Africa Update          Vol. XX1V, Issue 2 (Spring, 2017):

THE FOURTEENTH ANNUAL AMISTAD LECTURE

Table of Contents

Editorial: Professor Gloria Emeagwali (Chief Editor)

Professor Hilary Beckles:

14th Annual Lecture on the AMISTAD - The

Global Reparatory Justice Movement,

21st Century Enlightenment and the Legacy of the Amistad

Editorial

It   a great honor to introduce on behalf of the Amistad Committee  of  Central Connecticut State University-   comprised of 

Professors Olusegun Sogunro ( Education),  

Beverly Johnson (English),  Dann Broyld (History), Fumilayo Showers (Sociology)

and  Gloria Emeagwali, myself   (History)-  

 Prof.   Sir Hilary Beckles, our Distinguished Keynote Speaker for 2017.  

Professor Beckles   is 

President of the  University of the West Indies,  a university system      that consists of three campuses,   located in

Jamaica,   Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago. Professor Beckles attained his doctorate at the University of Hull, UK. and has attained honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow,   Brock University, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology,  Ghana, and the University of the Virgin Islands. He has published thirty one books,  and about one hundred scholarly articles,  on the subject of   capitalism and slavery, the struggle for   emancipation and freedom, decolonization and its challenges, uprisings such as the Haitian revolution, and sports.

Dr. Beckles  is Professor of   Economic     and Social   History. He  is also a playwright, having created eight plays on the subject of      legendary Caribbean 

heroes and sports persons. 

                                    Professor  Sir Beckles    is also an active   athlete and   ardent cricketer. 

 His insights into   the game  of cricket and its history are well quoted,  and    from time to time,  

generate spirited  discussions    in the region. 

In his capacity as an administrator,  he  

 has pioneered  several programs including

                                                                                  Cricket Research Studies, a first for the region.

We are honored by his presence -  and  his  formidable intellectual capabilities and achievements.

Prof. Gloria Emeagwali 

Chief Editor,  Africa Update

The

Global Reparatory Justice Movement:

         21st Century Enlightenment and the Legacy of the Amistad

Delivered by

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles

Distinguished Scholar and

 Vice - Chancellor (President)

University of the West Indies

                                                                     

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Central Connecticut State University

This Amistad moment we commemorate and celebrate is important because of the

critical lessons to be deduced from the discourse. I wish to highlight and comment upon the

philosophical and political principles involved in the case. First and foremost we must recognize that

the Africans who stood their ground in defense of human dignity forced the court, and wider civil

society, to comment on the immorality and other issues surrounding the legality of individuals’ ability

to buy and sell human beings. They forced the nation to discuss the western practice by which the

classification of humans as property and real estate had been normalized.

                          The court, torn and tortured by the hegemonic power of economic interest over social

morality, agreed that persons illegally enslaved have a right to resist their oppressors. This principle is

important from the point of view of ethical philosophy and jurisprudence. It integrated the experience

of enslaved African people in the Caribbean, Europe and the United States, and forged a unified

Atlantic cultural space that promoted conversations about justice, morality and ethnicity. Critically,

the conversation showed how these ideas ran into conflict with the belief that chattel slavery in each

jurisdiction was in the “the national interest”.

The text of the Amistad case is considered a classic commentary on the globalization of ideas

that gave rise to the practice of racial slavery that dehumanized, debased, and commodified African

peoples. The Africans aboard the ship, Amistad, were allegedly owned by Spanish investors. The case

began with the legal effects of the British abolition of their trade in enslaved, enchained, black bodies,

and invoked in the final instance the popular, official jurisprudence of the American criminal justice

system. It brought together the legal and philosophical premises of the modern western world in

order to test the notion of black freedom as both an existential ideal and a national threat. A former

president of the slave-based USA argued the case for the captives, and by extension the oppressed and

the enslaved throughout the nation. This fact alone has powerful symbolic significance for our time.

