Jamaica and the Debate over Reparation for Slavery: A Summary Overview
26/08/2013
- Opinión
The calls for reparation for genocide against the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, the kidnapping, forced migration and enslavement of Africans in the Americas (the Maafa or African holocaust), the establishment of chattel slavery as a unique form of human domination and as a global regime of racial terror, the exploitation of Indian people through the nineteenth-century indentureship system, and the murder of hundreds of people in various post-slavery protests across the region have intensified since the World Conference on Racism held in Durban, South Africa in 2001. Such calls also re-echoed during March 2007–March 2008, the bicentennial of the passing in Britain of the Slave Trade Abolition Act.
Of course, the reparation struggle is much older than 2001. In the case of Jamaica, it has been the clarion call of the members of the Rastafarian community, who have also insisted that repatriation is an essential aspect of reparation. In 1961, the Rastafari Brethren of Jamaica petitioned for economic, political and social emancipation in a letter to Queen Elizabeth II, a section of which reads:
We Rastafari Brethren of Jamaica do earnestly and sincer[e]ly desire your Royal Highness, to follow in the footsteps of so illustrious an ancestor as the great Queen Victoria (who freed the Blackman of this Western Hemisphere from chains) and free all Black People within your Commonwealth, from political, economical and [r]eligious slavery to which we are subjected in this present time . . .[1]
Notwithstanding its historically inaccurate account of emancipation, the letter was a reminder of the responsibility of the British for slavery and its legacies. Another letter from the Rastafarian community was presented to Queen Elizabeth II when she visited Jamaica in 2002. The letter petitioned the queen to make amends for slavery with reparation and repatriation. The head of the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, Brother Sam Clayton,said the letter was presented becausecolonialism “has disfigured us and we deserve some response to what we have been through . . . We think the Queen can make a significant contribution.”[2]
Indeed, it should be remembered that the English gave royal patronage to slavery through the establishment of the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, which, after five years of operation, was recapitalised and incorporated into the Royal African Company (RAC) in 1663. The RAC was chaired by the Duke of York, and members of the royal family were prominent investors.[3] Labour MP Diane Abbott reminded her parliamentary colleagues in the House of Commons in March 2007 that fifteen lord mayors, twenty-five sheriffs and thirty-eight aldermen were also shareholders in the RAC; and it is estimated that in 1776, forty members of the British parliament were making their money from investments in the Caribbean. The Anglican Bishops of London were also major enslavers in Barbados, running two plantations there.[4]
It is common knowledge that the profits from Britain’s participation in the Transatlantic Trade in Africans (TTA) enriched British industrialisation and gave Britain a head start in economic development, and that the evidence of that development is still obvious in the country’s infrastructure.[5] However, Queen Elizabeth II’s response, which came in 2003, while acknowledging the immoralities of the TTA, nevertheless disconnected the history of Britain's grand participation from its present government.
Public awareness of such issues heightened during the bicentennial year. Indeed, the Jamaican Parliament appointed a sub-committee of Parliament led by then member of Parliament Aloun Assamba, to debate the reparation issue and, urged on by then opposition member Mike Henry, itself entertained a few debates on the issue in Parliament in 2007.[6] The Global Afrikan Congress at its meeting in Barbados in August 2007 recommended the establishment of a Reparation Caucus of CARICOM, headed by Ambassador Dudley Thompson, to carry forward the Caribbean’s case for reparation in a unified way. Pro-reparation support also came from several Caribbean prime ministers (e.g. Ralph Gonzalves of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and [now former prime minister] Portia Simpson-Miller of Jamaica) and from President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Meanwhile, the Jamaica National Bicentenary Committee (JNBC) and the Antiguan Bicentenary Committee, among others, have continually expressed open support for the reparation cause, with the JNBC staging several screenings of the reparation documentary “The Empire Pays Back” as well as hosting two public lectures on the subject by such notable advocates as Lord Anthony Gifford and Randall Robinson.
