Garfield Ekon
Staff Writer
A highly placed United Nations (UN) official has described transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery, as one of the darkest chapters in human history, and “not merely a 400-year long aberration.”
President of the UN General Assembly, Dennis Francis who made the comments while contributing to the Henry Cohen Public Lecture Series, recently, said the salve trade was also systematic assault on the fundamental rights of millions of people of African descent, and “harrowing statistics and images” that are well known, show that 12 million people deported across the Atlantic.
“Now the grave of millions, faces haunted by despair, families torn apart by deliberate Colonial policy, backs broken and/ or scarred from the merciless whipping, and human beings reduced to mere commodities on the auction block – all while Colonial powers amassed incalculable fortunes and wealth as part of the industrial revolution in Europe,” the President said.
Adding that although the images do not show the vestiges of the system of brutality, as it was a system, and not mere interpersonal, so “reparations are, therefore, more than just a matter of financial compensation – they represent a moral imperative, an honest reckoning with the past to make amends to entire communities disadvantaged deliberately, not consequentially, in order to enrich and empower Colonial Governments,” he said.
Further, he said correcting that injustice is essential to building a just and equitable future, and separatory justice starts with historical justice, and the truth, stressing that a pervasive dimension of African slavery was the notion that Africans were “intrinsically inferior to their slave masters, members of the white plantocracy.
“Racism and discrimination therefore became an entrenched feature of slave society that have over the centuries led to the suppression from public view of major achievements and contributions made to civilization, made by people of African descent,” the UN official said
The slave trade, he noted, constituted a “grievous violation” of human rights, inflicting “unspeakable suffering” and lasting harm on the victims, on those who survived the Middle Passage, and their descendants, as well as on the African continent itself.
Formally acknowledging the historical injustice, of denying millions their right to life and their dignity, by offering apologies and engaging in truth-telling, it would, in effect, be honouring the memory of all those who suffered and died and pave the way for reconciliation and healing, he told his audience.
“This is a good and rightful start, but it is just that: only a start. When slavery was abolished by an Act of the British Parliament in 1830, the Parliament also approved the payment of compensation to slave owners for the financial losses they incurred as a consequence of having lost their ‘possessions,’” he said, adding that a starting point is for the establishment of a Reparatory Justice Development Framework to the communities directly affected and impacted by chattel slavery.