Very important messages emanated from the moment. Within this context, and against the

background of the economics of stealing humans, and the politics of social healing, I celebrate all of

you here in this distinguished university for taking these matters seriously. By so doing you are

sustaining the importance of the idea of human freedom and engendering conversations across

boundaries of age and ethnicity. You are calling for a future that stands in contrast to the historical

legacy of assaulting human dignity and liberty as a public good.

Reparatory justice is a theme that has always been at the centre of my consciousness, even if in

a subliminal sort of way. If you are born into a racialized society that has known ethnic slavery and

colonial oppression, and you are historically conscious, the issue of pursuing justice for the victim is

always somewhere within your imagination. That my ancestors were stolen from Africa and enslaved

and enchained in the “islands”, locate me as a “shipmate” of the Amistad folks. Amistad for me,

therefore, is more than a ship of horror. It is a social metaphor. My family survived the slavery

holocaust in the Caribbean, and by the mid-20th C found themselves in Britain, laboring for the

descendants of the very people who had stolen them from Africa. The movement from the plantation

fields to the industrial factories – Barbados to Birmingham – was therefore a continuum in the plunder

                  of a marginalized and oppressed people.

I take a moment here to pause. One of my uncles came to this City of Hartford and gave 50

years of labour. He too was a part of the globalization of my family’s labour. I was the first member of

my immediate family who took the decision to leave Britain and to return home to the Caribbean

diaspora. I wished to live as an empowered citizen and to have a strategic base from which to

participate in this global debate and movement. Reparatory justice for me, then, is an issue within this

migratory circle across diasporas that began with the trade in enchained ancestors as a crime against

humanity.

What do we, as citizens, scholars, and students have to say and do about this current moment

in our journey? You might very well say that there is no moral moment in history, and that there is an

ongoing cycle of oppression and exploitation that cannot be defeated. But the narrative I wish to

promote, and feel passionately about, tells the history differently. What we know is that it took all of

the 19th C to eradicate chattel slavery from this hemisphere. It took millions of people, from Alaska to

Argentina, to uproot the evil that had been an hegemonic economic system and societal base for over

four centuries.

We celebrate the Haitians. They were first, in 1804, to legally replace the institution of slavery

and deny its universality by putting in place something humane and more globally desired. They paid a

dear price for this seminal intervention, and continue to be targeted within the global white supremacy

order for turning the modern world the right way up. It took the Danish, British, French, Dutch,

Americans, Spanish, and the Portuguese the rest of the 19th C to follow the Haitian lead, and to

illegalize the evil. Between 1804 and the 1880s, the anti-slavery forces, rooted in black resistance,

battled against empowered slaveowners and their stakeholder government supporters. It was a battle

that enveloped all of the 19th C. Millions of people, morally dedicated and politically focused,

                           determined that the modern world should not be based on the criminal institution called

chattel

slavery. In this cause, thousands perished but millions have benefitted.

Then it took all of the 20th C to establish constitutional civil and human rights for the

descendants of the enslaved peoples. In all the countries of this hemisphere, it has been a grand and

epic struggle to establish for black folks the rights and privileges white folks had always assumed to be

their heritage. Now we have stepped into the 21st C. What will be the struggle of this long epoch? I

believe this 21st C is going to be the era of reparatory justice. I believe we are on the cusp of another

major movement in human rights thinking and acting within the western world.

It is finally universally accepted that the genocide committed against the indigenous peoples of

the Caribbean and Americas, and the chattel enslavement of millions of Africans, constituted crimes

against humanity. What we have been told by our finest jurists and philosophers is that we should not

harden our hearts to this history; that we should not conceptualize, tolerate and absorb this criminality

as a distant norm, but that we should treat it as a pressing matter for contemporary reparatory justice.

They have said that post modernity must atone for it, and learn important lessons from it for 21st C

harmonious global living.

The world is also entering its third phase of global commercial engagement. We are now

looking at each other, across culture contours, and realizing that there are no remaining obvious places

to hide on the planet. Cultural boundaries have been breached, and there are no physical frontiers, no

unseen spatial worlds. We effectively have a unified global community, and those who have

benefitted from crimes against humanity are being called to be accountable, and asked to discuss the

moral implications and legal basis of those benefits. There is no cave to run into for those who

committed crimes and wish to avoid justice.

