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Reparations for Africans Is About Much More Than Cash: Comissiong
By Olembe Wickham

Toronto, Canada (Jan. 2005) – The movement for reparations is about much more than about handing out cash to the descendents of Africans enslaved during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. “Reparations are about repairing the damage that was done,” says David Comissiong.


The former Barbados United Nations envoy pointed to a document from the 2001 World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), held in Durban, South Africa, as a model for reparations.


“There is a paragraph in the programme of action that actually outlines the kinds of measures that could form the basis of a package of reparations,” he said.


Comissiong stated that the African reparations movement comes from the need to reverse the effects of the damage caused to the African Diaspora by the transatlantic slave trade, which started in 1444 and continued through 1864. During this time, millions of Africans were kidnapped and taken across the Atlantic Ocean and forced to work as free labour on plantations in North America, the Caribbean and South America.


Some examples of reparations include debt relief, poverty eradication, transfers of technology, and investments in health infrastructure as well as repatriation to Africa of historical artifacts and documents which were stolen during slavery and currently sit in museums around Europe.


Comissiong made his comments during a lecture last December hosted by the Global Afrikan Congress (GAC) and the Jamaican Canadian Association (JCA).


The former Director of the Commission for Pan African Affairs for the Barbadian government added that Africa was at the height of its cultural and economic wealth before the first European settler ever arrived.


“(However) after 500 years, characterized by slavery, by colonialism, by the rape of African resources, both human and natural, we are now left with a situation in which Europe, in terms of material wealth, is at the top of the ladder,” he said.


Comissiong added that the long term effects of the trans Atlantic slave trade are not a myth, citing the works of numerous Caribbean writers who document with precision how the slave trade is directly responsible for current ailments seen throughout the African continent and the Diaspora, such as violence, poverty and lack of proper resources for education. He pointed to Dr. Walter Rodney’s book “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” as a case study to exhibit how European enslavement of Africans is directly responsible for much of the ills that ravage the continent today.


Dr. Rodney was an African Guyanese scholar who was assassinated in Guyana in the early 1980s.


Comissiong concluded that reparations must be a vehicle for Africa to return to its glory of the past. “There must be a new world order in which Africa (and the Diaspora) must once again take its rightful place….in world civilization,” he added. “Reparations is about taking measures to restore some semblance of balance, of equity to world civilizations and restoring the balance that existed 500 years ago.”


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