IS THE REPARATION MOVEMENT FINALLY TAKING OFF?

A SURVEY OF RECENT REVELATIONS AND EVENTS SHOWS THINGS ARE BEGINNING TO HAPPEN

A flurry of activities and a convergence of unconnected events in different parts of the world in recent weeks have suddenly brought the issue of Reparations into sharp focus and could well be a watershed in providing traction to the movement. Media and audience interest in Britain has certainly been hiked by the Windrush scandal which was rekindled on “Windrush Day” June 22, and in the USA the historic House Judicial Subcommittee meeting on Reparations that took almost 30 years to be convened, finally had its day on June 19.

In, Jamaica the Centre for Reparation Research,(CRR) located at the Mona Campus of The University of the West Indies is at the vanguard of the public information drive to share the research of scholars who are now regularly coming up with new information about the trafficking in Africans and the horrors of slave life. The Centre is involved in an uphill task of convincing Caribbean people that they are not involved in a ‘wild goose chase’ that has no possibility of success either in their lifetime or ever!

What will it take to make people start to believe both in the justice of the claim for descendants of slavery to be compensated and that compensation in whatever form WILL come if not in one mass surrender by the guilty European countries but little by little one institution by institution, one country by country next year, the year after, fifty years from now, but that reparations will be paid in different forms?

WHAT WE KNOW NOW THE WE DIDN’T KNOW BEFORE? 

1. In addition to the well-established slave trading countries –Britain, Spain, Holland, Portugal and France – countries like Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway and modern day Latvia who were never previously associated with the trade in enslaved Africans and slavery, had varying levels of participation and had boosted their economies through slavery.
2. What was also not well publicized outside of academia was the fact that colonial Jamaica was a major transshipment port, reloading enslaved Africans to other countries in the region in much the same way that we re-ship ‘deportee’ cars from Kingston today.
3. We now have the names of over 92,000 Africans who were freed from slavers after 1807 when Britain passed the Abolition Act, identifying them by sex but more shockingly by age, ranging from one year old babies to adults as old as 77 years.
4. We have always known that when slavery was abolished the British Government paid a total of twenty million pounds to slave owners to compensate them for the loss of their ‘property’ but bet you didn’t know that:

• The money was raised as a bond on the money market in England from private financiers and was not paid off until 2015 with interest accruing over those 180 years. Who paid back that money? British taxpayers including Jamaicans and their descendants – the same people who the government now wants to kick out of Britain, the same victims of the Windrush scandal. This is not guessing or speculation. The information came from the British Treasury itself in a tweet on February 19, 2017.
• Twenty million pounds is worth in today’s currency Two hundred BILLION pounds
• Enslavers received compensation not just for African/Jamaicans present on the estate at the time of emancipation but incredibly for those who had run away, long absent from the fields, those who had bought their freedom and most disgustingly for those who were long dead. A valuation return from Clarendon included the price for a runaway enslaved person last seen on the plantation 30 years earlier when he was five years old. In Kingston a slave owner received compensation for an eleven year old child who had been absent from the plantation since age three.

MEANWHILE UP IN THE USA……………..  

An historic event took place in the USA on June 19, the House of Representative Judiciary Sub-Committee met to consider a Bill that would create a Commission to develop proposals to address the lingering effects of slavery and consider a national apology for the harm it had caused. Symbolically, the hearing was held on the observation of ‘Juneteenth’ a day commemorating the final emancipation of enslaved black people in the US. The bill dates back to 1989 when Representative John Conyers Jr. introduced legislation to create a Commission to develop proposals for Reparations. He was to do so unsuccessfully for 30 years until the June 19 session in 2019 when it was sponsored by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D) Texas. Even if it passes the House, the Bill has little chance of getting through the Republican controlled Senate. But as the New York Times points out, that the hearing took place at all was remarkable reflecting the shifting landscape in the Democratic Party. More than 100 elected representatives including Speaker Nancy Pelosi support the Bill and at least 11 Democratic Presidential hopefuls have endorsed either the concept of Reparation or the Bill to study it.

IS REPARATION EXPERIENCING A SECOND WIND?

As recently as in the last Democratic administration, Conyers could not even get Barak Obama to support the Bill. In the same New York Times article, William A. Darity Jr. a Professor of public policy at Duke University is quoted as saying : “ To be blunt I am more optimistic as I have even been in my life about the prospect of the enactment of a reparations program that is comprehensive and transformative.”

Advocates for Reparations in the US face similar challenges to their counterparts in the Caribbean. As in the case of the CARICOM Ten Point Plan for Reparations, advocates in the US have been at pains to emphasize that reparation does not necessarily mean the government   would be writing cheques to black people. Rather, the government could offer various types of assistance like zero-interest loans for prospective black homeowners, free college tuition, community development plans to spur growth of black owned businesses in black neighbourhoods to address the social and economic fallout from slavery and racially discriminatory Federal policies that have resulted in huge wealth gap between black and white people.

AND OVER IN EUROPE, AN APOLOGY FROM THE NETHERLANDS

Still further afield across the Atlantic on June 24, the Council of the city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands took a historic decision to apologise for its role in the Transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans which made it the richest city in the Western world for more than 100 years from the mid -seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century – a wealth that remains visible today. CARICOM member state Suriname was where the Dutch West India Company founded in 1621 and financed by Amsterdam’s bankers, shipped more than 600,000 Africans to work on plantations producing sugar and coffee. The Irish Times reports that 30 of the city’s most prominent merchants were the main drivers behind Dutch slavery which they developed to a new mass scale. Many of the grandest buildings in the Centre of Amsterdam, including the Royal palace in the DAM was where plantation owners met regularly. It was during this golden age that the Amsterdam stock exchange was established to provide those merchants with a safe and regulated place where they could buy and sell shares in these early globalized enterprises. It is still the oldest functioning stock exchange in the world…. and it was built on slavery.

These recent developments are signs that progress is being made slowly but surely, one concession, one admission of contrition, one act of reparation at a time.  Stay informed by following Jamaica global online for news of more acts of reparation, join the discussion and let your voice be heard.