It’s called reparatory justice
I am grateful to Michael Dingwall for exposing the fallacy as “an obvious fact that Africans were, in fact, selling Africans into slavery. Indeed, by the admission of the Africans themselves (like the former ambassador of Benin and the Government of Ghana), if black Africans were not willing participants in slavery and the trade, then slavery as we know it could never have happened”. (‘Reparation movement shooting itself in the foot’, Jamaica Observer, February 16, 2018).
Before setting the record straight, I must first declare that I am a member of the Legal Committee of the Jamaican National Council on Reparation (NCR) that is pursuing a claim against enslavers for reparation and any pain in my foot is not from a self-inflicted firearm injury. The NCR will no doubt speak for itself.
Many Jamaicans are turned off from supporting the reparation movement by the contrived self-serving message that slavery as we know it in the Caribbean would not have been possible without the participation of black Africans with the enslavers from Europe, accepting the propaganda not knowing what slavery in Africa was.
Slavery in the Caribbean as we know it was chattel slavery that dehumanised individuals and treated them like any other industrial machinery on the plantations. These were people who were forcibly taken from their respective homes and family in Africa; thrown together with others of different language, religion and culture; undiscriminating for status; and transported across the Atlantic Ocean in horrible conditions on slave ships in bulk like cargo for sale in a strange land. On the plantations, they worked under the whip for obedience, with death as the only hope for relief from their misery. This was not like slavery in Africa.
The Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage by Olive Senior (2003) reports the first Africans to arrive came in 1513 from the Iberian Peninsula after having been taken from West Africa by the Spanish and the Portuguese as servants, cowboys, herders of cattle, pigs and horses, as well as hunters. The records of Port Cities for Bristol show the lowest estimate for the transatlantic slave trade to be about 20 million people of which 10.7 million survived to disembark in North America, the Caribbean and South America. There was a hell of a transformation of the Africans who arrived on the other side of the Atlantic — degraded and humiliated, with ethnicity as the qualification for enslavement.
Slavery existed in Africa, but it was not the same type of slavery that the Europeans introduced. The European form was called chattel slavery. A chattel slave is a piece of property, with no rights. Slavery within Africa was different.
Historically, many civilisations in Africa practised enslavement, which took different forms in different places. Enslavement in African societies might have involved criminals, prisoners of war, and debtors — and it did not necessarily involve ill-treatment, nor even hard labour, but the loss of freedom. People who were unable to feed themselves in times of famine might have voluntarily agreed to become enslaved in return for food. Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who wrote an account of his life, noted that slaves might even own slaves themselves. In larger states some slaves worked in government administration, and might become an important State or royal official with wide-ranging powers. Africans usually enslaved ‘other’ people, not their own particular ethnic, or cultural, group. As the demand from outsiders such as Arabs and Europeans grew, warfare and raids to get slaves and the kidnapping of individuals increased. Europeans wanted to buy enslaved Africans to work on the land they owned on the Caribbean islands and in America. Against that background, Dingwall’s statement that the reparation movement is a totally lost cause would encourage Jamaicans to forget their history, just as David Cameron would have us, ignoring the caution: “Those unwilling to confront the past will be unable to confront the present an unfit to face the future.”
On the issue of compensation for the enslavement of Jamaicans, it would not be too much to demand an apology from Britain for the crime against humanity. The Church of England, in which Her Majesty, Elizabeth II is the supreme governor, at synod in 2006 issued a full apology for involvement in slavery. The plantation owners were compensated by the British Government for the loss of property when slavery was abolished but there was nothing for the enslaved people, not even a return ticket to home and freedom or compensation for work done. The chattel slavery with free labour helped to finance the Industrial Revolution and the phenomenal wealth of Britain. The Caribbean islands became the hub of the British Empire and Britain’s most valuable colonies. These islands today may be said to be in a state of persistent poverty. It would not be too much to demand a programme for the offender and the victims of enslavement working together to find ways to compensate victims, ease the conscience of the offender, and provide what is in the best interest of these islands — it is called reparatory justice. Otherwise, we will continue on a fast boat to China.
Frank Phipps, QC, is an attorney-at-law. Send comments to the Observer or frank.phipps@yahoo.com.