Communities in the colonized and plundered world that have been assigned to endemic

poverty and social depravation in post colonialism are all asking for reparatory justice. They are not

prepared to endure this 21st C against the background of the plunder and pillage of their ancestors’

labour and economies. In other words, the racialized colonization that led to genocide and chattel

slavery is now seen as a criminal enterprise, and those who benefitted from the enterprise are called

upon to repair the damage.

There are some important milestones along the way to be recognized. I made mention of Haiti,

the first nation in the modern world to place in its constitution, that all humans are socially equal and

that slavery is forever abolished. The colonizing enslaver, France, having suffered a military defeat at

the hands of the enslaved, could not accept the new political and constitutional reality without seeking

reprisals and reversals. With their European and American allies they surrounded Haiti with gunboats

and forced it by threat of military invasion to pay reparations.

Consider this. The moment is 1825. There is jubilation in Port au Prince. The Haitians are

celebrating the 21st anniversary of their national independence and sovereignty. The French

government sends an emissary to say to the President that the slaveowning nations will not recognize

the independence of the country until it pays reparations to former slaveowners. The Haitian

President and his government believe they have no choice but to comply. Not officially recognized by

any nation in the hemisphere, they were effectively politically and economically isolated. Each society

in this hemisphere is built upon chattel enslavement; the Caribbean nation is the only place where

freedom is constitutionalized.

The Haitians decided that if the price to pay for official membership and diplomatic connections

to the white ruled modern world, and to be internationally recognized is to pay reparations, so be it.

The government agreed to pay 150 million gold francs to the French government as reparatory

compensation for slaveowners’ loss of property. Therein lies the first case in modern history that

represents an inter-government reparations claim. Imagine, if you will, the Haitian government in

which most officials, including members of the Cabinet were formerly enslaved, forced to agree that a

commercial value would be placed on all citizens in order to compute and make the reparations

payment. This was precisely the calculated demand of the French government. It was intended to

politically humiliate and economically humble the Haitians.

The French reparations intention was clear. The Haitians were to pay full compensation for the

loss of all property, animals, enslaved persons, buildings, stocks and bonds. Assets formerly held by

French citizens were valued, and these included near 500,000 enslaved Africans. This model becomes

the blueprint for other European Acts of Emancipation in the Caribbean. The British government, for

example, paid £20 million reparations to their slaveowners for the loss of their human property. The

enslaved contributed 52% of this sum by way of four years of “free” labour to former slaveowners after

they were “freed”, the so-called period of Apprenticeship. Reparations, then, was very much a 19th C

process and philosophy.

We have entered the 21st C and the enormous, unanswered question is this: What about

reparations for the enslaved and their descendants? It took the Haitian people over100 years to pay

the French financial reparations. There were moments in the 19th C when up to 80% of the foreign

exchange earnings of the Haitian economy was sent to France to pay this debt. The subsequent

disintegration of the Haitian economy was authored by the hands of the French government that

extracted from the fledgling nation the wealth it needed for national development. Its decent into

financial poverty was the intended outcome of French policy.

Jamaica is now moving into the second phase of its constitutional independence from Britain.

When the country became sovereign in 1962, 80% of the black people were defined as functionally

illiterate. Britain had colonized and extracted wealth from Jamaica for almost 300 years. At the end of

this long history of wealth extraction, three quarters of the people were left in a state of educational

backwardness. The Jamaican political leaders, like all others in the Caribbean, signed the

independence deal without making a claim for reparatory justice. The British State would have

responded with aggression if such a claim had been made.

Caribbean governments were keen to be constitutionally free of the tyranny of British and

European governments. They were intimidated and had no inclination at the time, as a result, to

discuss or promote reparations. The consequence is now clear. They are independent, constitutionally

detached, politically free of the colonial scaffold, but trapped in the residual legacy of colonial poverty.

