Three prophets who put spotlight on slavery reparations

In light of the global antislavery and anti-colonial protests, a burning issue that has not been prominently addressed is that of reparations for the victims of these two evil scourges in the Americas, the Caribbean and Africa.

How can Western nations who enslaved and colonised black people over five centuries repair this pernicious damage that has left these regions with the triple burdens of a lack of development, diseases and deadly conflicts? This remains a festering wound that needs to be addressed urgently.

Three prophets have been at the forefront of these debates: African-American lawyer Randall Robinson, and the Barbadian and Nigerian historians Hilary Beckles and the late Ade Ajayi.

As the 400th anniversary of American slavery was commemorated in 2019, calls for reparations for descendants of this exploitive system have once more been heard. Rather perversely, it was slave owners who were compensated for the loss of their “property”: the British government paid the contemporary equivalent of £200bn to slave owners after it abolished slavery in 1833.

Democrats in the US legislature have belatedly embraced the cause of reparations, while institutions such as Brown, Harvard and Yale universities that benefited from the slave trade have initiated programmes of restitution. The most articulate US crusader of reparations has been former anti-apartheid activist Robinson. He has consistently argued for reparations to close the 250year gap between white and black Americans created by plantation slavery.

He noted that Germany paid Jews reparations for the devastating but much shorter Holocaust (1933—1945) — estimated at $60bn — while Japanese Americans interned in concentration camps by President Franklin Roosevelt during World War 2 (1939-1945) were compensated with a $1.2m payment. He further observed that indigenous populations received land and money for the Australian government’s genocidal campaign against them, while Canada’s Inuit indigenous group received $700m in compensation from their government for similar atrocities.

In the Caribbean, Beckles has led the reparations debate, noting that “slavery and genocide are lived experiences despite more than a century of emancipation. Everywhere their legacies shape the lives of the majority and harm their capacity for advancement”.

Modern ailments common among Caribbean citizens such as diabetes and hypertension can be traced to the era of European slavery and colonialism. Beckles argued that European slaving nations, including the British state, its banks, merchant houses, insurances companies and the Church of England, pay compensation. A 2004 estimate of the cost of the slave trade to the Caribbean put the figure at £7.5-trillion.

In Africa, Ajayi was a member of the Organisation of African Unity’s eminent persons group on reparations in 19921993, which demanded that the West recognise its moral debt to Africa and its diaspora for slavery and colonialism, and pay these populations full monetary compensation. He noted that discussions about the contributions’of West s industrialisation the slave trade to have the been neglected, and criticised the ambiguous or indifferent attitude of African scholars to this issue. He thus called for four measures: domestic education and mobilisation in African societies; documentation and research on the costs of slavery and colonialism; making a cogent case for reparations; and agreeing on the strategy, manner, and mode of reparations, having placed the issue on the UN agenda.

He further argued that reparations should seek to “understand the African condition in depth, to educate the African and the non-African about it, [and] seek an acknowledgment of wrongs which have impaired the political and socioeconomic fabric of Africa.”

Reparations are an emotive issue that all progressive activists should embrace. One cannot acknowledge the pernicious effect of five centuries of Western slavery and colonialism without supporting the necessary measures to repair these glaring historical crimes against humanity.