Generous Scholarship Opportunities for Talented African Students and Youths, in Lieu of Reparations - Part 6

As the perennial struggle for Reparatory or Reparative Justice reaches high dudgeon in its procedural and processional amplitude, it is quite natural to expect that it is the Petition of the most intimate and direct descendants and primary victims of the massive and the centuries of unspeakable dehumanization, torture and the wanton and the inexcusable exploitation of the Continental Africans savagely merchandised and nefariously ferried across the Atlantic Ocean to the erstwhile New World, later called The Americas and, presently, the North and South American Continents and the Caribbean, that are apt to muster the most compelling arguments for the demand of immediate action (See Google: CARICOM TEN-POINT PLAN FOR REPARATORY JUSTICE).

It is the most compelling argument because the Petitioners in this most critical context are also the direct descendants of the “Most Innocent Victims” of this otherwise practically and veritably “Collaborative Process” of the morally and socioeconomically barbaric saga in the long episode of humanity’s selective inhumanity towards one another; almost invariably one that is almost wholly and solely predicated on sheer greed and pathological, collective acquisitiveness.

Now, what makes the CARICOM - or the Caribbean Community of Nations - “Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice” far more compelling than that which was recently endorsed by the Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, headquartered African Union (AU), and quixotically spearheaded by Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama, clearly inheres in the fact of the morally and the unarguably unignorable empirical or first-hand experience of the indescribable scourge and the seemingly unhealable sore of soul and psychologically withering wounds that are the lot of the Diasporan African whose ancestors endured the “Middle Passage,” a morally indefeasible fact of existential reality of European Barbarism that has had to be “euphemized” by conscientious European and American scholars and historians in order to make it more “palatable” or tolerable for readers and listeners, as well as documentary watchers of this most horrific and morally repulsive experience that has absolutely no rival or comparison in the Modern Era.

Even more compelling is the clinical and the scholastic objectivity with which the authors of the CARICOM Petition for Reparatory Justice delineate the architectural contours of the half-millennium merchandising of Continental African Humanity in the mnemonically indelible period between 1400 and 1900 by a rapidly industrializing Europe, in particular Western Europe, in ways that Continental Africans whose ancestors were not direct victims of the unspeakably obscene “Cargofication” and the Transatlantic Chattel-Merchandising of Africans by Europeans have not, naturally, been able to effectively articulate and/or encapsulate.

The first forensically unimpeachable item of factual recognition is that it was Europeans like the British, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the French and the Belgians, among a host of other European nations and Tribal Warlords, to be certain, that assumed ownership of strife or war-instigated Captive Africans who ended up in the so-called New World, presently the Americas, as slaves and items of chattel or properties, completely bereft of both humanity and Human Rights, as we have all come to recognize and envisage the same in the Modern and the Post-Modern World, in the present context, at least throughout most of the Twentieth and the Twenty-First Centuries.

Now, this does not, of course, wholly exculpate those powerful and equally greedy and cancerously avaricious African Rulers who myopically and benightedly and voraciously participated, collusively and collaboratively with their relatively far more socioeconomically and strategically savvy and foresighted European counterparts in the total destruction of their own people for the proverbial mess of pottage. We shall, of course, arrive at a dispassionate discussion of this bitter subject and morally execrable and painful topic in due course. In the meantime, suffice it to briefly and glancingly observe that “Ownership” of the Indigenous Africans involuntarily transported across the Atlantic - of course, a relatively fewer number were also transported to and settled in Europe, where they were routinely consigned to menial labor, a phenomenon that is often neglected in the standard narratives.

On the whole, and for the most part, the so-called African Slave Trade was almost entirely the Business of Machomen and an insignificantly few female monarchs and potentates. In practical reality, what eventually became known as the African Slave Trade was really an European Slave Trade in Continental African Humanity, a bizarre trade that witnessed the fullest extent of its criminally nefarious capacity right here in the present-day United States of America and the Caribbean and South America, with its most culturally and psychologically devastating imprint occurring in the Portuguese-colonized country of Brazil, where the systematic “Racial Atomization” of African Humanity strikingly reflected the the proto-primitive politics of Divide-and-Conquer in ways that were practically unknown even right here in the United States of America.

In sum, as far as the Continental African involvement in the heinous and the morally depraved Trans-Atlantic Trade was concerned, everything, all business engagement completely and decidedly ended when the captive was either delivered onto the waiting boats and ships at the European-constructed and owned forts and castles that dotted the entire coastline of the African Continent like ruminant muck or fecal droppings. The African Slave Traders - actually “Captive Traders” of “Prisoners War” - were paid nominal fees often set by the Europeans per captive or prisoner of war. You see, it was the European Slaveship Captains and their Crews who reaped a bumper “bounty” from what may fairly accurately be likened to a “Trumpian Transaction” or “DEal.”

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]