Generous Scholarship Opportunities for Talented African Students and Youths, in Lieu of Reparations - Part 19

I, personally, would have worded Number Ten or the penultimate resolution of CARICOM’s Reparatory Justice Program Proposal Slightly differently from the rather “cannibalistic” and the diplomatically gruff or irreverent terminology of “Technology Transfer,” which jarringly or cacophonously reeks with a scandalous sense of entitlement. For ultimately, what we are dealing with here is a solemn appeal to the tentatively presumed acute sense of razor-sharp morality and justice on the part of the descendants of the designers and the architects and the maximum beneficiaries of the half-millennium-long chattel enslavement and the wanton and the unspeakable exploitation of Indigenous Continental Africans in the erstwhile so-called New World of the present-day Americas.

To be certain, the half-millennium-long chattel enslavement and the wanton and the unmitigated exploitation of Indigenous Continental Africans was a heinous act of depravity verging inexcusably on what may be aptly termed as “Darwinian Bestiality,” more commonly referred to as the “Natural Principle of the Survival of the Fittest.” Actually, the foregoing terminology or characterization of the long nightmare of the chattel enslavement of Indigenous Continental Africans by the present-day Western Europeans grossly understates the practical reality of the situation that existed on the ground, as it were, for most of the period in question.

The stark fact of the matter is that it was more because of the Relative Superiority of the Physical Prowess or the General or the Stereotypical Strength of the Indigenous Continental African, vis-a-vis his/her European would-be Chattel Enslaver that dictated the fact that the Transatlantic Slave Trade was to last for as long as it did, all the recent cynical attempts by the Make America Great Again (MAGA) Trumpian Apostles and Disciples to blasphemously and scurrilously impugn the labor and the civic utility and the integrity of African Americans or the descendants of the pioneering Indigenous Continental African Species of Humanity who uniquely paid the groundwork and the contours of the future hitherto globally unknown phenomenal socioeconomic and technological advancement of the near-pristine State of Nature that was the present-day United States of America and the rest of the Twin-Continents of North and South America (See The Constitutions of All The Original Thirteen Colonies of the Contemporary United States of America in A. Leon Higginbotham’s treatise titled “In The Matter of Color).

The practical and the forensically readily accessible fact of the matter is that it was the far and away superior strength of the Indigenous Continental African Species of Humanity that strictly governed the fact that a cognitively and a morally self-deluded Superior European Species of Career Predatory Humanity would heavily invest in the admittedly dangerous kidnapping and the forced exiling or uprootment and the mass deportation of Indigenous Continental Africans for approximately a half millennium. You see, generally, one would not expect to hear people who make such extravagant and rhetorically grandiose claims as being racially superior, in both the intellect and physical strength, to the Indigenous Continental African, as well as being comfortably located at the very apex of civilized humanity, as already referenced or adumbrated a remarkable number of times throughout this series of commentary on the morally imperative need for the immediate establishment of a Post-Slavery and a Postcolonial Reparatory Justice Fund and a Program for Global African People, especially those in the American Diaspora, to predicate their destiny and the likelihood of their survival and their socioeconomic progress on the massive importation of Indigenous Continental Africans into the present-day United States of America.

And on the latter count, of course, the stark and the unmistakable reference is almost wholly and directly to Indigenous Continental Africans from the region of the present-day West Africa. Which, by the way, is absolutely in no way to excuse or ignore the equally catastrophic and extortionate acts of unspeakable savagery inflicted upon and/or suffered by Africans on the East Coast of the proverbial or the putative Primeval Continent at the hands of Arab Commercial Predators and other Asiatic People or Intruders and Invaders. One simply needs to read the seminal classics on Indigenous Continental African Chattel Enslavement by erudite and ideologically objective and open-minded European authors and scholars, such as Basil Davidson, among a host of others, to fully appreciate the fact that the phenomenal development of Western Civilization over the past ONE-THOUSAND YEARS, has been largely carried on the backs and the sweat and blood of Indigenous Continental Africans, most especially on the sweat and the blood of “The Negroes of Guinea,” that is, the Gulf of Guinea or the West African Subregion.

On the latter count, there has often been the equally cynical and deviously criminal and obscenely cavalier attempt to almost exclusively consign and confine the primary role of the Indigenous Continental African, vis-a-vis the creation of the Modern United States of America and the Caribbean, as well, to the stereotypical Plantation Culture of the sort of standard narrative of Chattel Enslavement that casually and almost invariably attributes the main role of African to manual and domestic labor. which , of course, makes for the most goose-bumping narrative in the righteous cause of the imperative necessity for Reparatory Justice by the leadership of the CARICOM Nations. It makes for a compelling pleading for “rehabilitative compensation” in the form of adequate material and cultural resources for the descendants of the primary victims of the 400 years of the Chattel Enslavement of Afro-Caribbeans and the preexistent or the Indigenous Native Caribbean neighbors and future relatives of these forcibly transplanted Indigenous African species of humanity.

The preceding notwithstanding and, in particular, vis-a-vis the age-old British mantra or self-serving slogan to the effect that for the obvious avoidance of commercial and industrial competition from the erstwhile slavo-colonial territories of the Americas and, to be certain, the African Continent itself, “Not a nail is to be made in the colonies,” obviously in order to ensure the realization of maximum profit from the “cannibalistic” trade in African Humanity, the reality on the ground, as it were, was, of course, not as conspicuously discrete and clinically or neatly dichotomized as the historical records may appear to indicate, even the most authentic and authoritative versions.

Rather, it is very significant to observe that even as Chattel Merchandise or Slaves, the technological know-how and genius of the Indigenous Continental African was organically and inextricably intertwined with the output of the very system that strictly denied him/her citizenship rights and, on the pain of death, property-acquisition rights. One only needs to research the history of African Inventors in the Diaspora, in particular in the present-day United States of America and, to be certain, elsewhere in the territorial totality of the Americas to promptly dispel the weird notion of the Chattel-Enslaved Indigenous African;s purportedly abject and complete lack of any remarkable creative genius.

Now, what the preceding observation means is that rather than falsely, albeit inadvertently, allude to the “beggarly” demand for “Technology Transfer,” a purely voluntary act of generosity or charitable goodwill, what we really need to be discussing in Number Nine of CARICOM’s 10-Point Reparatory Justice Program, is “Technology Sharing,” and not “Technology Transfer.” Which is why it comes as perfectly kosher or logical, when in the very last sentence of this penultimate section of the CARICOM Reparatory/Reparative Justice Program, the authors tersely and poignantly note as follows: “Technology transfer and science sharing for [meaningful] development must be a part of the CRJP.”

At any rate, in our kind of Postindustrial and AI-Technology-oriented global community, what we need to be sedulously focused on right now, are the primary local scientific and the technological needs of the Caribbean Community of Sovereign Nations and, in particular or especially, how any vital material and capital resources as may be ceded by a morally chastened global community, may be constructively utilized or effectively used in order to significantly meliorate the generally bleak and dreary socioeconomic condition in this most “capitalistically” deprived and victimized “Hood” of the Western Hemisphere, as it were.

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