West African royal descendants to join Ja reparation talks
Published:Friday | February 10, 2023 | 1:36 AMErica Virtue/Senior Gleaner Writer
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Fifteen descendants of West African royal families that were destroyed when their ancestors were captured and enslaved in the Americas will visit Jamaica this month as guests of The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Vice Chancellor...
Fifteen descendants of West African royal families that were destroyed when their ancestors were captured and enslaved in the Americas will visit Jamaica this month as guests of The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Vice Chancellor Professor Hilary Beckles announced Thursday.
Speaking during his presentation to the second reparation symposium of the American Society of International Law, Beckles said African consensus on a way forward on compensation for slavery was game-changing.
“Many of the royal families that have survived were driven into exile. Many developed a survivalist approach to the balance of power that had shifted in the favour of slave traders. These voices are now beginning to speak out,” Beckles, a historian and reparation lobbyist, said.
Beckles said that The UWI would host a symposium comparing the fortunes of the royal families of West Africa and Europe, analysing who owned the corporations, who used state support to enforce compliance in West Africa, and who were the financial beneficiaries.
The visit is scheduled to occur in two weeks’ time.
Reparation activism has been gathering steam in recent years, and a United Kingdom family’s intention to publicly apologise to the people of Grenada has renewed focus on the controversial issue.
The aristocratic Trevelyan family, who possessed six sugar plantations in Grenada, indicated that they would compensate nationals of the island because the Trevelyans’ ancestors owned more than 1,000 slaves.
BBC reporter Laura Trevelyan, a family member, described slavery as “really horrific”.
Beckles praised the CARICOM Reparations Commission for engaging African and diaspora governments and non-governmental organisations in a quest for justice from those who committed crimes against humanity.
European governments, he said, rebuffed invitations for a summit on reparation, offering instead to provide aid.
Beckles said that his focus in the last two years has been on participatory diplomacy to build out a global movement.
Citing the support of African governments as crucial to reparations talks, Beckles said that speaking with one voice would defeat the propaganda that they were complicit in the trade.
Beckles said that Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo has made it clear that the African Union will support the CARICOM reparation movement. A related summit is to be held in Kenya in May.
The UWI vice chancellor said that African governments are pushing back at claims that they were willing participants in the black holocaust.
“That, of course, was an absolute, dishonest, and immoral argument because on the one hand, they were speaking about the kidnapping, terrorism they unleashed in Africa, the destruction of nations and communities, the specific targeting of African elites to be destroyed if they stood in the way of slave trading and the business,” the professor said.
“Instructions were sent from the capitals of Europe to destroy governments and leaders and monarchies that stood in the way … .”
Last week, Jamaican-American professor of sociology, H. Orlando Patterson, condemned British slave owners who operated in Jamaica for imposing a genocidal labour system that slashed projected population growth by more than 90 per cent just shy of Emancipation.
Referencing forecast modelling, Patterson said that Jamaica’s Afro-descended population was more than five million short by 1830, and six million of coloureds were included.
Jamaica imported almost three times more slaves than the entire United States between 1650 and 1830, but the island’s black population, by the end of the period, was 359,000, compared to more than two million in the US.
Beckles said that 600,000 slaves were brought to Barbados, but only 83,000 persons of African descent were on the island by the end of slavery.
“The genocidal assessment is crystal clear in the Caribbean in terms of legal frameworks, speaking not only about commodification, chattelisation, ... the denial of human identity, the reduction of people to property status in law,” he told the symposium.
“But we are also speaking of genocide, deliberate, systematic genocide, because the fundamental economic principle was that it was cheaper to consume the life of an African ... . It was cheaper and more profitable ... .”