There was no economic development model that could have enabled the postcolonial Jamaican

economy and society of two million people, built upon extreme infrastructural decay, crippling

illiteracy, and massive chronic ill health to become a developed nation within two generations.

In effect, most all what Jamaica, and other Caribbean states have been doing with their passion

for nationhood, and their commitment to economic development, is cleaning up the inherited

enormous colonial mess. In order to give the new citizenship some significant semblance of

citizenship, they had to invest heavily in public education, community health and social development.

The result has been unsustainable social expenditure, out of control fiscal margins, spiraling domestic

debt, and systemic economic decline. This Caribbean scenario is the consequence of national

independence paradigms developed without reparatory justice principles.

Imagine this allegory. A woman is married to a tyrant, who is hyper-masculine and brutal in his

relation to her. She finally finds the courage and confidence, after years of violent oppression, to

detach herself from the abuse with her children, and declare herself free and independent. She is very

happy to achieve this personal freedom, but in the process she disconnects from her share of the

jointly accumulated resources necessary to assure her children’s future. In the celebration of her social

identity she focused on neither her economic rights nor the financial future of her children. Imagine,

furthermore, that the tyrant goes off and remarries, transferring her share of the jointly owned assets

to the new partner. Britain joined the European Union and jettisoned responsibility for the legacy of

the colonial relation. I am sure you will agree with me that this woman was in need of a good family

and human rights lawyer while signing the divorce document.

This is precisely what has happened in the Caribbean. Most governments of the region dashed

headlong into the separation from British tyranny. They did not say before signing independence

agreements that it was a priority to look at an economic development plan for the next generation.

They designed and celebrated independence without reference to the reparatory justice principle, and

the result has been what it is. Despite their heroic efforts at constructing the regional future, they

have fallen short because the cards they had to play made it impossible for them to be competitive.

Caribbean governments have now agreed, fifty years later, to join with civil society in the call

for a renegotiation of both Emancipation and Independence around reparatory justice. They have

established a Caribbean Reparations Commission to prepare the evidentiary basis for a review of

colonial crimes, and to make the research available within the public space. I have been asked to chair

this Commission and to coordinate the project with a view to presenting the imperial governments of

Europe with a claim for reparations. The context of these claims is to seek justice for the slavery crimes

against humanity specifically, and for violent, racist colonization generally.

Reparations, the main stream media have claimed, is about black people asking white people,

who are keen to say they have no responsibility for these crimes and their consequences, to pay out

premium cash. Leaders of the movement have rejected this claim and have said that it is about the

right to justice, and a call for effective development cooperation. The Caricom Reparations

Commission is saying to the governments of Europe, look here, there are fundamental moral and legal

problems resulting from the refusal to engage the just nature of reparations claim. The European

governments, the Commissioners say, need to return to the Caribbean, the scene of their crimes,

against humanity and participate in a development strategy around cleaning up their awesome colonial

mess.

The black non communicable chronic disease pandemic in the Caribbean is particularly

distressing in this regard. While slavery is legally over, and colonization constitutionally on the retreat,

the region is now living in the jet stream of their terrible legacies. Seventy per cent of all black people

in the Caribbean over the age of 60 have either hypertension, type II diabetes, or both. In fact, if you

use the criterion of non-communicable chronic diseases, the black people in the Caribbean are the

sickest people in the world.

                     This legacy of slavery and colonization has to be confronted and explained. Millions of

African

people were imprisoned on a group of small islands, defined and managed as chattel property, for five

hundred years, brutalized in every way possible, their emotional partners and children sold, sons and

daughters raped and kept generally malnourished. Slaveowners extracted from them 20 hours of work

per day, producing in the process an inter-generational stress experience. They were fed a daily diet of

salted fish and salted pork, and given pounds of sugar to eat as a meal. The medical results should not

be scientifically surprising. Slavery and colonization produced a black population with reduced capacity

to metabolize salt and sugar; a community that is chronically ill, and a social culture with unhealthy

food choices that is inter-generational. This is the circumstance that faces the African Caribbean

                      People.

