Generous Scholarship Opportunities for Talented African Students and Youths, in Lieu of Reparations - Part 15

The two most critical areas of woeful human-resource underdevelopment in the Caribbean Community of Nations (CARICOM) highlighted among the 10-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice for Four Centuries of violent and unspeakably criminal uprooting, massive deportation/exodus and the Chattel Enslavement of Indigenous Continental Africans in the then so-called New World of the Caribbean and, to be certain, the entire region of the New World, presently renamed The Americas, are Healthcare and Education.

In the case of Healthcare, one only needs to access the copious corpus and the compendious documents that meticulously and systematically detail the horrific and the bestial indignities routinely meted and rampantly meted captive and enchained or shackled Indigenous Continental Africans in the insufferably malodorous holds of European and European-American-owned slaveships that brazenly bore such scandalously ironic names as The Jesus and The Santa Maria.

The obvious reference here, of course, is to the nightmarishly unsanitary conditions of these slaveships, primarily entailing the abject lack of basic toilet facilities, which forced these captives to sleep, starkly naked, in their own fecal matter, packed tightly together, spoon-fashion, as the old cliche goes, and uncomfortably pressed against one another, including captives whose criminal deaths often did not promptly and immediately come to the attention of the slave ship captains and the members of their crew.

Now, there are several problems to consider here, not the least bit of which had to do with the riotously rampant spread of diseases, including the common cholera. Which means that a remarkable percentage of the captives did not survive the voyage, euphemistically tagged as The Middle-Passage, that at the time lasted three months at the barest minimum, often well in excess of four to six months. Which is also why it ought to come as absolutely no surprise to learn that of the estimated 10 Million Indigenous Continental Africans forcibly transported across The Atlantic and into the Caribbean, over the course of the 400-year duration of the European-engineered and almost wholly conducted Transatlantic Slave Trade, approximately 80-percent or a humongous 8-Million did not either make to their new destination or they simply did not live long anough to be able to successfully adjust to the harsh and the unspeakable realities of the life and the culture of their new environment.

Now, vis-a-vis the insufferable sanitation conditions of the slave ships, one has to also factor into the equation, as it were, the psychological and the psychic problems endured by these captives, not to speak of the downright bestial incidence of rape and other forms of sexual abuse of captive Indigenous Continental African Women who were unfortunate enough to be captured and sold to these European Slave Traders whom at least one Ghanaian King at the time, by the name of Nana Kwamena Ansah (or Kwamina/Kwame Ansah) has gone on record as having bitterly complained were so dirty and unwashed and insufferably stinky or fetid that he rather preferred dealing with these European Slave Traders literally at arm’s length, much less have these shaggy and ragamuffin “troglosytes” settle and build permanent abodes on the Western Ghanaian Coast of El-Mina, called Edina in the local vernacular, among his people (See Basil Davidson’s narratives of the Transatlantic Slave Trade).

In their summary and brief documentation of a couple of the slavery-related diseases visited upon or contracted by many of the Indigenous Continental Africans who were chattel-enslaved in the Caribbean and, by logical extension the Americas in general, the authors of the CARICOM Reparatory Justice Program of Resolutions highlight, as they perforce ought to, such hitherto unknown diseases as Hypertension and Type-Two Diabetes. The Dear Reader may duly add to the preceding Syphilis. The wanton sexual abuse of the soon-to-be chattel-enslaved African Woman also naturally meant that a legion number of sexually transmitted diseass hitherto completely unknown to these women and their communities, cultures and countries of origin would become part and parcel of their new environment and existence.

Now, on the question of sexuality and sexual abuse must also be critically and properly recognized the fact that Indigenous Continental African Men, especially very handsome and prepossessingly virile men, were almost equally and as riotously and ramoantly abused by both their European slavemasters and, to a remarkably lesser degree, their slavemistresses as well. Interestingly, though, the wanton abuse of chatter-enslaved African men is often not given adequate scholarly attention and treatment, obviously because the Culture of Male Homosexuality, which is as prominent in practice as Heterosexuality in Europe, with the exponential upsurge in Christocentric Theology and Evangelism, has tended to be officially suppressed and legally proscribed, for the most part, although as has been widely revealed or evidenced in recent times among the clergy of some of the most powerful Christocentric Western Institutional Establishments, Homosexuality is very well and much alive.

The thesis here is not to either quixotically or farcically deny the practical relevance and existence of Homosexualiyy in Continental Africa and even among Indigenous Africans, for that would be inexcusably mendacious and downright disingenuous. Rather, it is simply to take inescapable account of the factual reality of the criminal sexual abuse of chattel-enslaved Continental African Men at almost the same level as the all-too-common knowledge of the wanton sexual abuse of Indigenous Continental African Women.

Ultimately, the most significant takeaway here is the imperative need for the leaderships of those European countries that massively benefited from the half-millennial chattel enslavement of Indigenous Continental Africans in both the Americas and the so-called Continental Europe to, as it were, promptly step up to the plate and “Do The Right Thing,” as the title of one of the early seminal films of the generously talented and prolific African American filmmaker, actor and director, Spike Lee boldly and poignantly counsels.

In other words, there ought to be promptly mounted a capital-intensive Public-Health Revolution in the erstwhile European-Enslaved Nations of the Caribbean and, of course, the ECOWAS Subregion of West Africa.

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