AU must pursue reparations for slave trade from West, Arab world

By Anyang’ Nyong’o

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Seeing Steve McQueen’s movie “12 Years A Slave,” so wonderfully produced by Brad Pitt with outstanding stars carefully assembled to superbly pass the message this century needs to hear about the dark past of American history, I began wondering why African governments have done so little to make a case for reparations for slavery and the slave trade.

The evidence is there in plenty on how Europe underdeveloped Africa through the slave trade.

One only needs to read Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” and to follow it with evidence from museums, archives and public records across the globe.

Modern United States was built on the backs of the black person: Steve McQueen has dramatised it so vividly that revisionists and apologists for primitive accumulation in the Americas will no longer be able to get away with their lies.

In any case, reading Eric Williams’s magnum opus, “Capitalism and Slavery”, will have already provided one with all those detailed historical facts. We see white traders invading West African coastal trading ports, linking up with middlemen of black hue, capturing slaves in their millions, shipping them through such notorious trading ports like Goree Island in Senegal and then the gruelling journey across the Atlantic in crowded and unhygienic ships where only ten per cent of the human cargo survived to reach the plantations in the Americas.

Talking about the African brain drain: the slave trade was the real brain drain.

Those able-bodied men and women abducted from Africa at the prime of their lives would have been the movers and shakers of 18th and 19th century Africa.

The African Union Heads of State and governments are wasting our time with their self-serving resolutions and guns aimed at artificially created enemies. Let them not belittle the intelligence of ordinary Africans who are anxious that the real problems of the continent be addressed. One of the problems is to claim from the West and the Arab World what they owe us from the historical injustice of slavery and the slave trade.

The issue is not the ICC. In fact it is wrong to say that the ICC is a racist ploy by Western imperialists: that is absolute balderdash. Africans created the ICC, they have jobs there, they take themselves there, and they create the political mess that provides work for the ICC. If the AU political honchos do not want the ICC, let them do us a favour: stop rigging elections and killing people to get and retain power.

It is that simple.

Secondly, once they take people there to be tried for crimes against humanity, let them keep the script simple by accepting responsibility for their decisions. Just tell me: who took Laurent Gbagbo to ICC, was it the French President or his Ivorian counterpart? As far as I remember it was Alassane Ouattara, the Ivorian President. What about Joseph Kony? Who has hired the FBI to hunt for him and take him to The Hague? I will not be wrong if I gave the responsibility to Yoweri Museveni, President of Uganda.

What about a man called Bemba, the ‘butcher of Goma’. Was it not Kabila who handed him over to the ICC? And in the Kenyan case the evidence is there in Parliament: “ don’t be vague go to The Hague” was the chorus of those now very vociferous in their denunciation of ICC.

Get President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and ask him whether he has absolutely nothing to do with the ICC. Most likely he will tell you one of his generals is probably heading there at his behest.

And to say that the ICC only tries Africans is a white lie. Slobodan Miloševic, the man who terrorised his own people after the demise of Yugoslavia died in a prison at The Hague, charged with crimes against humanity.

There is therefore nothing new the ICC is doing in trying sitting Heads of State charged with crimes against humanity.

The only issue, which the AU can pursue sensibly and productively in the international scene in the genuine interest of our people is reparations for slavery and slave trade. Crimes against humanity have no time limits.

This crime was the most heinous, the most devastating and the most blatant in recent history.

When the Nazis killed Jews and intellectuals in their millions, the criminals were pursued to wherever they were hiding in the world and were brought to justice after the Second World War. They are still being hunted down even today. The time has come for this reckoning and the AU should play its leading role and stop fiddling with self serving projects which are completely oblivious to the big picture regarding addressing historical injustices at global level.

The Arab nations have an even greater debt to Africa. What happened to the millions of Africans transported to Arabia as slaves during more than five centuries? We know that our men were castrated so as not to perpetuate the black race there. This was the meanest, cruelest and most grotesque act a human being could do to another.

The blood of our people, which fertilised the Arabian deserts where oil now flows, must be paid back with this same oil.

There are many African scholars ready to work with the AU on this project: historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political economists, lawyers, accountants, etc. The AU only needs to take fellow Africans more seriously and listen to the voices of the people and not their own voices when they mount the podium so often in Addis Ababa.

The writer is Kisumu County Senator