Generous Scholarship Opportunities for Talented African Students and Youths, in Lieu of Reparations - Part 20

Ultimately, one cannot open up the critical question of Post-Slavery and Post-Colonial Reparatory Justice without also wedging in the equally critical question of “Debt Cancellation,” which logically constitutes the Tenth and the Final Resolution of the 10-Point Proposal of the CARICOM Reparatory Justice Program Proposal, inasmuch as the ultimate resolution also appears to be almost patently pleonastic or redundant and superfluous. Indeed, Resolution Number 10 may come off as downright redundant because the morally righteous and the practically unarguable demand for Reparatory/Reparative Justice clearly implies the prompt and the definitive and thorough redressing of the perennially unspeakable ravages of the deleterious impact of the Transatlantic European (Slave) Trade in African Humanity.

Even so, the critical and the morally imperative and the practically indispensable problem of the insufferable magnitude of debt acquisition, largely from the descendants of the architects of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the maximum beneficiaries of this most horrific trade in African Humanity cannot be constructively discussed without also radically tackling what many major and/or prominent African Economists and Economic Analysts and Theorists have almost invariably, and to a person, characterized as “The deliberate and the systematic debt-trap,” rigged up to ensure that African people continue to be globally and perennially trapped at the very bottom of the vicious cycle of a contemporary global economic system which continues to be almost hermetically controlled by the European Descendants and the Maximum Beneficiaries of the erstwhile Transatlantic Slave Trade in African Humanity.

In the foregoing context, therefore, in reality, the massive chattel enslavement of the African people never really ended; rather, it was simply strategically conveniently sublimated or more “palatably” refined and transformed into a relatively more sophisticated system that more morally acceptably, at least on the surface of things, soothed the collective conscience and the moral amplitude and, perhaps, even the attitudes of the descendants of the designers and the architects of the system which the great White-American scholar and historian by the name of Kenneth Stampp called “The Peculiar Institution.”

Which is why in practical terms, contrary to what the leadership and the authors of CARICOM’s 10-Point Proposal Demand for Reparatory Justice (CRJP) would have the rest of the proverbial International Community believe, absolutely “No Caribbean governments ever emerged from slavery and colonialism,” in reality, much less be aptly envisaged to have “inherited the massive crisis of community poverty and institutional unpreparedness for development.” Rather, what really occurred in the heady days of the Post-World-War II Era of the Post-Nazi “Rooseveltian New World Order” of Global Mutuality of Respect for All Humans, Irrespective of Nationality and Socioeconomic and Political Status, was the massive or the wholesale granting of “Ceremonial Sovereignty” within the long-calcified stranglehold and the supervisory purview of a deftly crafted and new cosmetic bonds or shackles of a more sophisticated “Slavo-Colonial Plantation System” called “The British Commonwealth of Nations” and, subsequently, even more suavely and deceptively relabeled simply as “The Commonwealth.” On the French side of the new “Geopsychological Divide,” the new name for this criminally fabricated game became The Francophone Alliance or simply “Francophonie.”

And here also, like the jaded and the morally effete Transatlantic Slave Trade, the designers and the architects of these so-called Postcolonial Friendship Alliances with the former Subjects of the British Empire and the Egalitarian, Democratic French Republic were the very same descendants and the prime beneficiaries of the old regime of Indigenous Continental African Chattel Enslavement in the erstwhile so-called New World, presently renamed The Americas, of which the CARICOM Nations are a part and parcel.

Which is also why, truth be told, the so-called Afro-Caribbean constituted Post-Slavo-Colonial Governments that were deviously and conveniently planted in place of the departing European colonial imperial “Plantocrats” were not really officially charged with “engaging in the [patently ungodly and the scandalously unwholesome] business of cleaning up the colonial mess [so as] to prepare for [real] development.” That is an egregiously gross and an abjectly flagrant misreading of the script of the Euro-Colonial Imperialist Aggression Against Indigenous Continental African Humanity. Rather, the establishment and the normative institutionalization of the present-day so-called Postcolonial Governance System was clearly and incontrovertibly rigged up to perpetuate the Old and the Ancient Regime, even while also craftily shifting the responsibility for the massive and the seismic burden of 400 years of Chattel Enslavement on the metaphorical victims themselves.

You see, it constitutes the unspeakable height of the patently oxymoronic and the ineffably absurd for anybody to assume or cavalierly presume that a system that was perfectly and thoroughly rigged up to perpetuate the socioeconomic inferiority of Global African Humanity could at the same time be expected to “clean up the mess” that it is actually intended to compound and inexorably multiply ad-infinitum. Now, whatever the real case scenario may be, it ought to be quite unimpeachably clear to both oppressor or victimizer and victim that this New Global Era of the Iranian Revolution demands the inevitable turning of the tide of the Global Mutuality of Collective National and International Security. In short, the days of the jejune and the morally repulsively infantile “Self-Centered” and Narcissistic Darwinian Policy of Criminal Extortion and “Kaakaamotobi” Intimidation of Non-Nuclearized Ideological Opponents and deliberately selected foes are way over and permanently done with.

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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