Reparations:  Not just from the buyers, but also from the sellers.

It seems to me that Omowale Za (Afrikan Involvement in the Atlantic
Slave-Trade) is an apologist for those Africans who sold their fellow Africans
into slavery. This aspect of our history is not widely known or taught and the
brother seems either to have neglected this or is being very selective in
referring to Walter Rodney.

My article For Reparations and Repatriation posted on TheBlackList some time
ago and can be found at http://www.mathaba.net or http://www.panafricaneye.com
refers those who are interested to Rodney's West Africa and the Atlantic
Slave-Trade.

The point has been adequately made by Chinweizu that Africa will not begin to
develop until it gets back into its own culture. The fact is that African kings
and rulers sold their own subjects into slavery In their collaboration with
different European groups they changed the culture and mores of African
societies from one in which all the peoples were looked after to one in which a
few were looked after. The evidence is in Rodney's book.

Omowale Za should know that the Ashanti Kingdom arose out of slave-trading and
became rich and powerful out of slave-trading. Earlier this year, the Ashanti
ruling class held a ceremony commemorating their 300 years alliance with the
Dutch. The basis of the alliance was slave-trading.

Not only that, Nigerian writers have been looking at the Yoruba kings who sold
so many Yorubas into slavery. Two of the principal characters mentioned were
King Jaja of Opopo and Kotoko (see Niyi Ogunfolaju's, NIGERIA: MANY SOVEREIGN
NATIONS AT CROSSROAD, WITH DIFFERENT DESTINIES,
http:www.nigeriaworld.com/articles2002/nov/051.html).

I posed the question of slave-trading among the Yorubas to Naiwu Osahon of the
Lagos based World Pan Afrocan Movement. His reply was "of course, the Yoruba
where sold into slavery. You would find most Yoruba in Brazil and Cuba. They
were sold by our kings and some very influential nobles. One notorious slave
merchant was called Kosoko and he operated from Lagos ports in collaboration with
white merchants.

In examining the condition of the masses of Africans on the continent today,
one sees the same slave-trading mentality among African rulers whose primary
concern is to enrich themselves while the masses of Africans languish in
poverty.

That is why I argue that the African ruling classes must make reparations to
the African masses by repairing the damage done to African society and culture
by the changes made when the former ruling classes engaged in selling their
fellow Africans into slavery.

Today, we see the current ruling classes individually making alliances with
Europe and America rather than making alliances amongst themselves to protect
Africa from the ravages of imperialism. There are so many examples.

Take for example President Teodore Obiang of Equitorial Guinea. He practically
gave away the country's oil deposits to American oil companies with little
benefit to the masses of people. Even the US government's energy Department
noted that the governments share of oil revenues is relatively small by
international standards. Rather than use the oil revenues to benefit the people,
the President and his family have been buying up multimillion-dollars homes in
the USA (see: The Curious Bonds of Oil Diplomacy, front page,
http://www.allafrica.com).

This is similar to the International Monetary Fund castigating the rulers of
Angola for pocketing $billions of oil revenues while begging for aid, and their
denunciation of the Nigerian ruling classes who grab 80 percent of that
country's oil revenues while the majority of Nigerians exist on less than $1.00
a day.

As long as these alliances exist and as long as the African ruling classes
continue to rule with their slave-trading mentality, Europe and America will not
take our just demands for reparations seriously.

In my view, the current demands for Reparations is one sided. The focus must
be on forcing the African ruling classes to make Reparations to the African
masses by repairing the damage done to African societies during the slave trade.
This means that the wealth of Africa must be used to provide an adequate
standard of living to all Africans. In other words, Africans first.

With this changed mentality will come the end of foreign domination of Africa,
Repatriation and citizenship for Diasporan Africans and reparations from Europe
and America for their criminal enslavement of Africans. This means of course
that Africa will be exercising its tremendous economic power as a united entity
and not as isolated junior partners with Europe and America.

Lester Lewis