Reparation and Restitution: The quest for justice for Africans and people of African descent

Introduction

Reparations are actions, measures, payments and policies designed to repair past wrongs, grave injustice such as slavery, the slave trade, colonial exploitation by European Kings and Queens, apartheid and systemic racism committed by past colonial governments, rich European aristocrats or institutions against specific groups.

Reparation includes restitution compensation, rehabilitation, apologies and memorialization and guarantees of non- repetition – a framework widely recognized in international practice. The Trans-Atlantic Trade represents one of such wrongs against Africans and people of African descent.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

According to many historians, between the 16th and 19th centuries, approximately 28 million healthy African men and women were captured from their homes and farms and forced to march across their homeland to the sea, where slave ships awaited to transport them across the Atlantic to the Western Hemisphere. Shackled in pairs with metal chains around their ankles and ropes around their necks, and subjected to violence and abuse, approximately half of the men and women perished on the sea.

Of the 14 million who made it to the African coast, only two-thirds survived the 5000-mile voyage, lasting one to three months, in the inhumanely cramped and disease-infested hold of a ship. The boats and ships that carried slaves to the New World did not only have human cargo in their galleys but also they carried artifacts and gold stolen from palaces and temples. Most of the African artifacts taken from sacred places of worship are now on display in European and American Museums. 

Enslavement was wrong because it has caused identity crisis in our minds and inflicted injury on our bodies. The effects of the master-slave relationship were not only physical but deeply psychological. Uprooted and bastardized, the new generation of Africans in the Diaspora continues to ape the culture of the master. Forbidden to use their own language, they continue to speak the very languages that dictated their subservience. The black youth, in particular, has become not only culturally white-washed but also brainwashed. The various forms of oppression have given rise to a sense of loss, anguish and pain which sometimes lead to anger, revolt and worldwide demonstrations such as Black Life Matters in the USA.

Repatriation

In July, 2020 a pan-African movement of art activists seeking repatriation for colonialism, slavery and cultural expropriation walked into the Africa Museum in the Netherlands, removed a Congolese funeral statue and walked out. Their protest, broadcast live on social media, was aimed at turning the tables on colonialism. This was the group’s third such protest, drawing attention to the stolen and hidden African artifacts in British, European and American Museums.

Many Museum Curators have stated than more than 5,000 African artifacts are in the basement of the British Museum. The artifacts include beaded cosmic charts and love-letter necklaces, leather and bead thongs, Zulu girls waistbands, wedding adornments, snuff cloths, wooden carved pipes, and a beadwork collection of 1,000 items. Artist, Pitika Ntuli of South Africa tabled the issue of restitution at the AU Agenda in Addis Ababa in 2013 with the support of then Chair, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. He said “these works belong to African people as teaching aids, as our culture acts as a link between us and our spirits”. The issue of them being returned is a matter of urgency and great importance to us as a people. 

French President, Emmanuel Macron is the first international leader to speak about this. He commissioned an investigation titled “THE RESTITUTION OF AFRICAN CULTURAL HERITAGE: TOWARDS A NEW RELATIONAL ETHICS” into the estimated 90, 000 artifacts from African countries that are in French Museums. Felwine Saar and Benedicte Savoy published the report in Artnews and called for ‘young people of African descent to have access to their culture, creativity and spirituality from other eras’. 

Africa’s  Youth 

An important element that seems to be missing in the Reparation agenda is the youth of Africa.  The youth of Africa today are the link between our past and future. European ideas and concepts have had such an extraordinary effect on the African youth today that most of them do not think of themselves as Africans. Eurocentrism has, in varying degrees, permeated their thinking, psyche and spirituality. 

In the Negro Revolt, Louis Lomax wrote “we speak an Anglo-Saxon tongue, worship the Christian God and our political ideals are identical to those of our colonizers who enslaved us”. The Black youth of today display a wide range of views and attitude about their African origin. There are those who believe that they were biologically born and fashioned in Europe and the New World and have nothing in common with Africa. 

The neglect of African history in our public schools, lack of cultural awareness programs and the distortion of facts about Africans in history books have generally deprived the black youth of their cultural heritage and reduced them, to use Carter G. Woodson words, in his book the Mis-Education of the Negro “to nothingness and nobodyness”. 

In W.E.B. Du Bois words in the Souls of Black Folk, it has led to “a sense of looking at one’s self through the eyes of others and created a feeling of twoness……two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body”. This is one of the effects of slavery on the Black youth, particularly in the Diaspora. 

Post- slavery colonial trauma syndrome

Dr. Yehuda of Mount Sanai Hospital, New York City, USA has been doing extensive research with the Nazi Germany concentration camps and has done trauma research with the children of these same Nazi concentration camp survivors. Yehuda’s findings show concrete proof that trauma affects the ‘biological’ and ‘psychological’ functioning of these survivors. Thus, Dr. Yehuda’s conclusions are that trauma does not end with the survivors only, but will continue “genetically” with their off-springs (CNN-News Medical Report on Trauma 12 July, 1995). Hence, many Diasporan black youth continue to suffer from post slavery colonial trauma. 

Restitution

The word “restitution” was used in the earlier common law to denote the return or restoration of a specific thing or condition. In modern legal use, its meaning has frequently been extended to include not only the restoration or giving back of something to its rightful owner but also to pay compensation, reimbursement, indemnification, or reparation for benefits derived from, or for loss or injury caused to, another. In summary, therefore, the word “restitution” means the relinquishment of a benefit or the return of money or other property obtained through an improper means to the person from whom the property was taken. The orthodox view suggests that there is only one principle on which the law of restitution is dependent, namely the principle of unjust possession and enrichment. 

The Berlin Conference

In our view, the 13 nations that participated in the Berlin Conference (1844-85) which saw the so-called Scramble and Partition of Africa and the enslavement of our people, particularly those who built forts and castles on our coastline, are guilty of human rights violation and must pay restitution and repatriate all stolen artifacts.  

The conference was led by Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of the newly united Germany. The countries that attended the conference included Austria Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands,  Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden-Norway (unified from 1814-1905), the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), and the United States. 

A Conference on Repatriation and Restitution

As part of the Reset Agenda and to prioritize r reparation, repatriation and restitution, the Association for Reparation and Restitution and Repatriation of African Artifacts in American and European Museums (AFRITEAM) is proposing to President Mahama to convene a conference in Accra on Reparations. The objectives of the conference must include:

 ·         To bring all stakeholders on the Continent and people of African descent in the Caribbean, Brazil, South and North America and Europe to seek reparative justice;

·         To lobby the ECOWAS, African Union, UNESCO, the G7 Nations, the World International Property Organization (WIPO), the UN Commissioner on Human Rights, etc. for a speedy resolution, action

and return of all African artifacts in European and African Museums to their original places of creation;

·         To advocate and implement educational and awareness creation programs and activities in public schools and tertiary institutions about reparative justice;

·         To organize events (exhibition of artifacts, workshops and seminars) to educate the youth about the African cultural heritage, history, artifacts and empower them through audio-visual projects and documentary films such as, You Hide Me, You Can’t Hide Me and the  African Holocaust for them to know who they are as Africans.

Finally, the Conference must focus on general consultation with scholars in the academia, lawyers and advocates of restitution with the view to designing a framework, including monetary compensation to be paid by the participants of the Berlin Conference to the Global Office of Reparation (GOR) for distribution to African governments and people of African descent in the Diaspora.