REPARATION MEANS A RETURN TO OURSELVES
by Charles Quist-Adade
Black History Month enjoins people of African descent to take stock of their collective histories and ponder what the future holds for them. Of the many issues being pondered at this year's Black History Month events, reparation figures prominently. Still, there are many who question the motives of reparation. Some ridicule and trivialize it or dismiss the effects of the slave trade as tired excuses for shortcomings of Blacks.
Reparation opponents seem to ignore several relevant facts: The effects of the WWII (which lasted only six years!) still linger in the consciousness of Eastern and Western Europe. Take the case of German unification. Since 1991 nearly $650 billion has been transferred to rebuild the former East Germany. Yet East Germans still languish in poverty and carry the badge of dishonor as second-rate citizens. Compare that to 400 years of slavery and 100 years of African colonization. Compare that to 200 years of state repression, oppression, and acts of terrorism (rape, lynching, etc.) visited upon peoples of African descent in the Americas and elsewhere.
But what is reparation? The term reparation has several meanings: restoration, spiritual restoration or renewal, salvation; the action of making amends for a wrong done; compensation, repairs; restore to previous state of well-being. Reparation means atonement for the horrendous pain and suffering inflicted and still being visited upon Africans as a result of the Maafa (Yoruba for Great Tragedy). However, reparation should not be seen as pushing for mere monetary compensation. Rather, it signifies a resolve of Africans to restore themselves as a vibrant and united people who make their own history.
Ultimately, reparation means redressing the vulgar contradiction in the fact that Africa as potentially the continent richest, has the poorest people. The contradiction, of course, is a result of centuries of destruction, subjugation and continuing exploitation of the African resources. It is impossible to remake the past or to predict where we Africans would have been today if they had not suffered from this Maafa. Most estimates of the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis arrive at a figure of about six million. In contrast, even Eurocentric apologists put the figure of murdered Africans during the slave trade at 11 million. A much more realistic estimate figure is over 200 million.
Besides, although pogroms had been organized against the Jews for many generations the sustained intensity of the attack upon Africans has been much greater. No other nation has been so obliterated on this planet save perhaps for the Native American people.
African centers of learning (the first universities in the world) including great libraries were destroyed. Much of African civilization was obliterated and its artifacts shipped to West. The Maafa is the greatest holocaust in human history, yet Africans have never been given reparations, not even a meaningful apology. When the European Union offered an apology at the 2001 Durban conference on racism, it made its apology conditional for fear that Africans might ask for restitution.
The Maafa unfolded under the twin catastrophes of Arab and European invasion, destruction and subjugation of Africa. Both the Arabs and Europeans employed warfare and religion as their chief weapons. This resulted in the imposition of foreign values in Africa causing confusion among many generations of Africans about who they are and what their real interests are. This is precisely why Nigerians speaking the same language and sharing the same substrate culture are slaughtering one another in the name of alien religions: Christianity and Islam.
How Long? How Many? Detecting and Quantifying the Injuries and Losses
Much work still needs to be devoted to detecting and quantifying all the injuries. In the meantime, these questions must be answered: How many Africans died as a result of the practices of enslavement and trading in enslaved Africans? How many died in the Maafa? It must include all the murders inflicted upon Africans as well as those who left this side of reality from the famines, hunger and starvation promoted by the slavers; those who were driven to suicide, those who died from overwork, disease, etc.
How many Africans were enslaved in Arab countries and in the West? What is the total number of hours Africans labored in these places for lashes instead of wages in the largest pogroms of forced labor in global history? How many Africans have been overworked, underpaid, refused promotion, refused employment, underemployed, and otherwise discriminated against and for how long? How many of Africans have lost life or limb in the pursuit of our basic human right to resist enslavement, to be free, to associate important aspect of reparation?
The colonizers did not only physically separate Africans from Africa. They also separated Africans from their traditions, their values, and their history. Africans at home and abroad have been dispossessed of their traditional role of makers of history and dumped outside of the process of history. They have become the objects rather than the subjects of history. They cannot win their freedom if they have lost our culture. Reparations must therefore mean a return to themselves as the makers of their own culture and history. They cannot expect to transform their reality without being willing to transform themselves. This underscores why Black History Month is all so important.
The historical process of African underdevelopment is expressed in particular eras as enslavement, colonialism, neo- colonialism and all their ramifications such as racism, the creation of dependency and self hate. These are all different aspects of the same thing: the subversion and destruction of African civilization, and the continuing exploitation of the continent's human and natural resources. The International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Aid agencies and Charities are mostly successors to the slavers who kidnapped and enslaved Africans, thereby taking away their human rights.
Today millions of Africans continue to be impoverished and their lives fundamentally endangered by Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP) Globalization, and other policies of those western institutions. Unless there is an end to the domination of the continent and exploitation of its resources by those foreign agencies and their African accomplices, the notion of reparations will be incomplete and ultimately meaningless.
After more than 500 years of destabilization inside and outside Africa it is clear that there are certain things African to which Africans need to return, which make the idea of return much more than just a physical journey. It is also patently clear that Africans are the ones who have to undertake their own rehabilitation. They cannot leave this to anyone else. Only they can free themselves. One meaning of reparations is that it is a process. Africans must therefore be prepared for a long struggle. Perhaps the worst thing Africa's former oppressors can do to them right now is to repay them, for they are not ready. Also, merely achieving repayment for the centuries of wrong, perhaps in some form of cash, would be both an incomplete and a misleading idea of reparations. For the meaning of reparations also includes the notion of restoring of the African people collectively and individually to where they would have been had they not suffered from the trilogy of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism.
Dr. Quist-Adade has published a chapter in the book Africa, the Kremlin, and Press. He has also published articles in various mainstream and academic publications and journals throughout the United States and Canada. He is also author of Africa in the Shadows of the Kremlin and the Press: Africa’s Media Image During and After the Cold War. Dr. Quist-Adade is also the founder and editor of Sankofa News, an international news magazine. For a complete list of his published works on our website, CLICK HERE
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