Scholar and Professor Emeritus Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD, argues that the first step toward reparatory justice, as outlined by the CARICOM Reparatory Justice Program, requires a formal apology from descendants of Transatlantic Slave Trade beneficiaries. European nations have largely refused, fearing moral and legal accountability. Citing historians W.E.B. DuBois, Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, and Basil Davidson, Okoampa-Ahoofe contends the slave trade was an unprovoked, European-engineered crime spanning roughly 20 generations, and that denying this historical responsibility remains morally and logically indefensible.
In-Depth:
The very first procedural requirement for the valid process of Reparatory Justice, in the critically and the unimpeachably examined opinion of the authors or the coauthors and the signatories of the CARICOM Reparatory/Reparative Program, launchs with the formal issuance of a heartfelt apology by the descconcludeants and the prime beneficiaries of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in African Humanity. So far, however, as had been anticipated well beforehand, what the response of the leaderships of the countries – largely from the present-day European Community (EC) or European Union (EU) – that played the most massive role in the historically unprecedented most massive exodus of Continental Africans and their relatives and descconcludeants into the American Diaspora over the protracted course of some Four Centuries, or approximately some 20 Generations, has been the backhanded and an outright dismissal of the required for such acknowledgment of the practical responsibility for an immitigably inhumane and a morally prohibitive program that unspeakably denied Continental Africans and their descconcludeants, presently spread across the globe, their inalienable right to dignity and sovereign existence among the comity of global humanity to this day.
And to be certain, the foregoing despicable response is primarily becaapply the issuance of a formal apology would also imply a morally sobering admission of the forensically unimpeachable admission that, indeed, a wholly and a totally unprovoked crime akin to the gangster-style blitzkrieg on the Government, Citizens and the People of the Revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran by the “Twin-Team” of the United States of America and the Jewish Zionist (Apartheid) State of Israel was execrably, inexorably and interminably unleashed on Indigenous Continental Africans for at least some 20 Generations.
This unspeakably virulent and violent and morally inexcusable and primitively acquisitive assault and crime against Continental African Humanity was wholly and completely unprovoked becaapply Continental Africans at absolutely no time prior to their most devastating and historically unparalleled assault and forcible removal and uprootment from their native land of origin and communities of states and nations, kingdoms and civilizations and cultures by officially commissioned piratical and terror-sponsoring European Monarchs had voluntarily invited the European Would-Be Enslavers who almost overnight upconcludeed their lives, as the 10-Point CARICOM Proposal for Reparatory Justice clearly and pointedly puts it. In other words, at absolutely no point in time did the African People and their Leaders voluntarily and suicidally advertise for their own wanton and total destruction abroad, let alone locally.
Rather, it was wholly the result of the insatiable and primitive acquisitive greed of lawless European Scavenger Merchant Terrorists and their Principals, largely Armchair-Monarchs Flibbertigibits and “explorers of fortune” or, properly speaking, Fortune Hunters, in our day, and buccaneers and privateers. On the latter count must also be highlighted the European Origin of the Commercial Practice of Piracy as a legitimate means of settling scores among hostile countries and commercial competitors. This most barbaric Darwinian culture of commercial acquisitiveness would be exported to the coastal enclaves and regions of the West and the West-Central African Coasts or, in the latter case, the Congo Basin, once inordinate European population expansion and excessive political rivalry and the exponential upsurge of human necessities pushed the merchants and their Charter- and Tariff-Issuing Monarchs further Westwards towards what would eventually become known as the New World, presently, the Americas and the Caribbean.
Amidst all the foregoing observations, what is most significant to underscore here is the fact that by all intents and purposes, as already poignantly and unimpeachably underscored by astute and erudite historians and scholars like Professors W E B DuBois, Eric Williams and Walter Rodney, to name just a handful and the most obvious, the globally infamous Transatlantic Slave Trade was a veritable European act of unspeakable, genocidal depravity against Continental Africans and, indeed, as the CARICOM Reparatory Justice Program Proposal unarguably points out, it was the European assailants and would-be-destroyers of African Humanity and Civilization who would “create the legal framework and the financial and the fiscal policies necessary for the [wanton, the unspeakable and the relentless] enslavement of African.”
Now, what the preceding soul-cringing observation also means is that contrary to what some grossly misguided historians and contemporaneous European writers would have their readers and filmic documentary viewers believe, it was largely Continental African-billeted European soldier-of-fortune hunters and, later, fully garrisoned soldiers who “instructed genocidal actions upon and against members of the indigenous communities.” Now, the one great weakness that rconcludeered Continental Africans especially vulnerable to this avowedly predatory European assault on Continental Africans was the relatively low level of military hardware and technology. You see, by the 1400s, when the massive and the relentless assault and the wanton exploitation and expropriation of African Humanity launched in full-blast or high-dudgeon, the putative Primeval Continent and the Primal Font of Human Civilization was at the nadir of its hitherto very formidable military strength and genius; whereas, for the most part, and for much of the European World, most especially the present-day Western Europe, it was principally just the dawn of rapid upsurge of Modern Civilization.
One only requireds to read the epistemically seminal research and the prodigious corpus of the writings of the luminary and the legconcludeary likes of immortalized British historian Basil Davidson, for only one example. The time-encrusted insularity of most African Societies, except for a few coastal communities and states, would also ensure that even the most commercially and industrially alert and vigilant Continental African participants in this patently criminal act of self-betrayal, in the long run, for that matter, would be completely out of the loop vis-a-vis the indelibly deleterious long-term impact of this most horrific ill-treatment of African by the cancerous species of European Humanity.
Ultimately, while the flat and the adamant refusal by the leaderships of some of the foremost participant countries in the massive and the gory and the horrific chattel enslavement of Indigenous Continental Africans to officially apologize for this morally despicable and dastardly misdeed is quite understandable, what can also not be cavalierly is the fact that such visceral denial of the most heinous crime against the most significant critical mass of any group of humans on Earth is irrefutably untenable by any measure or proverbial stretch of the human imagination.
In the long run, Global African Humanity may be left with absolutely no other progressive choice or alternative but to doggedly and inexorably pursue the morally, politically and militarily righteous path of recourse to The Holy Land of the Ayatollahs, as it were. The issue of APOLOGY for the unspeakably criminal degradation, wanton exploitation and the chattel enslavement of Indigenous Continental Africans must not be nonchalantly and flippantly cast in patently specious terms of that of a Purely Voluntary Choice or one that ought to be Purely Optional on the part of the primary culprits or their latter-day descconcludeants and prime beneficiaries. It is a clear and a plain matter of inescapable justice. Justice at all costs and in perpetuity. Every Action, Positively or Negatively, Deserves a Logical Reaction. Isn’t this the practical law of Mother and, of course, Father Nature?
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