There is a global media image of African Caribbean people as healthy and athletic. It is an

image created largely around high performance in sport, driven by super athletes such as Usain Bolt.

But behind this image is an explosion of chronic illness. It is the primary medical contemporary legacy

of slavery and colonization. These and such like images and realities constitute the healthcare basis of

reparations discourse. Reparatory justice is about confronting these legacies in order to prepare for

the future. Since the Caricom Reparations Commission was established, similar agencies have been

springing up everywhere. There are existing bodies in the European Union, Britain, USA, Canada,

Brazil, Colombia and Costa Rica. There are plans to have an agency in India because many Africans

were taken across the Indian Ocean into the sub-continent and kept in slavery. Wherever Africans

were enslaved, diaspora communities are pressing for reparatory justice. Plans are in place for these

reparations agencies to meet in Africa in 2018 in order to advance the global campaign.

                   Statements of Regret have been issued by many countries and companies that have benefitted

from these crimes against humanity, but no apologies have been forthcoming. Young people especially

should understand the difference. The Statement of Regret is now a norm, but it is not an apology.

Allow me to give you an explanation of the difference. Let us assume that one of you get up from your

chair and steps on the foot of your neighbor. Your neighbor is diabetic. The injury becomes infected,

and does not heal. In time the injured foot is amputated. You can issue a Statement of Regret. That is,

you can say to your neighbour I regret very much what has happened, and you walk away putting the

matter behind you. This is a kind moral response. It is a significant statement designed to pacify

without payment. It admits to no responsibility for the action or its consequences. Nothing is

admittedly owed; there is no accountability for the damage suffered by the victim.

An apology, however, is altogether a different declaration. It takes responsibility for the

wrongdoing and its consequences. The wrongdoer is prepared to engage the victim with an intent to

repair the damage. It seeks to atone as much as humanly possible, and to facilitate the victim’s

rehabilitation. An apology, then, is a precursor to repair, by engaging the process of reparations.

No government in the western world has issued an apology for slavery and racist colonization

with an intent to repair the damage. The Pope, US President Bill Clinton, Prime Minister Tony Blair of

the UK, and others have issued Statements of Regret. France has issued an apology by admitting that

slavery was a crime against humanity, but proceeded to participate in the overthrow of President

Aristide of Haiti when he called for reparatory justice.

The demand for an apology, however, is gaining ground globally. It is considered a first step in

the atonement process. I believe in the positive aspects of human nature. I am a great believer in the

                    universality of human morality. I believe that human beings are inclined to do the right thing.

I also

know that economic elites who possess organized political power have always stood in the way of

popular claims for social justice. Political power rarely concedes social justice. Reparations have never

been paid by economic elites to people who are disorganized, weak in political consciousness, and

lacking collective political commitment in pressing their claim.

Reference is often made to the situation expressed by the Jewish community in Europe. They

suffered a horrendous holocaust as a crime against humanity perpetuated by the Nazi regime in

Germany, and beyond. This connection seeks to draw comparison with the holocaust against the

enslaved African peoples, and the genocide committed against the indigenous peoples of the

Caribbean and Americas. On the island of Barbados, for example, where I was born, the British

imported 600,000 enchained Africans over a period of two hundred years beginning in 1627. At

emancipation in 1838 colonial officials reported 83,000 black survivors. Slavery in Barbados, and the

wider Caribbean, was also a genocidal experience. Genocide is the result of placing a people in a

circumstance so cruel and inhumane that they fail to reproduce themselves. Slavery was Europe’s

mass destruction of enslaved Africans in the New World. Today the black population of Barbados is

about 280,000 still less than half the number imported.

