. Mr Bakr should join Caricom in seeking justice.

Yours faithfully,
Eric Phillips