There is no doubt that reparation is a just cause; and clear precedence exists. In his plenary address at the First Pan-African Conference on Reparations held in Nigeria in 1993, Chinweizu noted that perhaps the most famous case of reparation was that paid by the German state to the Jews in territories controlled by Hitler's Germany to indemnify them for persecution. In the initial phase, payments included US$2 billion to make amends to victims of Nazi persecution; US$952 million in personal indemnities; US$35.70 per month per inmate of concentration camps; pensions for the survivors of victims; and US$820 million to Israel to resettle fifty thousand Jewish emigrants from lands formerly controlled by Hitler. Later, other, and largely undisclosed, payments followed; and even in 1992, the World Jewish Congress in New York announced that the newly unified Germany would pay compensation, totalling $63 million for 1993, to fifty thousand Jews who had suffered Nazi persecution but had not been paid reparations because they lived in East Germany. Reparation has also been paid to First Nation People in the USA and Canada, as well as to Japanese-Americans, Koreans and Japanese-Canadians.[7]
Perhaps the most blatant example of historic reparation was the case of Haiti where, under an 1825 ‘agreement’, Haiti was asked to pay 150 million gold French francs to France in exchange for France’s recognition of Haiti as a sovereign nation, thereby ending the twenty-one–year isolation from the international community it had faced for its ‘audacity’ in taking its freedom.[8] The second historic reparation case occurred in 1834, when at Emancipation enslavers argued that the freeing of enslaved people by British legislation was a violation of their property rights and demanded compensation. Britain paid £20 million as compensation – the equivalent of £1 billion today. Indeed, it would appear as if reparation has been paid to every group of claimants except those who are of African descent.
European powers, however, reject the notion that they are liable and that the historic trade in captured Africans was not a crime at the time it was pursued. The view that the historic trade in Africans and slavery were neither crimes against humanity nor contrary to international law when they were condoned by the Europeans has little support in the African Diaspora. By the seventeenth century, the philosophical history of most civilisations had indicated abhorrence to the status of property in persons; it was considered untenable in Europe and abhorrent to the dictates and practice of international law. The quintessential philosopher on freedom and liberty, John Locke, inveighed against the system (though only for Europe, as he himself owned enslaved people in the Caribbean and was at one time the corporate secretary of the RAC – Locke and other philosophers, showing an inherent contradiction in their philosophical thinking, considered African people outside of the community of human beings).[9] Much later, the Nuremberg Tribunal, a special tribunal set up to process the Jewish Holocaust claim, settled the question by including slavery in discussions of crimes against humanity committed during the period of modernity, which included the slavery era.
The following extract is from the Resolution of the 2001 Durban Conference in South Africa, a conference that was nearly aborted over the Western European bloc’s opposition to the inclusion of the reparation issue on the agenda:
We acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade, including the transatlantic slave trade, were appalling tragedies in the history of humanity not only because of the abhorrent barbarism but also in terms of its magnitude, organised nature and especially the negation of the essence of the victims; and further acknowledge that slavery and the trade are a crime against humanity and should always have been so, especially the transatlantic slave trade, and are among the major sources and manifestations of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance; and that Africans and people of African descent, Asians and people of Asian descent and indigenous peoples were victims of these acts and continue to be victims of their consequences.[10]
The Durban document explicitly recognises the relationship between this legacy and the current unequal condition of African people worldwide. Despite its shortcomings, this document has helped to advance the position of Africans and African descendants in the quest for reparation, justice and equality. Indeed, the acceptance of the Durban declaration and programme of action by many nations of the world, and the fiery opposition of others to some of its terms, have perhaps done more than the previous appeals to catapult the issue of reparation, particularly in relation to the people of Africa and the African Diaspora, into the spotlight.
However, the Western European bloc has remained firm in its opposition on the following bases: slavery was legal at the time it was imposed on the Caribbean; African slavery in the Caribbean is too remotely in the past to attract legal redress in the twenty-first century; there are no identifiable victims nor defendants; Africans also participated in the trade; current governments cannot be held responsible for the activities of governments of the slavery era. The British government has instead stressed the need to eliminate modern-day slavery.
