Dear Editor,
An interesting letter from Mr Cedric L Joseph enjoined us to approach the Reparations issue from a legalistic and jurisprudential point of view and to avoid the emotionalism on which some seek to set afloat the case.
A good point, for an unavoidable baring of wounds and showing of stigmata is expected. But it seems to be mostly what we are getting. The letter’s headline in your newspaper led us to expect an exposition of the legal issues and a presentation of the emotive dead-ends that should be avoided. In this regard I need to make some observations. There are gaps in the narrative presentation of the case as it is bared in the local press.
First, I understand that the national and regional committees are charged to examine the case of both African and Amerindian victimhood/exploitation and to suggest remedies that address them both. I seem to be seeing little on the case for the Indigenous victims.
Amerindians sufferred far more than Africans by a certain accounting. Their lands were stolen, there was massive decimation by disease and war, and there was, more important, theft of the patrimony that saw the transfer into European economies of food plants like corn and tomatoes and the potato, that would have multi-trillion dollar value in cumulative sales. In general terms, the native populations of the New World were to live a peripheralisation and a racism that was worse than anything any other group in contact with an expanding Europe would suffer. Should we do an evaluation of the stolen land and the minerals extracted from them, plus the free labour and population loss, plus the transfer of products of Amerindian agronomy that now form an important part of the international commodities trade, then the discourse has got to be skewed away from the emotional collective narcissism that has the lights focused on Black dreams of reparations.
In terms of current indigenous efforts at reconstitution of the cultural patrimony, work by Dr Maximilian Forte is of great value as he has referred to progress in Puerto Rico, in Trinidad, Dominica and elsewhere to affirm the Indigenous presence in a Caribbean where we were taught they had mostly died out, and to link this with activists in North, Central and South America.
So, in the Reparations talk there is this strange absence of the other victims. It would appear to me that the African activists leading the charge are, as usual, guilty of the same crimes of which they accuse the White Man, a self-serving ethnocentricty as unconscionable in its blindness as the ills they decry.
Second, the vacuous scholarship that has, in a few cases, sprouted around the issue diminishes the African to the same petty scale that they claim to reject. Unless it is acknowledged that Africans like the Ashantis practised slavery (buying and using in wood clearing and other activities) and equally grew wealthy from the trade, then the African is reduced to a fool selling his brother for trinkets; an infantile character who, after hundreds of years, failed to understand and to possess that will, consciousness and impulse to action that is now contained in the cultural studies jargon as “having agency.” Who, even after some Africans visited Brazil to look at the slave plantations, or Europe to look at the cities, still kept shipping them out. Preparing them, it could be said, to lay claims to reparations in the soon future.
Admissions of Africa’s role have been made by African chiefs, scholars and leaders like Jerry Rawlings, Mathieu Kerekou, Ali Mazrui, Yoweri Museveni, and apologies given. But these black people’s apologies are not enough. The European apologies is what we desire and crave. To free us, paradoxically, from a complex that sees anything European as of higher value.
So we are getting a mythified version of history as self-serving as that conveyed by the White man’s story of his “civilising mission” as motive for the invasions, purchases and thefts.
Third, the history fixes the White man in his role of conspirator/instigator of the trade and casually ignores the fact that, had it not been for Europe, we and many others would probably still all be slaves or lower caste rejects in the continents of our origins. Emanicaption would set in motion a process that not only frees our ancestors, but, eventually, their brothers in Africa (even though pro-slavery battles erupted around Eko/Lagos in what is now Nigeria and several Africans petitioned Europe for its continuance). The British abolition movement would lead to a dynamic that rendered slavery unacceptable in law and also saw the liberation of slaves in Europe itself where Indians known as Gypsies lived in servitude in Romania/Moldova until the mid-1860s. The narrative then, needs to portray the guilty in all his roles and in his evolution. For even though a document similar to the Magna Carta was orally produced by the Soninke of Mali in 1250 or thereabouts, in which Sundiata Keita features (see Charter of Mandé) most African societies served as sources of the outflow of Black slaves and, despite the 300 or so cases of rebellions against the slave trade, lived with it in a corrupt value system still alive today.
Fourth, Mr Joseph states the preference for a legal approach and makes reference to precedents. However, the foundations on which the case is to be argued is hardly evoked beyond citations of doctrine that developed in the Western world circumscribed by its peculiar interpretations and limitations.
The value of his contribution lies in its possibilities as a reminder that, if this is to take the air of a community effort and project, efforts have to be made to educate and sensitize Caribbean peoples. I do not see this as another process where ethnic preference or navel gazing will triumph and the case fall into ridicule for lack of preparation.
The region has produced jurists of the calibre of Dr Mohamed Shahabuddeen (formerly of the World Court) S S Ramphal, Dr Fenton Ramsahoye, Rex McKay, to name only the senior practictioners, and can marshall enough minds to rescue us from the certain derision that this could rain down upon us.
Mr Joseph’s letter evades the issues of who should pay reparations to whom. Should the impoverished Africans be made to pay to help us out of our generalised immiseration? Should the European pay them for enslaving their peoples (if that hypotheses is held)? How much should be sought and in what form? Are we seeking a precedent where Arabs would then be called to pay? How far back in time will we go in our identification of victims? Citing cases of reparations within recent history and cases in living memory is of little value, as it opens more doors than it closes our case.
We are told that this is not about a raise in the pocket of each descendant, but about “reconciliation” and apologies. This idea alone deserves elucidation.
In sum, seeking a big British law firm is okay, but we have to allow into our midst our own devil’s advocates to anticipate and examine the counter-arguments our case will meet in any tribunal. Dismissing this process, as happened when Afro-American scholar Henry Louis Gates was pilloried for saying things (that Africans were involved in the slave trade) unacceptable to the mythified narrative some Blacks prefer, is to reduce us to an unthinking mob. For that there would be volunteers, but there cannot be conscripts.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
