This Day (Lagos) September 4, 2001 Posted to the web September 4, 2001 Chidi 'Uzor Lagos Four major architects of slave trade in Africa: Britain, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands have said that they are not ready to apologise for the pains of 400 years of slave trade on Africa just as other European countries are sympathetic to the African position. Agency reports quoted British diplomats as saying that the four countries are sticking to the line that European countries agreed on before the beginning of the United Nations World Conference on Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa.
The position is to accept that the slave trade was deeply regrettable, but not to apologise or to agree that it was a crime against humanity. Other European countries led by current EU president Belgium, want to move closer to African and black American demands for an apology. President Olusegun Obasanjo had called on the countries and continents who perpetrated slave trade to apologise to Africans whose brothers, sisters, fathers and relations were taken across the Atlantic and sold as slaveries to America and the new world. His call comes short of those who not only want the West that perpetrated this inhuman act to apologise but to pay reparations to Africa and blacks in the diaspora. Senior African-American campaigner, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, said a failure to apologise would indicate that these countries were proud of their colonial past. "If you don't feel apologetic for slavery, if you don't feel apologetic for colonialism, if you feel proud of it, then say that," he told the BBC. "But if one has a sincere desire to overcome the ravages of the past it doesn't take much to apologise and move towards some plan for restoration." Some countries may indeed fear that an apology would add momentum to demands that those which traded in slaves pay reparations. The question of reparations was among the most divisive issues at the conference. But for President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, the concept of reparation is "absurd and even insulting", arguing that three centuries of slavery cannot be evaluated in terms of dollars. He also pointed out that slavery has been practised by everyone, including his own ancestors. The situation in the Middle East has also haunted the summit. The US, Canada and Israel sent just low-level delegations to Durban in protest against draft declarations indicating condemnation of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. On Sunday, about 6,000 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) drew up their own final document branding Israel a racist state. The declaration, which is in no way binding upon the conference, raised tempers both in Durban and in Israel. "It is an outburst of hate, of anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism without any consideration," Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said in Tel Aviv. Meanwhile the leader of the summit's Israeli delegation warned he was weighing up his options. "We are reaching a stage where we have to consider whether to walk out," Mordechai Yadid told a news conference. Norway is trying to draw up a document which will bridge the gulf between the demands from Arab and Islamic states and US and Israeli anger that Israel be condemned. South African President Thabo Mbeki, summit host, said that the US was responsible for allowing the Middle East dominate the agenda in this way. The US had "aggressively lobbied" on Israel's behalf in the run-up to the summit and delegates had been "forced to make statements in order to assert which side they are on in this debate", he said. But Mbeki was optimistic that the conference's differences over the Middle East and slavery reparations could be resolved. "I am confident that we will find a common and acceptable position with regard to those issues," he said. Delegates have four days to work out their differences before the conference closes on September 7 . The exact numbers of Africans shipped overseas during the slave trade are hotly debated - estimates range between 10 and 28 million. What is undisputed is the degree of savage cruelty endured by men, women and children. Up to 20% of those chained in the holds of the slave ships died before they even reached their destination. Between 1450 and 1850 at least 12 million Africans were taken across the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic - mainly to colonies in North America, South America, and the West Indies. The Middle Passage was integral to a larger pattern of commerce developed by European countries. European traders would export manufactured goods to the west coast of Africa where they would be exchanged for slaves. The slaves were then sold for huge profits in the Americas. Traders use the money to buy raw materials such as sugar, cotton, coffee, metals, and tobacco which were shipped back and sold in Europe. Slavery created and then relied on a large support network of shipping services, ports, and finance and insurance companies. New industries were created, processing the raw materials harvested or extracted by slaves in the Americas The slave trade contributed significantly to the commercial and industrial revolutions. Cities such as Liverpool and Amsterdam grew wealthy as a result of the trade in humans. In Europe, slavery was often justified by the state on philanthropic grounds. They argued that Africans taken into captivity could then be "saved" by conversion to Christianity. However, Europe did not have a monopoly on slavery. Muslim traders also exported as many as 17 million slaves to the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa. Some historians say that between the years 1500 and 1900, five million African slaves were transported via the Red Sea, the Sahara and East Africa to other parts of the world. In Africa, unknown numbers of people - according to some estimates at least four million - died in wars and forced marches before ever being shipped to another continent. Within central Africa, the slave trade led to huge population upheavals. Coastal tribes fled slave-raiding parties, and captured slaves were redistributed to different regions in Africa. Slave dealing also contributed to the expansion of powerful West African kingdoms such as Mali and Ghana.
Right now, he is delivering Zimbabwe to the Brits in a platter. I only hope they'll hold him culpable should they get an unfair deal with the Brits.
