Generous Scholarship Opportunities for Talented African Students and Youths, in Lieu of Reparations - Part 9

Now, what is especially fascinating about the Caribbean Community of Nations’ Proposal for the Reparatory and the Compensatory Rehabilitation of the hitherto and erstwhile perennially chattel-enslaved, extorted and wantonly exploited nationalities of the formerly colonized Continental African-Descended Species of Humanity that is not surprisingly conspicuously missing from the so-called Heroic Demand by Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama’s UN-Adopted Resolution on Reparations for the Western-European Enslavement of African People for approximately a Half-Millennium, is the inimitably deft diplomatic explanation of the fact that the urgent need for the dignified restoration of the African Personality to a universally coequal status recognition, morally unreserved affirmation and the justifiable equality of access to all avenues of human development, inheres in the practically unignorable fact of the Post-Slavo-Colonial Era having unfathomably compounded some 20-plus generations of the deliberate and the systematic degradation and the socioeconomic exclusion from all critical avenues of human development to Afro-Caribbeans and their Non-European Relatives and Neighbors Across the Globe, to be certain.

In the preceding sense and context, the irrefutable contention here is that the sort of “Calibanistic” Flag-Raising that entailed the so-called Geopolitical Emancipation so theatrically granted many hitherto European-cannibalized or colonized African and Asian polities and/or nationalities between the mid-1940s and the mid-1960s, were decidedly socioeconomically an untenable strategy craftily deployed to further prolong and exacerbate the abject penury and the unspeakable misery of the aforesaid groups of humans in the aforereferenced cannibalized geographical locations and settlements. The latter intellectually insulting brazen pretense to a sociopolitically progressive and a morally enlightened regime of a Modernistic Paradigm Shift was, in reality, unarguably tantamount to what Ghana’s First Postcolonial Prime Minister and, subsequently, Executive President, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, poignantly elucidated as the veritable Cosmetic Halfway-House Era of Neocolonialism, a transitional sociopolitical phase of European dominance that was strikingly akin to the proverbial Token Administrative Integration of a handful of “Elite African Americans” into the Top-Echelon Rungs of the Traditional Corporate Ladder, even as more White-Supremacist-Oriented “Super Ladders” were simultaneously created or constructed to immediately nullify what may, on the surface of things, might appear to be a substantive or a radical or a revolutionary paradigm shift when, in reality, what we had here was the strategically Exponential Diffusion of Hermetically Entrenched White-Supremacist Culture of Corporate Fascism of the kind and the sort that has virtually become synonymous with US MAGA Right-Wing Promotion of False Intellectual and Professional Merit. This is what has been sarcastically termed as the “Shifting of the Goalposts” by many an African American scholar, sociologist and Critical Race Theorist like Kimberlẻ Crenshaw and, well before the latter, William Edward Burghardt (WEB) DuBois and Derek Bell.

The preceding tableau is clearly what the authors of the Ten-Point CARICOM Plan for Reparatory Justice (CRJP) mean, when they pointedly underscore the fact that the farcical pomp and pageantry that accompanied the practically and the conspicuously vacuous Declaration of Independence from European Colonial Imperialism between the 1950s and the 1960s and, of course, a little later, actually marked the abortifacient stultification of real progress and the material development of the Afro-Caribbean and the Continental African People and their African American Kinsfolk right hereabouts in the United States of America, to be certain.

In the Caribbean and the Continental African frame of reference, our European and American-trained local leaders, already psychologically alienated from their organically evolved moral and cultural values and strategically innoculated with acute clinical self-hatred, would also be handed down institutional governance structures that had been created for the wanton and the withering exploitation and the systematic underdevelopment of their own people, as masterfully expatiated upon by immortalized Guyanese Scholar, Historian and Radical Political Activist, Professor Walter Rodney, in his seminal classic titled “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” (1972).

So far, contend the authors of the CARICOM Reparatory Justice Program (CRJP), any significant and progressive attempt that have been made by many a postcolonial African leader to reverse this socioeconomically ruinous state of affairs, has almost invariably resulted in the direct intervention by the erstwhile colonial suzerain in the governance of the purportedly Independent Sovereign Affairs of the officially former colonial state. This is what the authors of the CARICOM TEN-POINT PLAN FOR REPARATORY JUSTICE mean, when they bitterly complain that: “The CRC operates within the context of persistent objection from European governments to its [popular mandate.”

Consequently, by the forensically informed lights of the CARICOM proponents of Reparatory Justice, about the only progressive way forward will be for the Members of the European Community and the NATO Countries to accept the undeniable and the historically inevitable fact that genuine labor ultimately deserves to be justifiably and judiciously rewarded: “The CRC, nonetheless, is optimistic that the CARICOM Reparatory Justice Program (CRJP) will gain acceptance as a necessary path to progress.” They are not saying the same in plain language, but the dire warning of the catastrophic consequences that await fraudsters and mega-thieves and unconscionable extortionists is crystal clear: “It [The CRC] calls upon European governments to participate in the CRJP with a view to [preparing] these victims and sufferers for full admission with dignity into the citizenry of the global community. The CRC here outlines the path to reconciliation, truth, and justice for VICTIMS AND THEIR DESCENDANTS.”

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofekwame@gmail.com

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