Europe pressed on slavery reparations

by Dave Clark
21 mins ago

PARIS (AFP) – Historians and anti-racism campaigners are to urge the countries that oversaw and profited from the Atlantic slave trade to recognise it as a crime against humanity, opening the way for reparations.
Next week, activists are to send a letter to the leaders of Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain asking them to recognise the trade as an historic injustice a century and a half after it ended.
They have already convinced France to do so.
The European Memorial Foundation for the Slave Trade will launch the appeal at the French Senate on May 10, backed by the French historian Louis Sala-Molins and John Franklin from the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.
"There are several reasons for this, including its symbolic value, to restore the memory of this crime against humanity," Karfa Diallo, chairman of the foundation, told AFP.
"There's also a question, shall we say, of justice," he said.
The continuing problem of racism in a Europe that now has an ethnically diverse population that could be precisely traced back to the 16th and 17th century texts justifying and codifying slavery, he argued.
"Racism and discrimination persists in Europe. Young people of Caribbean and African ancestry are victims of it. And we know, historians have shown this, that racism was born in this story."
Diallo's group was founded in the former French slave port of Bordeaux in 1998.
It has found allies in other cities of Western Europe that grew wealthy on the profits of the trade, from Bristol in England to Porto in Portugal.
And now it wants other European states to follow France in recognising that the slave trade was not just a historical tragedy, but a criminal act that has enduring social consequences in Africa, the Caribbean and Europe's melting pot cities.
France passed a law in 2001 recognising slavery as a crime against humanity and the then president Jacques Chirac declared May 10 as a national day of remembrance for the victims of slavery.
"If we accept that it was a crime, then there should be reparations. All crimes deserve compensation for victims and punishment for perpetrators," argued Diallo.
"We'd like to see the creation of an international memorial fund, that would support a School of Memory. A fund managed by the United Nations," he said.
The school would teach the history of the slave trade to descendants of victims and slavers alike, he added.
While European nations now accept that slavery was an injustice, governments have fought shy of offering compensation. Some Europeans argue it is impossible to put a price on the suffering of slaves long dead and of regions of Africa that weren't then even states.
But Diallo argued that Germany's reparations of victims of the Nazi Holocaust had set one precedent, while some payouts have already been made in the case of slavery -- but to the slave owners, not their slaves.
"Europe owes a part of its capital to those that suffered," he said. "So far, only the slavers have been compensated. In all the colonies, when slavery was abolished, states decided to compensate.
"For as long as there are no reparations to the descendants of the victims, we remain in a situation of extraordinary injustice, which is that we paid off the slavers. That's hard to accept in the 21st century.



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President Obama talks about his reflections while touring the Cape Coast Castle during his trip to Ghana.

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Obama visit to slave fort steeped in symbolism

By TODD PITMAN, Associated Press Writer Todd Pitman, Associated Press Writer

CAPE COAST, Ghana – From the rampart of a whitewashed fort once used to ship countless slaves from Africa to the Americas, Cheryl Hardin gazed through watery eyes at the route forcibly taken across the sea by her ancestors centuries before.

"It never gets any easier," the 48-year-old pediatrician said, wiping away tears on her fourth trip to Ghana's Cape Coast Castle in two decades. "It feels the same as when I first visited — painful, incomprehensible."

On Saturday, Barack Obama and his family will follow in the footsteps of countless African-Americans who have tried to reconnect with their past on these shores. Though Obama was not descended from slaves — his father was Kenyan — he will carry the legacy of the African-American experience with him as America's first black president.

For many, the trip will be steeped in symbolism.

"The world's least powerful people were shipped off from here as slaves," Hardin said Tuesday, looking past a row of cannons pointing toward the Atlantic Ocean. "Now Obama, an African-American, the most powerful person in the world, is going to be standing here. For us it will be a full-circle experience."

Built in the 1600s, Cape Coast Castle served as Britain's West Africa headquarters for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which saw European powers and African chiefs export millions in shackles to Europe and the Americas.

The slave trade ended here in 1833, and visitors can now trek through the fort's dungeons, dark rooms once crammed with more than 1,000 men and women at a time who slept in their own excrement. The dank air inside still stings the eyes.

Visiting for the first time, Hardin's 47-year-old sister Wanda Milian said the dungeons felt "like burial tombs."

"It felt suffocating. It felt still," said Milian, who like her sister lives in Houston, Texas. "I don't know what I expected. I didn't expect to experience the sense of loss, the sense of hopelessness and desolation."

Those who rebelled were packed into similar rooms with hardly enough air to breath, left to die without food or water. Their faint scratch marks are still visible on walls.

Down by the shore is the fort's so-called "Door of No Return," the last glimpse of Africa the slaves would ever see before they were loaded into canoes that took them to ships that crossed the ocean.

Today, the door opens onto a different world: a gentle shore where boys freely kick a white soccer ball through the surf, where gray-bearded men sit in beached canoes fixing lime-green fishing nets, where women sell maize meal from plates on their heads.

Behind them is Africa's poverty: smoke from cooking fires rises from a maze of thin wooden shacks, their rusted corrugated aluminum roofs held down by rocks. Children bathe naked in a tiny dirt courtyard.

"I just can't wrap my mind around this," said Milian, who works at a Methodist church. "If it weren't for all this" — for slavery — "I wouldn't be standing here today. I wouldn't be who I am. I wouldn't have the opportunities I do. I wouldn't practice the religion I do."

Milian also grappled with the irony that fort housed a church while the trade went on, and that African chiefs and merchants made it all possible, brutally capturing millions and marching them from the continent's interior to be sold in exchange for guns, iron and rum.

"It's mixed up," Milian said. "It's not an easy puzzle to put together."

Though slavery in the U.S. ended after the Civil War in 1865, its legacy has lived on. The U.S. Senate on June 18 unanimously passed a resolution apologizing for slavery and racial segregation.

"This is part of our history," said Hardin, who first visited Ghana in the late 1980s and later married a Ghanaian engineer she met in the U.S.

Her 15-year-old son was along for the first time. "I want him to understand what his liberty really means, who he really is," Hardin said.

But racism, both sisters agreed, would not end with Obama's visit.

"Let's not be naive. When your skin is darker, you are still going to be treated differently," Hardin said. But Obama's trip "will be a turning point, not just for America but for the world."

Milian said Obama's journey would also bear a message to those who organized the trade.

"It will say they failed, it all failed," she said. "The human mind is capable of horrible things, but the fact that we're standing here, the fact Obama will be standing here, proves we are also capable of great resilience."

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