___________________ Awo's political idea was based on the assumption that any town beyond Owo was Igbo or Hausa. Awo was not socialised; he was not a good mixer because he did not have the opportunity, which the secondary school offered. ~TOS Benson, Baba Oba of Lagos
posted
As we know, the Igbos travel far and wide in search of freedom and greener pastures...away from that entrapment called Nigeria. The most pathetic thing about Obasanjo's incitements is that the Zimbabweans and other Africans will likely take out their frustration and anger against the Igbos in their midst mistakened as Nigerians. The Igbos in Togo has already fallen victims in the hands of their Togolese hosts. If we have Biafra, the Biafran govt would have swiftly taken action against Togo. For now, no such thing even as Obasanjo embarks on more inciteful utterances geared to further victimize the Igbos.
In order to keep our lives and properties, Igbos everywhere should actively support Biafra Republic actualization. That is the only option for our continued survival.
Published on Friday, September 7, 2001 in the Boston Globe
The US Runs From Racism Conference, But It Can't Hide
by Derrick Z. Jackson
IT WAS A FRAIL notion that the United States, where racism built white wealth and perpetuates it at this very moment, would display any humility at the World Conference Against Racism. Its whole goal in Durban was to label someone else racist, which in this case was the Arabs who wanted to call Israel racist. That done, American delegates threw off the chains of egalitarian exchange and fled on their underground railroad to their safe houses on Capitol Hill and behind the Rose Garden.
There, they tiptoe in dim congressional corners, avoiding any contact with anyone who can handcuff them back into the court of America's unfinished business. There they cower, afraid that the whistling wind rattling the closed shutters is the ghost of Harriet Tubman. There they sweat, knowing that they have run from a firestorm in a foreign land to a raging furnace of resentment at home, growling up from the bellies of Tubman's descendants.
The sneering by the US was symbolized by the absence of Secretary of State Colin Powell. Powell is the top prop for white Americans who claim we have ended racism. Perhaps the Bush administration feared that Powell would hear the call of the drums in Durban and roar like Frederick Douglass. Douglass once said that there is no progress without struggle. Powell said 10 years ago, ''I am also mindful that the struggle is not over.''
There would be no struggle. It was most fitting that the United States was the first nation to run from its own shadow on racism. As of this writing, the Europeans were still in Durban, duking it out in that cantankerous cauldron. Perhaps that is because while they built their wealth on colonial slavery, they never worked as hard as the United States to systematically disunite and oppress millions of black people - for a century after slavery - within their own borders.
The United States could not send Powell to Durban without explaining why it pummels so many people who look like Powell. You name the health, education, or economic statistic, and African-Americans, the mule of racism, and Native Americans, the forest of humanity cut down so the mules could work the soil, still suffer at disproportionate rates.
America is simply not ready to admit that the $1.35 trillion tax cut of President Bush is connected to broken treaties and annihilated Indians. America is not ready to admit that the $8 trillion being passed down from the World War II generation to its baby boomers was hauled on the bent backs of black people who were barred from full rights from 1776 until the 1960s.
America is not ready to discuss how slavery was so critical to the nation that the South once had a larger economy than any European nation except England. According to some economists, slave labor was worth three times more than immigrant labor in the first half of the 19th century.
White escapists like to say that the white soldiers who died in the Civil War are the final apology and reparation for slavery. But America is not ready to discuss how ex-slaves were denied land and forced into peonage while many white Confederates got their land back, backed by the Ku Klux Klan.
America is not ready to discuss how white violence destroyed post-Civil War black businesses in the South and stopped them in the North at the ghetto's door. America is not ready to discuss how it did business with slavery in the North, from the cotton mills of Massachusetts to Aetna Insurance, Fleet Bank, and Ivy League schools such as Yale, Princeton, and Brown.
America is not ready to discuss the government-sanctioned housing and banking discrimination of the 20th century that will result in white baby boomers inheriting an average of $65,000, compared with $8,000 for black baby boomers, according to researchers for the Federal Reserve Board. Despite some fabulous progress for many individual African-Americans, America is not ready to discuss why high achieving African-American men on the whole still earn only three-fourths of what comparable white men make.
America has always hidden in racism's corners until flushed out by civil war, Little Rock, Rosa Parks, Birmingham, riots, or racial profiling. It hid after our last presidential election as black votes were disproportionately disqualified in Florida. America is hiding because it knows the growing call for reparations for slavery is legitimate. America has gone underground, trying to railroad any discussion because it is too painful to admit that the collective fruits and flowers of 21st century white America were watered with the red and black blood of the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. America knows that when the descendants of Harriet Tubman bring the bill for slavery into the broadest of daylight, there is no telling what the struggle will become.
posted
I was falsely overjoyed when I saw Ms. Wekson’s name here. I do not know why she was booted out, but this place has never been the same since she and Mr. Okonkwo were banned unceremoniously. Administrator, please bring them back.
___________________ Nobody drinks medicine on behalf of a sick person. Posts: 110 | From: United States | Registered: Mar 2001
| IP: Logged
What do you miss about that loud-mouthed freak? Anyway, it looks like all the banned people are using other screen names.
Posts: 174 | From: Lagos, Nigeria | Registered: May 2001
| IP: Logged
When are you visiting the States again? Good to have you back and we miss your thought-provoking arguments.
Posts: 69 | Registered: Jun 2001
| IP: Logged
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
Printer-friendly view of this topic
