Generous Scholarship Opportunities for Talented Students and Youths, in Lieu of Reparations - Part 13

Unarguably, the Third of the 10-Point CARICOM Proposal for Reparatory Compensation for the descendants of the victims of the double-catastrophe of the Slavo-Colonial oppression of Chattel-Enslaved Indigenous Continental Africans, brutally uprooted and forcibly and savagely herded into the criminally septic fecal-sullied and the fetid holds and dungeons of slave ships across the Atlantic Ocean to the present-day Caribbean and the Americas, to be certain, is at once the most significant and morally refreshing compensatory demand, so far, made on either side or divide of the starting point and the end-point ot the final destination of the primary victims of the Transatlantic European in Indigenous Continental African Humanity, between 1400 CE and 1900CE, if also because for the very first time, the Third of the 10-Point CARICOM Reparatory Justice Program Proposal critically underscores perhaps the most far-reaching of the deleterious consequences that the impact of the Slave Trade, as it is often called, had on the Indigenous Peoples of the Caribbean.

For the most part, and for almost as long as any specialist that this author knows or whose work he is familiar with can remember, the latter group and/or community of Pre-African Indigenous Caribbean Humans has been casually and cursorily treated in the available scholarship by their fellow postslavery Afro-Carribean victims of the greatest and the most catastrophic act of genocide in Modern History, almost as if they never existed and/or preexisted their transplanted Continental African neighbors and, subsequently, relatives.

The ineradicable fact of the matter, however, is that the massive and the perennially incessant importation and the “Tsunamistic” influx of the Caribbean region by European-Captive Indigenous Continental Africans also meant the radical and the heartless and inexcusably brutal displacement of the largely defenseless Indigenous Caribbeans, sometimes called Native Americans or The Red Indians. In the Third of the 10-Point CARICOM Reparatory Program Proposal, we are significantly informed that by 1700 CE, when the Transatlantic Chattel-Enslavement and the massive forced exodus of Continental Africans, or vice-versa, began to exponentially crescendo to its apogee, in normative or standard historical parlance, there existed an estimated population of some THREE-MILLION (3,000,000) Indigenous or Naive Caribbeans in the region. As of this writing, however, as it is all to be expected, at least going by the standard historical records, the population of the Indigenous Caribbeans has been drastically reduced to a measly ONE-PERCENT of the latter estimated figure of approximately THREE-HUNDRED-THOUSAND!

Now, if the preceding incalculably dismal state of affairs is not inexcusably tantamount to a classic case of Deliberate and Systematic Genocide, then one does not know what else it is. One thing, though, is clear: Indigenous Caribbeans and, one also supposes, Latin Americans, are an Endangered Species of bona fide Humanity whose protection and preservation deserve to be granted topmost priority on the agenda of the United Nations’ Commission on Human Rights.

In the meantime, it is quite morally and politically refreshing to learn that the administrators at the University of the West Indies, established by the erstwhile British colonial regime, on the verge of its inglorious departure in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, have established an Indigenous People’s Fund, “in a desperate effort at rehabilitation.” This is obviously a desperate effort indeed!

Now, what is direly needed is a comprehensive readily-accessible Universal Education Program that offers free education in all the various available disciplines and fields of endeavor, from the Pre-K Level to the Tertiary or the University Level, to not Indigenous Caribbeans but to their formerly Chattel-Enslaved Continental African Neighbors and Relatives. On the preceding count, we also have in mind the protection, the preservation and the development and the critical modernization of some of the most significant or relatively widely spoken Indigenous Caribbean Languages, alongside of the various Creole Languages that resulted from the indiscriminate and, in some cases, the strategically deliberate admixture of the Captive and Chattel-Enslaved Continental African Peoples of diverse cultures and linguistic and ethnic affiliations, as a mechanism of effective commercial control and appropriation.

Actually, the most accurate characterization of the latter is “Criminal Misappropriation.” Whatever be the case, it is limpidly clear that such undertaking, as enunciated above, is not apt to be a proverbial cakewalk, in traditional or vernacular African American parlance. As well, an equally daunting task confronts us right here within the United States of America, where generations of epic struggle has ensured that African-Descended Americans, whom at the close of the American Civil War (Circa. 1865), constituted approximately a Quarter or 25-percent of the total population of the United States of America, would be ceded their inalienable human and civil rights. An Artificial Intelligence-sourced reference via the Google Search Engine, informs us that in 1860 or 1865, the total population of the United States of America was 34-Million, out of which figure of some 16-percent or 4.5-million was of Continental African Descent or Origin.

Other sources put the estimated population of African Americans two generations prior, that is in 1790, or thereabouts, when the statutory policy of Official Racial Segregation is widely believed to have been promulgated, at a minimum of 19.3-percent, which comes up a an approximate population of some 800,000 (EIGHT-HUNDRED-THOUSAND) people. Now, what is equally significant to note here is the fact that the overwhelming majority of the total number of Africans in the United States by the close of the Civil War was “fully engaged in chattel servitude,” as the recently deceased globally renowned firebrand Civil and Human Rights Activist, The Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson, once poignantly and sarcastically put it as follows: “That was about the only time in American history that African Americans were fully employed, with the labor statistic of Black Unemployment being at Zip/Zero.”

Ironically, the fact still unpalatably remains to this day that short of signing up for unpaid labor or a sweat-shop level of paid labor, the average non-college educated African American is absolutely without a doubt, the most humiliated and wantonly exploited species of humanity in Trump and “Rapepublican” Party-ruled America. As the old cliche goes: “The Blackman/Blackwoman is the last to be hired and the first to be fired.”

Now, vis-a-vis the sorry state of the Indigenous Caribbean, we are painfully informed that not only would even the “generous” disbursement of a January 6, 2021 Trump type of the $1.7 Billion Boondoggle Program be miserly or woefully inadequate, about the most salutary and practically ideal solution would be to seamlessly couple the preceding sort of “Band-Aid Assistance” with land or real-estate redistribution, as, of course, it can absolutely not be gainsaid that one’s authentic personal, cultural and national identity inextricably devolves on land ownership and spatial proprietary identification. Incidentally, this is also where the veritable piranha-cannibal of “Capitalist Democracy” goes awry.

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