THE PRESIDENT of Ghana has renewed calls for reparations for countries affected by slavery.
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, was speaking at the UN General Assembly when he made the comments, and said the consequences of the slave trade are still being felt in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas.
President Akufo-Addo said: “It is time to acknowledge openly that much of Europe and the United States have been built from the vast wealth harvested from the sweat, tears, blood and horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.”
According to the recently published landmark Brattle Report, Britain owes a staggering £18.6 trillion in reparations – which is over five times the country’s annual gross domestic product.
The president added: “No amount of money will ever make up for the horrors, but it would make the point that evil was perpetrated, that millions of productive Africans were snatched from the embrace of our continent, and put to work in the Americas and the Caribbean without compensation for their labour.”
“Maybe we should also admit that it cannot be easy to build confident and prosperous societies from nations that, for centuries, had their natural resources looted and their peoples traded as commodities,” he added.
President Akufo-Addo stressed the importance of conversations about reparations.
“Granted that current generations are not the ones that engaged in the slave trade, but that grand inhuman enterprise was state-sponsored and deliberate; and its benefits are clearly interwoven with the present-day economic architecture of the nations that designed and executed it,” he said.
In July, Africa and The Caribbean joined forces to call for reparations for slavery at a historic meeting.
Representatives from African and Caribbean nations attended a series of meetings in Bridgetown, Barbados, to formulate a strategy to demand reparations.
The ground-breaking meetings included representation from the University of the West Indies (UWI), the Economic, Social and Cultural Council of the African Union (AU), Barbados’ government, grant-making network Open Society Foundations and the Caribbean Pan African Network, Reuters reported.
According to a report in news a outlet, the meetings signal the beginning of an “intercontinental campaign” demanding reparations for slavery.
In August, hundreds of people have marked Emancipation Day by marching through London demanding reparations for slavery.
The annual Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations Day March, was held on August 1, in Brixton, south London.
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One the one hand, the President of Ghana is wisely, and justly, calling for Reparations.
However, calling for the West African Military Forces, to invade the Niger; on the behest of the French, to restore the compliant former President, weakens my belief in the wisdom of this President, and West Africa’s political elected leaders.
Let him get it from the tribes in Africa that sold them to slave traders in the first place – if you going tell a story tell the whole truth.
You are absolutely correct about “telling the whole truth” So let me tell you that truth! The British, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Danish, Swedish and Norwegians captured over 90 million Africans and transported them to labour under the whip in the mines of Central and South American and the plantations of the Caribbean. Millions of enslaved African women were sexual molested, prepositioned and raped on a daily basis in the slave dungeons of West Africa; during the middle passage and on the plantations and mines of the Americas. Europe can no longer get away with the horrendous and atrocious treatment meted out to African women. I find Europeans deeply hypocritical. Everyday children and young people are being rightly told: “you must not disrespect a woman!” “You must not hit a woman!” “You must not stare at a woman!” “Rape is the most horrendous crime in human history!” “Sexual harassment is wrong!” but when it comes to the African woman, Europeans employ a different standard altogether. A black woman choked in a shop in Peckham and the headline is ‘shoplifting and theft’ Absolutely no media outrage about violence against a woman. Europeans must pay reparations to the African continent and to the descendants of Africans in the Americas. In the current hypersexualized environment, many Europeans must know that the perpetrators of the millions of sexual crimes committed against women, men and children during slavery and the slave trade will be punished posthumously. The slave plantations were playgrounds for sexual predators, rapists and paedophiles.
Let’s just reflect on the following: The enslavement of the African was sanctioned and normalised for thousands of years. Before the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, there was the Trans -Saharan Slave Trade. What makes the Atlantic Slave Trade unique is its chattel (cattle) characteristic, whereby the body of the African woman was at the complete sexual disposal of the white slave master. Whenever i discuss this issue with white feminists, who quite rightly advocate for the creation of safe spaces for women and want to see the criminalization of sexism and misogyny, the response is often the deflective: “that happened a long time ago and we should focus on modern slavery” Some people assuage their guilt by deploying many facile strategies.
“When Rape Was Legal: The Untold History of Sexual Violence During Slavery”
Rachel A Feinstein
New York and London, Routledge, 2019, ISBN: 9781138629677; 90pp.; Price: £27.99
I was inconsolable as i read about the INDUSTRIAL SCALE sexual terror vengefully inflicted on millions of African women. If blacks had enslaved whites for 400 years, blacks would be forced to pay hundreds of trillions of dollars in compensation to whites.
When we talk about white privilege and white supremacy, it causes much offence, then what is this:
“The Slave Compensation Act of 1837 compensated slave owners in the British colonies in the amount of approximately £20 million for the freeing of slaves. Based on a government census of 1 August 1834, more than 40,000 awards to slave owners were issued”
“The Haiti indemnity controversy involves an 1825 agreement between Haiti and France that included France demanding a indemnity of 150 million francs to be paid by Haiti in claims over property – including Haitian slaves – that was lost through the Haitian Revolution in return for diplomatic recognition, with the debt removing $21 billion from the Haitian economy”