Although there has been keen realisation in the Caribbean of the seriousness of the modern-day trafficking in human beings and the need for its elimination, African diasporic people have been nevertheless troubled by the attempt by European powers to focus on modern-day slavery, especially in Africa, to such an extent that it overshadowed the historic trade in Africans and their responsibility to make amends for it. As Dawn Butler, Labour MP for Brent South in the UK, remarked in her contribution to the parliamentary debate on the bicentennial, “Slavery was not just an event – it was a process of destabilising African societies. It produced a negative self-image and African deculturisation, and demonised all things black and all things African. That is what separates the slave trade from modern-day slavery . . .”[11] In his contribution to the House of Commons Debate on the bicentenary, British M.P. Dr Vincent Cable admitted that in present-day Britain, “despite successes in many activities, there are still serious problems with discrimination.”[12]
Prominent Jamaica-based advocate Lord Anthony Gifford has suggested that the legal basis for reparation rests on the following arguments: enslavement was and is a crime against humanity; the right to reparation is recognised by international law; there is no legal barrier to prevent those who still suffer the consequences of enslavement from claiming reparation even though the crimes were committed against their ancestors; there is no statute of limitation and there is precedent. International law provides the means for descendants to receive recompense on behalf of their ancestors. [13] As descendants of enslavement continue to suffer from the legacies of slavery, for example racism on the basis of skin shade and ethnicity, the continuing legacies of slavery provide further justification for pressing the case for reparation. In other words, it is incorrect to say that slavery is too remote in the past for it to have contemporary relevance; or that its legacies are no longer evident among present populations who therefore have no claim, unlike their ancestors who may have had a firmer basis for claiming redress. In terms of the social legacies, the struggle with identity and social dislocation are perhaps the two most lasting legacies and impacts of slavery.
Many have reduced the call for reparation to monetary compensation – an outright financial settlement of a minimum £7.5 trillion, according to Robert Beckford’s calculation in the BBC documentary “The Empire Pays Back”.[14] The Rastafarians in Jamaica are asking for £72.5 billion to aid repatriation – another form of reparation.[15] The need for reparation, however, is much more than a call for monetary compensation and cannot be narrowly defined as such; rather, it is a call for a long-term commitment to stabilise and bring restitution to those who were oppressed and subordinated by the dominant colonial powers. Indeed, many people in Africa and the Diaspora argue that it is an insult to reduce our ancestors’ suffering to monetary value. A financial calculation, however, provides an idea of the magnitude of the crime. John Maxwell has reminded us that the West owes much more than money to Caribbean people. He has emphasised that “democracy and the rights of man would never have existed without the Haitian revolution – a consideration of which is an object lesson in understanding the debt the Old World owes to the New”.[16]
Reparation also requires addressing social infrastructural problems (in education, health, the justice system) and the inequitable distribution of wealth; debt write-off; the elimination of racism, which is rooted in the experience of enslavement; and generally, the placement of former colonised countries in a position where they can survive as partners in a so-called ‘global village’. In a column in Jamaica’s Sunday Observer, Bishop Howard Gregory expressed the view that while reparation involves a monetary transaction, “it is about much more than that. It has to do with the acknowledgement of wrong, the healing of the one who has been wronged”, and the restoration of the fractured and distorted relationship that has developed, since monetary compensation alone cannot restore the broken relationship.[17]
Admittedly, there is as yet no groundswell from the people of the Caribbean, which would propel individual Caribbean governments and CARICOM (acting as the plaintiff against the defendants), to take the matter forward. Indeed, judging from several newspaper articles, editorials and letters to the editors during 2006 and 2007, some people still remain unconvinced by the validity of the reparation claim, with others urging that Jamaicans forget about the “shameful” episode of slavery.
