​REPARATIONS ESTIMATES

“Various estimates have been given if such payments were to be made. [U.S.] Harper's Magazine has created an estimate that the total of reparations due is over 100 trillion dollars, based on 222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619 and 1865, with a compounded interest of 6%. Should all or part of this amount be paid to the descendants of slaves in the United States, the current U.S. government would only pay a fraction of that cost, over 40 trillion dollars, since it has been in existence only since 1789.“ Estimates far above that of Julian Simon's and Larry Neal's set in 1974 between $96.3 billion and $9.7 trillion!

How much more for systematic kidnapping and deportation, chattels status, humiliating auctioning on the auction blocks, gratuitous violence and torture, selling of offspring and separation from companion, neglect, renaming, loss of limbs, sexual mutilation, suicides, deprivation, dispossession, sexual exploitation, debasement, arbitrary sentencing, debilitation, nicknaming, etc over centuries of bondage?
Howard Dodson, the African American writer of the authoritative paper, 1996 “What price Slavery? What price Freedom?” highlighted a probing and burning issue worthy of note: “Numerous...peoples throughout the world have been compensated for crimes against humanity far less heinous and enduring than the centuries-long enslavement of African peoples.“ Should more be said?

​

​In 1865, exactly 7th August, a former slave living in Dayton, Ohio wrote a clever letter in response to his former master's request that he return to the plantation, soon after the end of the Civil War. Whether this letter is genuine can be debated. However, see how he requested compensation in this extract.

“Mandy [his wife] says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams's Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense.”

​

WE HAVE NO MORE “REPARATIONS” ON THE MENU, SHALL WE SERVE YOU “APOLOGIES” INSTEAD?

​PAPAL APOLOGIES

While in Cameroon on August 14, 1985, Pope John Paul II apologized to black Africa for the involvement of white Christians in the slave trade “we ask pardon from our African brothers who suffered so much because of the trade in blacks.'' He apologised again the year when every computer should have crashed for failing to prepare for the new millennium, for all the crimes the Roman Catholic church committed over 2000 years of supremacy especially for the Inquisition, the forced conversion of native peoples in Africa and Latin America, support for the crusades, and support for enslavement and other crimes.

​

U.S.A. APOLOGIES
Shorter of one year after the Congress issued an unprecedented apology to black Americans in July 2008 for the institution of 246 years of slavery, its corollary slave fugitive enforcement laws, and the subsequent Jim Crow laws that for years discriminated against blacks as second-class citizens, the Senate approved the resolution with a proviso on reparations “so they can move forward and seek reconciliation, justice, and harmony for all people of the United States.”

​
LATIN AMERICAN APOLOGIES
April 14, 2005, Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva apologised for his country's role in African slavery while on an instigative business visit to Senegal who was conscious of hs country’s historical debt towards Africa.

On Sunday November 29, 2009, Peru, after years of denial and for the first time apologized to its African descendants population for slavery, century of “abuse, exclusion and discrimination.”​

​

SPAIN APOLOGIES
At the World Conference Against Racism in South Africa in 2001, Spain’s Labour and Social Affairs Minister, Juan Carlos Aparicio, said of African slavery: “We profoundly regret the injustices of the past.”​

​

THE UGLY DUCKS
At some point in this glorious apologetic ‘hour’, a splinter group among the respectable few assembled for the August 2002’s international celebration of the Abolition of the slave trade backed by the United Nations, the UK and other former colonial powers successfully resisted the pressure for an apology at the call for reparations or an apology. This was not their first act of rebellion for in September 2001 at the United Nation Conference Against Racism, Britain, Portugal, Spain and France, the countries most closely associated with that trade, fought for all references to reparations to be removed from the paper. They were successful in having "reparations" excised. The British and Lisbon (Portugal) wanted a reference to "regret" something much weaker than a full apology contrary to other nations requiring a more profuse expression of apology.​

​

The compliant

On behalf of the British government, Prime Minister Tony Blair in November 2006 issued a statement of “deep sorrow” in the New Nation, a British Afro-Caribbean community magazine for Britain's role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Then added, "It is hard to believe that what would now be a crime against humanity was legal at the time." His comments came eight months in advance of the 200th anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807. (The City port of Liverpool apologised in 1999.) The General Synod of the Church of England, owner of a plantation in Barbados worked by slaves apologised in February too.

​

The unyielding
In 2002, the Dutch queen, Beatrix, opened a monument in remembrance of the slaves that were kept and traded but her office issued no official apology for the Dutch participation in the slave-trade and slavery.

During the summer of 2012, French president François Hollande acknowledged the country’s guilt in the deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration camps and the massacre carried out in 1961 by the Paris police on peaceful Algerian demonstrators. Yet, still nothing regarding the atrocities of the slave trade. While in Senegal in October 2012, being interviewed on possible compensation for the descendants of the victims of slavery, he would prefer it sufficient to stick to a “moral” recognition of colonial and imperial France’s dark past and perhaps collaborate in the development of the Senegalese country. Notwithstanding this rebuff, French-speaking Black organisations are continuing in their just cause for reparations.

Denmark had not yet apologised at the end of 2012 for its involvement in slavery. Perhaps this will come in 2017 for the centennial of the Danish sales of the West Indies.

​

Little known to the public Canada’s involvement in slavery abolished in 1834 as part of the British colonial expansion. But Canada was also the ‘haven’ for free slaves who had escaped or thought of a life of opportunities. While having no responsibility in what happened under the British rule it never apologised for its racist treatments to its Black citizens. Then again, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued an historic apology in Parliament in July 2008 to the formerly interned native Canadian schoolchildren of state-funded Christian schools:

​