The Jewish people, in western Europe, have said there has to be justice for the crimes

committed against them by the Nazis. They demanded that the German and other European States

own the crimes and commit to reparations. There was no legal precedence, no case law, to determine

the procedure. There was no jurisprudence; there was no system of legal administration to make it

happen. The judges in tribunal were called upon to make it up. When they met at Nuremburg to

proceed with the case, they were breaking entirely new ground. Some of them had doubts about their

effectiveness. There was no history in litigating such a crime against humanity. Then something

remarkable happened. One of the judges said to his colleagues, let’s walk into the desert, because

somewhere in it there is an oasis. Let’s go and find it. They proceeded boldly and found the water.

The result is that we now have a body of legal thought that serves as a standard in the modern world in

respect of addressing crimes against humanity.

A similar approach is required to conceptualize reparations for Africans. The British Parliament

discussed this matter in 2007 and came to an extraordinary conclusion. They determined that the

crime against the African people is too large to litigate or prepare for a parliamentary resolution. No

body of legal thought exists, they said, that can be used to guide reparatory justice for Africans. The

crime, they adjudged, is to be left in abeyance. Their technocrats joined in by noting that there is no

national or international court with the authority to hear such a case. The truth is that British

politicians were not overwhelmed by the size of the crime. They were overwhelmed by the enormity

of the wealth they had made from slavery, and the scale of corresponding atonement. They were not

afraid to walk into the desert; they were unwilling to share the water.

The United Nations has agreed that reparatory justice has to be taken seriously in this decade

dedicated to atonement for the crimes committed against Africans and African descendants. Europe is

hoping that a global Enlightenment will not come to guide them. It would be an Enlightenment of an

altogether very different kind. Their first so-called Enlightenment produced racialized slavery. Many

of us as students were required to read John Locke’s work on concepts of human liberty. How could

the leading English contributor to the discourse of liberty, attach his mind and personal well being to

the management of African slavery? Locke was the owner of enslaved Africans in the Bahamas. He

was

also the corporate secretary of the Royal African Slave Trading Company, yet he was the leading

English intellectual authority on liberty and freedom within western philosophical conversations.

Now what would this second Enlightenment look like? Next week leaders of dozens of US

universities will meet at Harvard. These are mostly managers of universities that were built with

enslaved labor and sustained by slave generated wealth. The universities in this country, as in Europe,

conceptualized slavery, defended, promoted, and invested in it. They were a core part of the political

and market economy of African enslavement. For 200 years these were the roles of university

administrators, scholars, and students. A question on the agenda will be how can university leaders

reverse this terrible legacy and emerge as champions for reparatory justice?

The University of the West Indies, of which I have the honor and pleasure to serve as Vice

Chancellor, has three landed campuses. Each was built on a slave plantation. Less than a decade ago it

was preparing to build a state of the art medical faculty building on the Jamaica campus. The tractors

and bulldozers came in to dig the ground in order to lay the foundation. To the shock and dismay of

contractors, bones came up from the ground. It was soon revealed that being excavated was the

plantation’s burial site. The bones of enslaved Africans spoke from unmarked graves; their spirits said

to us, we are here and we must not be forgotten.

Universities in this hemisphere will have no choice but to confront this specific kind of legacy.

Many people are not aware that the Harvard Law School was empowered in its formative stages by an

endowment from an Antiguan slaveowner, and slave trader. The School began its prestigious

academic journey with cash and land from a Caribbean enslaver. What does this say about Harvard

and its relations to Africans today?

                     The second Enlightenment, then, is expected to be the first. It is expected to right the wrongs

of the first. Students, faculty, and persons who believe in the collective goodwill of humanity will be

hoping and planning that their university will lead by saying that this greatest crime of the modern

world has to be addressed. Academia cannot continue in this century with a 20th C sense of amnesia,

utilizing the empty rhetoric that says let us forget, archive it, and move on.

The erupting bones of our ancestors will not allow us to move on without reparatory justice.

Where official voices and literary records are proving insufficient, unmarked graves are yielding their

truth. A moral issue is driving the legal right, and I sincerely hope that all of you here today will find a

way to be a part of this epic journey. Let us all walk into the desert because somewhere out there is

the water we need. Let us go boldly into the bright light and find it.

Thank you.

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles

Vice Chancellor

The University of the West Indies