EDITORIAL: Slavery Reparations: A global quest for justice

Finally, the recent United Nations’ landmark resolution that the transatlantic slave trade, spanning over four centuries, was the “greatest crime against humanity,” calls a spade squarely by its name, and with moral clarity. This declaration affirms the necessity of a common ethos across the globe, in speaking to all that’s undesirable in the human experience, beyond unequal power relations and situations.

Sponsored by Ghana, with the support of the African Union (AU) and Caribbean Community (CARICOM) States, the UN General Assembly set aside 25 March as the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery, to give impetus to the crusade for a formal apology from the perpetrators of this evil and reparations for its victims. This is a just call!

The voting on the resolution at the UN showed the approval of 123 nations, and abstentions of 52 others, while three countries – the United States of America, Israel and Argentina – voted against it. Instructively, the barefaced absentees included the United Kingdom, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Denmark and a number of others in the European Union (EU) bloc, which were the main merchants of the heinous trade. Efforts to get them to pay reparations before now had been met with objections.

Between 1501 and 1867 AD, an estimated 15 million human chattel – mostly from West Africa – were bound in shackles and shipped in overcrowded vessels across the Atlantic to European nations, and the Americas. Over two million of them – comprising mostly women and children – are noted to have died during the long passage. Undoubtedly, this international criminal enterprise, with its handmaiden of colonialism, altered the destiny of Africans. Critical aspects of this dark history are chronicled in Walter Rodney’s acclaimed book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, among a corpus of similar books and literature.

In the vast cotton, tobacco and sugar plantations of America and Portugal’s colonial territory of Brazil, and elsewhere in the Caribbean, the victims were subjected to the worst form of human degradation. They were not only manacled, flogged, starved for days, and medically uncared for, they were equally subjected to the most brutal forms of forced labour, amidst other daily rituals of torture. Their womenfolk suffered grievous sexual violence to boot.

From their sweat, US cotton exports reached 58 per cent of the global total in 1890, primarily drawn from the American South, which was the haven of slavery. More so, material accumulation from port cities like Liverpool, Amsterdam and Nantes, fed the growing appetite of the Industrial Revolution for raw materials. And, the role of the Royal African Company, formed in 1672 by King Charles II and London merchants, served the express purpose of securing enslaved Africans for the plantations of the West Indies, which, in turn, spun the great wealth of the British Empire.

These irrefutable facts were what the Secretary-General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, underscored in pointing out that the “wealth of many western nations was built on stolen lives and stolen labour,” as he pressed for reparations for this savage history of exploitation. Despite the abolition of the slave trade in the late 19th century, its legacies, mired in racism, inequality and limited opportunities, continue to haunt the descendants of its victims all over the world.

Playing the ostrich, the Netherlands formally apologised for its role in that past in 2022, even though it feigned aloofness for paying compensation for this. The erstwhile British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, only expressed regret in 2007 for his country’s part in slavery, and insisted in 2024 that it was wrong for nations to apologise for historic wrongs. This is dishonest, unconscionable and provocative. PREMIUM TIMES strongly condemns the double standards of these countries and their leadership.

The US President, Donald Trump, while insinuating historical amnesia, pushed the farcical narrative that because slave trade was legal at the time it was carried out, it is therefore inappropriate for reparations to be paid for such gruesome evil. But he seemed to forget that the fight to abolish slavery had deeply divided America, and led to a bid for secession and eventually a civil war. The triumph of the abolitionists and preparation of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution on 3 December 1865 had ultimately sealed the illegality of the trade.

Mr Blair’s perverse logic is, however, neutered by the continued return of hundreds of artefacts stolen from the Benin Kingdom during Britain’s 1897 military expedition. These include 116 artefacts from Cambridge and 97 from Oxford universities. The Netherlands, France and Germany have followed suit. These acknowledgements of guilt and seeming restitution, though minuscule, constitute part of the reparation agenda.

President John Mahama of Ghana deserves all the accolades for this stellar diplomatic achievement. It provides valuable moral armour and strength for Africa to advocate for nations at the centre of this “greatest crime against humanity” to pay for their wrongdoing.

This has been done before, which serves as motivation for this cause. Since 1952, Germany has been made to pay over $80 billion to the Jewish victims of the Nazi regime’s atrocities, especially the millions killed in gas chambers and through other unspeakable means. Britain coughed up $21 billion (£16 billion) in absurd compensations to slave owners in the 1830s, for making them give up thriving businesses, instead of the victims, when slavery was abolished.

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Since 2013, a league of 15 CARICOM nations has made a strong case for reparatory justice, which led to its 10-point demand, amounting to $33 trillion, covering debt cancellation, and investments in public health and education. A higher claim of $107 trillion by Patrick Robson, a former Judge at the International Court of Justice, is an eye-opener to the rest of Africa. In some quarters, questions of how much money is involved and who should receive this have been raised, making the CARICOM template to be of great appeal.

However, with America and the EU bloc largely being unyielding, this quest for reparation may remain in the realm of symbolism at this time. Be that as it may, Mr Mahama’s witty and profound summation is worth repeating here: “Let it be recorded that when history beckoned, we did what was right for the memory of millions who suffered the indignity of the slave trade and those who continue to suffer racial discrimination.”

Nigeria, rather than Ghana, had once led this cause, through the late MKO Abiola’s Reparation Movement, which culminated in the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), as AU was then known, setting up a 12-member Eminent Persons Group in 1993. Mr Abiola was the chairman, with Professors Ade Ajayi, Ali Mazrui and Dudley Thompson on the team. Regrettably, Nigeria – the ‘giant of Africa’ – dropped the ball following Mr Abiola’s death.

However, as a common agenda, we expect the AU member states to put forward a strong resource and diplomatic pool to leverage the gains from the UN resolution, towards the betterment of the continent. Nigeria should wake up from its slumber in the global arena and contribute meaningfully to engineering this next critical phase of the struggle.