MORE DEMANDS OF APOLOGIES AND REPARATIONS

AFRICA

A coalition of African heads of state, during their 1992 summit organised a pan-African conference on reparations in 1993 in Abuja, Nigeria. They demanded the recognition of the slave trade as a crime against humanity and that the former slave-trading nations apologize for it.

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CARIBBEAN ISLANDS

Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados and St Vincent and the Grenadines called for on those very slaves-owing states to back up their apologies with new commitments to the economic development of the nations that have suffered from this human tragedy, globally for people of African descent (September 2011). Prime Minister Portia Simpson suggests Britain apologizes for enslaving the ancestors of Jamaica (April 2012).

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THE DARING

​1959
In 1959, Queen Mother Audley E. Moore, founder of the Committee for Reparations for Descendants of U.S. Slaves  presented a petition to the United Nations in 1957 for self-determination and against genocide. She presented a second request to the same United Nations in 1959 for land and reparations valued at 200 billion dollars. The estimated compensation for 400 years of slavery.

1968
“The Republic of New Africa, founded in 1968 in Detroit, demanded 400 billion dollars from the US government in reparations for the damages inflicted on Africans and their descendants for chattel enslavement, Jim Crow segregation and structural racism as part of its effort to establish an independent black republic in five southern states.

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1982
The African People’s Socialist Party held the first World Tribunal on Reparations for African People in 1982 in Brooklyn, NY. The Tribunal called for $4.1 trillion to be paid by the U.S. to African people based on the wealth accumulated in this country from stolen enslaved and underpaid labour of African people alone with damages yet to be assessed for pain and suffering. At the time, experts and scholars generally agreed to the figure, based on the yearly wage differential between white and black incomes between 1865 and 1982.​

1999: a worthy intention
Internet visitors visiting BBC’s News online could read on August 20, 1999 this very dramatic headline ’World: Africa Trillions demanded in slavery reparations’. The African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission, meeting in Accra for its first international conference demanded ''all those nations of Western Europe and the Americas and institutions, who participated and benefited from the slave trade and colonialism'' to pay 777 trillion dollars within five years. Then? “The 2nd World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission was convened in Ghana in July 2000. Its deliberations concluded with a Petition being served in the International Court at the Hague for 777 trillion dollars against the United States, Canada, and European Union members for "unlawful removal and destruction of Petitioners' mineral and human resources from the African continent" between 1503 up to the end of the colonialism era in the late 1950s and 1960s.” They have not made the headline since.

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2002 and 2004
Lloyds of London, a UK-based insurance concern, was sued by the descendants of African American slaves for profiting from the slave trade. Lloyds of London was only one of 17 companies across the U.S.A. forcing them to research their own history and make it public. “No similar law exists in Britain, giving a cloak of protection to the likes of Lloyds of London and other UK companies who remain silent about their shameful past.” The lawsuit estimated the “market value” of each slave to be $850 million, putting the total figure into the trillions. The case was not successful.

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2008: another worthy intention

​At the conclusion of its conference on June 20, 2008 the coalition The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA), intended to file a lawsuit against the federal government to recover compensation for descendants of slaves for an estimated 8 trillion dollars advocating that the US Government, US corporations and individuals who benefited from the labours of former slaves should pay reparations. Based on the estimated US population for 2008, this amounts to approximately $205,000 per black citizen.

Amidst many setbacks, ill wills, discord, the mundane and very little victories, the reparations movement has managed to remain alive from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Caribbean islands and from North to South America, even on the soil of the former slave trading colonial powers. This is facilitated through modern, divers and efficient means of communications giving wider access to information and publication of materials: books, websites, press, TV programmes, high profile personalities’ endorsements, lectures, ceremonies. In addition, there is greater understanding of the economics of colonial and modern slavery practiced by the former colonial and imperial powers who call themselves ‘developed countries’. As people of the African Diaspora come increasingly into contact with each other united by their past, they can go forward finding momentum for their common cause.​