Other bases for internal opposition are that both the victims and the perpetrators are all dead and therefore no claimant or defendants can be identified; slavery is too remote in the past for there to be any credible claim for compensation; in any event, Caribbean governments would just squander any monetary compensation; and would mixed-race Caribbean people be liable for both compensation and pay-out? Others are concerned that the call for reparation from external powers might transfer responsibility for injustices that have nothing to do with slavery, but rather with political directorates, many of whom are the descendants of enslaved people, who have squandered the legacy of our ancestors and continue to maintain the worst legacies of the hated plantation system, failing to educate the people and to provide them with the tools for upward social advancement. The question of whether reparation can solve the problem of mental slavery that many believe has trapped black people within the cycle of shame and guilt has also been raised.
Yet, despite obvious cynicism, complexities and uncertainties, reparation is a human rights issue which rests on firm philosophical and legal grounds, and the struggle for it will continue well into the twenty-first century. University of the West Indies’ Professor, Sir Hilary Beckles has warned, “former colonial powers should be aware that global politics has set the tone for the reparation struggle to be a factor in the twenty-first century from people from all parts of the world who have suffered from colonial or neo-colonial forms of exploitation.”[18]
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- Verene A. Shepherd is member of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent.
This article was adapted from the lecture “Reparation: A Route to World Peace and Understanding”, delivered to the Rotary Club of Spanish Town, Hilton Hotel, Jamaica, on 26 February 2008.
Endnotes
[1] Letter from the Rastafari Brethren of Jamaica to Queen Elizabeth II, “The Just Shall Live by His Faith,” 21 April 1961. Public Record Office, ref.: CO103/3995
[2] “Rastas Want Meeting with Britain’s Queen,” CNN, 17 February 2002.
[3] See “Jamaica and the Debate over Reparation for Slavery: A Discussion Paper”, Jamaica National Bicentenary Committee, 2007, p. 51.
[4] Speech given by Labour MP, Diane Abbott, 20 March 2007. See House of Commons Official Report, Hansard, 20 March 2007, pp. 705-706.
[5]The relationship between British industrialisation and Caribbean slavery was especially clearly articulated in Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).
[6] We await the completion of the work of that sub-committee, which met only once, and the publication of the debates and conclusions.
[7]Chinweizu, “Reparations and a New Global Order: A Comparative Overview”, Paper read at the second Plenary Sessionof the First Pan-African Conference on “Reparations”, Abuja, Nigeria, 27 April 1993.
[8] See Jacqueline Charles, “Aristide pushes for restitution from France”, The Miami Herald, 18 December 2003.
[9] See “Reparations: Taking Forward the Caribbean Case”, Plenary Lecture by Professor Hilary Beckles, Mona Academic Conference, “Freedom: Retrospective and Prospective”, 2 September 2007.
[10] Excerpt from the Declaration of the 2001 World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa. http://www.un.org/WCAR/durban.pdf
[11] House of Commons Official Report, 20 March 2007, p. 721.
[12] House of Commons Official Report, Hansard, 20 March 2007, p. 711.
[13] See Gifford’s paper, “The Legal Basis of the Claim for Reparation, Facts on Reparation: The Abuja Declaration, “ 27-29 April 1993
[14] See also Dudley Thompson, “The Debt has not been Paid, The Accounts have not been Settled,” in African Studies Quarterly, The Online Journal for African Studies. Available online at: http://www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v2/v2i4a4.htm
[15] Jamaica Observer, 7 September 2004.
[16] John Maxwell, “The Agenda”, in the Sunday Observer, 25 February 2007, Section 3, p. 3.
[17] Sunday Observer, 4 March 2007, Section 3, p.11.
[18] Beckles, Plenary Lecture, “Reparations: Taking Forward the Caribbean Case“, Mona Academic Conference, 2 September 2007. Also, Beckles, Keynote Address on the subject of Reparation, delivered at the 4th Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of the World Wide African Diaspora (ASWAD), Barbados, 11 October 2007.
The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations.
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