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
Ita great honor to introduceon behalf of the Amistad Committee of Central Connecticut State University-comprised of
Professors OlusegunSogunro(Education),
Beverly Johnson (English), DannBroyld (History), Fumilayo Showers (Sociology)
and Gloria Emeagwali,myself (History)-
Prof.SirHilaryBeckles, 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 onebooks, and about one hundredscholarly articles, on the subject ofcapitalism
and slavery, the struggle foremancipation and freedom, decolonization and its
challenges, uprisings such as the Haitian revolution,and sports.
Dr. Becklesis Professor ofEconomicand SocialHistory.
Heis also aplaywright, having created eight plays on the subject oflegendary Caribbean
heroes and sports persons.
Professor SirBecklesis also an activeathlete and ardent cricketer.
His insights into the game of cricketand its history are well quoted, andfrom time to time,
generate spirited discussionsin the region.
In his capacity as an administrator, he
has pioneered several programs including
CricketResearch Studies, a first for the region.
We are honored by his presence - andhisformidable 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