Reparative justice for the slave trade
Following the overwhelming adoption last week by the UN General Assembly of a resolution tabled by Ghana recognising the transatlantic slave trade as the gravest crime against humanity, a lot of heated arguments have been bandied about on various social media platforms.
Whilst some cheered this historic resolution to the rafters, others shrugged with indifference, questioning how this is a bread and butter issue for the average Ghanaian, especially when many UN resolutions are mere paper tigers with no bite.
Thankfully, some attempts to give the issue a partisan slant were diffused by the fact that former President Akufo-Addo valiantly championed this cause in his time and President Mahama has pursued the same path.
Powerful reminders
Without doubt, present-day Ghana was a major hub of the transatlantic slave trade, with some of the forts and castles dotted along our coast serving as brutal holding places for slaves before they were shipped out to the so-called New World.
The remnants of the slave market in Salaga, together with the Assin Manso Slave River site, where the slaves had their last bath on African soil on the way down to the Elmina and Cape Coast slave castles are also important reminders of this ignominious era of our history.
It is estimated that about 12 million Africans were captured and transported across the Atlantic Ocean between the 16th and 19th centuries, to be sold into slavery in the Americas.
Of those, roughly 10.7 million survived the ‘Middle Passage’ to arrive in the Americas, with the largest numbers going to Brazil and the Caribbean.
The gravamen in the arguments around the transatlantic slave trade, and the resistance against the calls for reparations that follow it, seems to fall around claims of enablement and even active involvement by some locals as middlemen in the dastardly business, as well as the wealth built by various local kingdoms at the time through that dealt in selling slaves to the Europeans along the coast.
Others point to slavery all the way back to ancient empires as found in the Greek and Roman civilisations.
They cite the Arab slave trade and also the indigenous systems of slavery before the arrival of the Europeans in the late 15th century.
To those who point these out, the moral claims for reparations for the transatlantic slavery are severely watered down by these historical facts and reduce Africa to a permanent victimhood stance and a sense of entitlement, when other nations with a similar past have moved on and established themselves.
Honest debate
This column is clearly inadequate by way of space and expertise to examine in detail the complexities, power play, institutionalisation and other issues surrounding this subject.
Distinguished scholars such as Prof. Akosua Perbi, Rebecca Schuman and Dr Walter Rodney, among others, have done sufficient justice to this subject in their works.
That said, I believe it is possible to have an open, honest conversation around the role played by some natives in enabling the slave trade, or our indigenous slavery systems prior to the arrival of the Europeans, without detracting from its racialised, dehumanising, documented horrors.
Throughout history, oppressive, brutal systems have on many occasions been enabled by people from within the oppressed groups.
It is therefore rather simplistic to reduce the slave trade to a claimed joint enterprise between external profiteers and internal opportunists, and thus seek to absolve those who instituted chattel slavery on a scale almost unimaginable in sheer numbers, degree of brutality and disgusting inhumanity.
Faulty education system
I think that over the years, this country has failed significantly to engage the history, the horrors and the realities of the transatlantic slave trade in its education curriculum, which means many of us know very little beyond skimming the usual headlines and narratives.
Indeed, the 1987 education reforms subsumed history under Social Studies, causing a decline in knowledge of national history. It was not until 2019 that it was reintroduced as a standalone subject.
Few of us know, for instance, that actively involved in the slave trade or benefitting from slave labour were major churches, global financial and other institutions, including colleges and universities.
Haiti was brought to its knees even after independence from France in 1804 because in 1825, it was forced to pay a 150 million Francs ‘indemnity’ to France, compensating former French slaveholders for lost ‘property’ and income.
The debt lasted until 1947 and totalled roughly $560 million in modern value, heavily contributing to Haiti’s instability.
In the aftermath of the end of the slave trade, the British government paid ‘compensation’ to the tune of 20 million pounds at the time to British individuals, businesses and institutions for their loss of slaves.
And the freed slaves?
They got nothing.
They had their liberty but had no education, skills, land or capital, thus leading to a rocky start, filtering down several generations.
Some went back to serve their former owners because that was the only life they knew.
Such was the damage.
I believe a consequence of this knowledge gap is that native Africans, whose ancestors did not suffer the horrors of the slave trade, collectively feel rather emotionally distant from the slave trade and remain blissfully ignorant of some key facts in a way that those who directly descended from the enslaved are not.
This is evident for instance when these descendants visit the Elmina and Cape Coast castles from abroad and get all emotional and teary walking through the courtyards behind the white-washed walls, through to the ‘Door of No Return’, where their ancestors once lay shackled like animals, waiting to be transported across the ocean to an unknown future.
I have every sympathy with the argument that any financial reparations paid to African countries as a result of the slave trade, aside from other complexities, would simply find their way back to Europe and North America in foreign accounts owned by members of the corrupt elite in charge of these countries.
That is our reality, but that is not why I do not share the view of African countries receiving reparations.
Much as I agree with reparatory justice in principle, I believe it should be geared primarily at the direct descendants of those who suffered aboard those slave ships and on the plantations, their humanity and dignity stripped away.
Reparatory justice from the countries and institutions that grew wealthy from the slave trade should be in the form of targeted major investments to address the historical, structural inequalities that hold back many people of colour in the Americas and Europe in so many ways.
In the United States, for instance, on several fronts such as wealth gap, income and wages, unemployment, educational attainment, savings and poverty rates, African Americans do not fare favourably against whites.
Contributory factors range from systemic barriers through wealth accumulation to economic mobility and educational outcomes.
The story is not unique to the United States.
These are the issues reparatory justice is best directed at, and in spite of the pushback by those who will have to pay up, I think it is a cause worth championing.
Rodney Nkrumah-Boateng
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