“The money the West lends to Africa belong to African and Caribbean countries and the African Diaspora.” – Mutemi wa Kiama
Elizabeth was a mere child slave who was sickly from constant seizures. At one point she suffered a most violent fit that prevented her from rising from bed. She could not work. The young girl was incapacitated and stayed that way for up to four days. But this did not deter her “owners” from selling and reselling her. The child was to become the subject of a court action pitting a number of people with appalling sense of entitlement to her very being.
Hers is a sad story. This was in April 1839. Elizabeth had suffered a series of violent fits that seriously weakened her. When she was taken to a physician, Dr. John M. Jewell, he concluded that she was epileptic after examining her. A year earlier, she had been purchased by one Thomas Williams, who was in a slave trade partnership in Virginia, USA. Williams would transport enslaved people to Louisiana from where he sold them for a profit. Elizabeth was one of the slaves sold by Williams’ partner, William N. Ivy, for $480 to one Ethan Allen. One day later, Allen sold her to John Johnson who later sold her to William B. Lewis for $613 on March 8, 1839. Less than a month later, she was sold yet again to Thomas H. Lewis for $650 who turned her into a house servant.
She had hardly stayed in Lewis’ home for two weeks before she suffered the violent fit that lasted for three hours. From then on, she was to suffer seizures on a regular basis. This made her deranged and forgetful of everything told to her. Young Elizabeth could no longer work. As a result, Lewis saw no value in her. He decided to look for her previous “owners.” When he succeeded, he took them to court on the grounds that her poor health had “diminished her value as a slave.” The case is recorded in the Norfolk County Chancery as No. 1853-008, (Thomas Williams vs. William N. Ivy, etc.). During the case, the plaintiff asked the court to help him recover the cash he had paid for her plus interest.
A few months later, Elizabeth died on October 23, 1839 at the mere age of 13. In death, she was seen as a human being with no value and was described as having been “burdensome to her owner and totally valueless as a slave.”
Glaring insight
The young girl’s case is a glaring insight into the thinking of the slave dealers. It provides details of how the whole inhumane business was carried out. It also gives one a birds-eye glimpse of how the entire slave economy was organised. Today, Elizabeth is just but part of the slavery statistics. She was one of the more than 12 million Africans who were violently ejected from their homes and families as slave trade flourished for more than 300 years.
The West has continued to dilly dally in as far as paying reparations is concerned
But rather than see the decency of atoning to their great crime, the West has continued to dilly dally as far as paying reparations is concerned. When not dillydallying, those in-charge of governments there have voiced sentiments that are seen as little-veiled insults to the descendants of the enslaved Africans. This notwithstanding, Britain has gone a step further (in the insult) by erecting an exhibition at the premises of the Bank of England that reflects on how the wealth created through the trans-Atlantic slavery shaped development of the country.
It is a well-known fact that slavery was instrumental to the growth and development of the global economy. The enslaved Africans worked really hard to open up and develop little known countries. Typically, they would be bought in an auction, transported sometimes over long distances, sold or hired out to plantation or factory owners where they would be made to work sometimes for an year or more and later resold for a profit.
It was very clear that the enslaved Africans had no other value. They were regarded the same way their enslavers regarded ordinary goods and services. They were traded publicly in auctions and would be advertised just like normal goods were. For instance, in one of the adverts, the owners of a firm going by the name, Pulliam & Davis Auctioneers and Commission Merchants based in Richmond VA. say that they continued “to offer services in the sale of negroes.” Another firm, Lewis B. Levy located in Wall Street, Richmond VA. advertised themselves as “manufacturers of all kinds of servants’ clothing and that they specialized in supplying clothing to persons bringing their slaves “to the city for hire or sale.” Besides the oddity of businesses that bought and sold fellow human beings, the traffickers who placed the adverts sometimes retained their ownership and would either get them back after some time or eventually sell them.
Proceeds of serious crime
Those involved ended up earning humongous amounts which, when all was said and done, were proceeds of serious crimes against humanity. Those who benefitted were not merely individuals; the royalty, companies as well as governments benefitted immensely. Indeed, slavery was, to say the least, part of the national systems in most European countries such as Spain, England, Portugal, Belgium and others. In the USA, it was at the “very core” of the country’s economic and political life” – according to a National Geographic story published on January 3, 2003.
Without slavery, the European colonial misadventure spanning from 16th to the 19th centuries and especially in the Americas, would not have succeeded. Essentially, Europeans were not able to open up the new lands they forcefully took after killing millions of native Americans. Neither could they rely on the latter. As the National Geographic report says, most European colonial economies in the Americas were entirely dependent on enslaved African labor for their survival. This dependency extended from America to Britain where the country’s textile industry could not have survived or thrived without the cotton shipped to the country via New York.
The fact that slavery built the world economy and that it was a highly productive and economically efficient institution, should be adequate reasons for the West to consider the payment of reparations to the descendants of the people they enslaved. The latter did back-breaking work; were made to put up as many as 18 work hours a day and largely worked in brutal and inhumane environments.
Momentum rising
With this in mind, those calling for reparations have heightened the clamour. For instance, an online petition to British Parliament succeeded in securing the endorsement of 20,585 people who asked Britain to pay reparations to Caribbean and African descendants of enslaved people.
This has been a moral campaign with those advocating for it, voicing the view that payment of reparations is about making those responsible realise the moral outrage involved. In an article published in The Conversation, Luke Moffett, a senior law lecturer at Queen’s University, Belfast wrote that this is “not so much about money” as “confronting those responsible with their wrongdoing and getting them to recognize the value of their victims as human beings”.
The continuation of racial violence in the US and elsewhere springs from failure to address the legacy of slavery
A similar argument was made by Michelle Bachelet, the Head of UN Human Rights Commission in an article published by The Guardian in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd. Bachelet said that the continuation of racial violence in the US and elsewhere springs from failure to address the legacy of slavery. “Behind today’s racial violence, systemic racism and discriminatory policing lies the failure to acknowledge and confront the legacy of the slave trade and colonialism,” she said in an apparent attempt to prick the conscience of the West.
Debt forgiveness as part of reparations
In his book, Trade is War: The West’s War Against the World, Yash Tandon ably demonstrates how the West, “despite its rhetoric about ‘development’, has no interest in the development of the rest of the world and is in fact in a relentless ‘war’ against it.” Tandon says that among the instruments of domination used by the West is aid, trade, investment and technology which defines the structure of global governance created by the ‘victor nations’ after the second world war. This created the colonial and financial empires that was consciously designed by the West to benefit their own people not the rest of the world. The “rest” were coerced throughout the colonisation era and even after that to produce raw materials, food and minerals that were processed in the empires.
Reports show that African countries are the most indebted regions in the world. For instance, the average debt to GDP ratio in the Caribbean was 71.4% in 2018. This rose to 90.1% of GDP since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Things are not any better in Africa. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the total debt held in Africa, accrued by public and private sector entities and owed to foreign lenders “surpassed US$1 trillion while the annual debt servicing broke through the $100 billion threshold for the first time ever in 2021. In the same years, the EIU says that Africa used 15% of foreign exchange income on servicing foreign debt.
Sub Saharan Africa has too much debt than it can’t pay. Photo: Pixarbay
The effect of the heavy debt burden is worsened by the immense resource spirited out of Africa by the West. For instance, according to the 2016 report by War on Want Organisation, The New Colonialism: Britain’s Scramble for Africa’s Energy and Mineral Resources, some 101 British companies, which have mining operations in 37 African countries, collectively control over $1 trillion worth of the continent’s most valuable resources undermines the ability of African countries. Combined with the heavy debt burden, this greatly affects…
