“The funds will facilitate the operations of a jointly-owned and managed institution to be called the Glasgow-Caribbean Centre for Development Research,” the St. Lucia Star reported last Sunday. “The centre will target and promote solutions to Caribbean development problems in areas such as medicine and public health, economics and economic growth, cultural identity and cultural industries, and other 21st century orientations in Caribbean transformation.”
The goal is to reverse the enduring debilitating impact of slavery on the Caribbean. “The centre will therefore focus on joint efforts to clean up the colonial mess that continues to subvert efforts at Caribbean social growth and economic growth,” the Star reports. “It will be formally established on the two campuses in September 2019.”
This is a most significant development because the call for reparations for slavery has been ongoing for a long time without headway. The primary obstacle is that it is a complicated matter. How are reparations to be paid, how much, to whom, and to what end? None of these questions has an easy answer.
Take the question of “how much,” for example, it begs for even deeper questions: What’s the price of servitude and brutalisation of hundreds of thousands of people? What’s the price of loss of freedom to be human? How much did slave labour contribute to the development of some of the world’s most prosperous countries? Yes, the slave-based economy has been shown to be the most efficient of all, efficient in maximizing profits and development, that is.
Still, advocates of reparations have remained undaunted. They point to the example of reparations to Japanese Americans after World War II. During the war, they were rounded up and hurdled into internment camps on suspicion that their loyalty would be to Japan. The fear arose from the trauma of Japan’s bombardment of Pearl Harbor, Hawai’i, America’s major naval base in the Pacific.
In 1988 — about 73 years after the war ended — the US government formally apologized to Japanese Americans and gave $20,000 to each surviving person who was in the internment. Advocates of reparations for slavery argue that this provides a model approach.
There’s much difference between the two, however. To begin with, the Japanese internment involved much fewer people, it was for a relatively short period of time, and some of those interned were still alive to receive reparations. Reparations for slavery would be a lot more complicated and expensive. So, governments have balked at even entertaining the idea.
The agreement between the universities of Glasgow and West Indies doesn’t answer all the questions pertaining to reparations for slavery. But at least, it points to a certain direction. To begin with, UG documented specific ways it benefitted from slavery. According to its own study, it received millions of pounds in grants and endowments from slave owners over the century stretching from the 1780s to the 1880s. This enabled it to grow and flourish.
As to the amount of 20million pounds, that is the amount paid to slave owners by the British government when it abolished slavery in 1834. In essence, that was what slaves in the British-ruledWest Indies were worth 185 years ago. One doesn’t have to be an economist to know that the value is now a thousand-fold.
In any case, the value of the UG-UWI project can’t be measured strictly in the amount involved. It is more meaningfully measured in terms of the trend it may set. UG couldn’t have been the only university in the UK that similarly benefitted from slavery. Might others follow its example? How about Western governments, especially the UK and the US?
Most important, will the reparations truly lift up the living standards of people of the West Indies? For people in the Western hemisphere, the level of poverty is shocking. This is known of Haiti, but it is not alone. Beyond the swanky tourist havens, life in many Caribbean countries tends to be much like that of the urban underclass in sub-Saharan Africa.
It may be wishful thinking to expect the UK-UWI project to be a panacea, but it is a hopeful development nonetheless.
Before they became ‘bandits’
Given that I addressed this matter in last Sunday’s column, a related story in Punch online on Tuesday caught my attention.
“Some repentant bandits in Tsafe Local Government Area of Zamfara State, on Monday, explained why they took up arms against the people of the area,” the story begins. “The ex-bandits said at a peace meeting in Tsafe that they were harassed and intimidated by the police and vigilantes, locally known as ”Yan Sakai, into becoming bandits and kidnappers.”
There is just something curious about this explanation. A rule of grammar is that we do not use a pronoun without an antecedent. And that raises the question, what were they before they became “bandits”? What was their identity as a group, and what set them apart as targets of harassment and intimidation? Were they “bandits” who were provoked into more banditry?
And with their guns, why did they not confront those who were “harassing and intimidating” them? Why target the masses, people who did them no wrong: travelers, villagers, people in marketplaces? Were they just easier targets?
Also, how did they acquire the weapons for their banditry? Guns are not like pebbles that may be picked up on the streets, forests and seashores. They cost money, which the Nigerian masses are struggling to get enough of just for feeding. One can’t procure guns just because of vexations. Else, virtually every Nigerian would have one.
One gets the sense that half the “bandits” story has not been told.
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