EVEN IN the face of unrepentant former enslavers, biased international courts and a United Nations controlled by colonial powers, Caribbean leaders keep the issue of reparations for slavery on the table.
The issue may be on the Caribbean political table, but it is not a favoured dish of Caribbean people. It is not a hot topic on call-in programmes and in rum shops. The average Caribbean citizen probably does not know much about the CARICOM Reparations Commission and its ten-point plan established by the CARICOM Heads of Government in 2013.
Where there is knowledge and awareness of the issue of reparations there is often animosity. Many people who should be the beneficiaries of reparations are hostile to the idea. They think we are begging, that we are crying over spilt milk, that we are past any issues related to slavery, that corrupt leaders would just steal the money and that we should just drop it and move on.
Yet we have no problem receiving foreign aid with strings attached. We do not see the irony in the fact that our nations are drowning in debt owed to countries that made their wealth from the rape and pillage of our human resources.
It is difficult to see how we will ever convince other nations of the wisdom of reparations for slavery if we cannot convince our own people. Caribbean societies have not been effective in doing the most fundamental work of recovering from slavery and colonisation. That is, the recovering of a strong sense of cultural and historical identity which drives a people and guides their actions.
The need for reparations should be a no-brainer for Caribbean people and all African descendants. But one of the things that must be repaired is our psyche and sense of self. Slavery and colonisation was a process of creating individuals who find it difficult to think and act in their own interest and who will think and act in the interest of their masters.
Supporting a call for reparations in their own interest and against their former owners creates a conflict for the partially recovered former slave.
If you do something wrong, you should correct it. If you wrongfully hurt somebody or damage their property you should fix the situation. If you benefit from the injurious act, some or all of what you gained should go to your victim. Simple.
Reparations isn’t a hard issue to figure out … at first. Was chattel slavery wrong? Yes. Were people hurt? Yes. Did people suffer and are people still suffering as a result of the Transatlantic slave trade? Yes. Are there people and entities today who directly benefit from it? Yes. Then pay up. Simple. If only the world were that straight forward.
If only it was nature of man to bring justice down on his own head. More often than not humans must be forced to repair damage they have caused. Who will make the children of the architects of slavery pay when they live lavishly in the mansion their grandfathers designed?
It is like asking the police to investigate the police: not a recipe for justice.
Those who orchestrated the slave trade are now the mortal rulers of the world. They run tings. They have the biggest guns and the most money. They control the international banking and legal systems. The media, which tells us what issues and whose issues are important, are run by them.
There is no entity that can force America, Europe, Barclays Bank or any of the other beneficiaries of slavery, to do the right thing. Does that mean we should stop making demands and just keep quiet? African American freedom fighter Frederick Douglass gives us an answer.
“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
Power concedes nothing without a demand. Whether they are likely to agree or not, the demand is just and must be made. This does not rule out the need for doing our own work to repair the damage. It is one of many necessary steps.
Our call for reparations is not novel or unique.
When slavery was abolished in the West Indies, former slave holders were paid reparations. If you owned slaves, the British Government saw it as only fair that you were compensated for the inconvenience of no longer benefiting from free labour.
The former slaves got nothing. They were forced to work for free for a period of time, so as to give the former slave holders a chance to catch themselves. The former slaves were left to catch their tails.
This arrangement was not called slavery because even though you were forced to work for nothing, the people you worked for had to give you nothing. At least as a slave they threw you scraps of food and cloth.
The Jews received reparations from Germany after World War 2. First Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion argued that the reparation demand was based on recovering as much Jewish property as possible “so that the murderers do not become the heirs as well”. He also argued that the reparations were needed to finance the absorption and rehabilitation of the Holocaust survivors in Israel.
There was no financing of the rehabilitation of the victims of slavery. Just like the Jews, we must not forget our own Holocaust. And we must always seek to ensure that those who built empires on our backs do not get away with a free ride.
Adrian Green is a person who may forgive but he will never forget. adriangreen14@gmail.com