6 - 12 September 2001
Issue No.550
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 6 - 12 September 2001 Issue No.550 |
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Turning a blind eye
The US may have averted a confrontation about reparations for slavery at Durban, but recognition of the legacy of the slave trade is growing, writes Faiza Rady
In South Africa there are patterns of human settlement that describe in stark terms what it has meant to be black or white -- in terms of the distribution of wealth and income, or the incidence of poverty and prosperity. They tell a story about the difference between human fulfilment and human degradation.
Cuban leader Fidel Castro embraces South Africa's Nelson Mandela (photo: AP)
-- South African President Thabo Mbeki
Old sins die hard, or so the saying goes. This adage was well in evidence at the World Conference against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa, when the United States tugged its leash and led Israel in a walk-out of the conference on Monday. The low-level US delegation vehemently expressed its outrage over international condemnation of Israel's "racist policies in the occupied territories" -- declaring that the conference agenda had been hijacked by Israel's foes.
Despite the vociferous outburst and the noisy posturing in Israel's defence, many observers remained sceptical, questioning the Bush administration's real motives. Beyond the public hullabaloo surrounding the contested definition of "Zionism as racism" and the outcry over semantics and propriety lurks a more ominous and material issue: the US's anxiety regarding the demand for reparations to sub- Saharan African nations and African Americans for the slave trade.
Never one to drag its feet, the US government's response to African calls for reparations was swift and to the point: it walked out of Durban under the guise of moral outrage and solidarity with Israel. Prior to Durban, the Bush administration had been careful to cover its tracks. Alerted by the spectre of potential class action suits by millions of African Americans for their ancestors' deprivation of the rights to "liberty and the pursuit of happiness," and fearing massive reparation demands by concerned African countries, the Bush administration repeatedly threatened to boycott the conference should the question of reparations be included on the Durban agenda. More so than its high-profile protectionism of Israel, the high price tag of reparation costs mobilised Washington against the WCAR.
The irony of Washington's dictates to the conference was not lost on Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The US was, after all, engaged in a campaign to suppress freedom of expression, the most fundamental of democratic rights. "Nobody has the right to set preconditions on the conference or urge it to avoid the discussion of the way we decide to rate the dreadful genocide perpetrated, at this very moment, against our Palestinian sisters and brothers," said Castro.
Commenting on reparations, Castro asserted that the US and other Northern countries had a moral obligation to compensate the South for the human and material devastation resulting from the slave trade. "The developed countries have been the main beneficiaries of the conquest and colonisation, of slavery, of ruthless exploitation ... of countries that constitute the Third World," Castro said.
The Cuban leader's assessment was echoed by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In a special pamphlet on the slave trade, the ministry charged that the unequal distribution of wealth resulting from the slave trade persists to this day. "Two centuries after the abolition of the slave trade as a legal institution, the gap between the African and European continents is increasing. Choked by a colossal foreign debt, the former is ailing; while the latter's development, even when in crisis, remains unimpeded by any outstanding debt payments to Africa," the pamphlet read.
Many analysts admit that the growth of the European and North American economies largely hinged on the exploitation of slave labour. North American plantations in particular, and the precious metal mining sector, were developed by African slave labour -- producing gold and silver, but, more importantly, sugar, cocoa, cotton, tobacco and coffee. Over and above feeding into national markets, slave labour production spearheaded and fuelled the growth of international trade. By the end of the 18th century, Liverpool alone boasted annual profits of £300,000 from the production of slave labour, while British plantations in the West Indies accumulated revenues of £4 million in 1798.
Extending from the end of the 15th century to the 19th century, the slave trade bled the African continent of its workforce and its riches. According to the very approximate estimates of economist Ralph Austen in African Economic History, between 11 and 20 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean over a four- century period.
The infamous trade first took off in the 15th century as a series of raids, a form of brutal plunder of human beings -- powerfully portrayed by African American author Alex Haley in his famous novel Roots. By the 17th century, the wholesale decimation of the Central and South American indigenous peoples -- 90 per cent of whom were either slaughtered by Spanish and Portuguese invaders or died from overwork and imported diseases -- contributed to an increased demand for African slave labour. The occasional raiding expedition by individual entrepreneurs no longer satisfied growing demand for slaves, hence the trade had to be organised and systematised, explains historian Elikia M'Bokolo in the French journal Manière de Voir. By the mid-17th century, European nations had established grand, modern slave-trading companies, which most efficiently supplied the emerging economy of the US with plantation slaves by the millions.
While the slave trade depleted Africa of its human resources over a period of four centuries, the plunder of other African and Southern nations has expanded and further consolidated under colonialism and neo- colonialism in more recent years. The legacy of the slave trade and colonialism, a legacy of dire poverty and underdevelopment, continues to plague the South, and the African continent in particular. With a few notable exceptions, conditions have remained largely unchanged since the early days of Southern independence. There have been no credible (or successful) attempts to transform colonial practices and institute real land reforms -- a key demand of poor peasants who identified the struggle for independence with the struggle for the land, remarks analyst Randall Baker in Manière de Voir. "National independence has witnessed repossession of the land by a new type of settler. It is essentially a history as a continuum," writes Baker.
The North has successfully suppressed exceptions to the rule. Concentrating on its own "back yard" -- Central and South America -- the US restored "order" in Guatemala in 1954 when President Jacobo Arbenz nationalised North American banana plantations. In 1961 came the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (the only US failure in its history of military incursions in the region).
Following its assault on Cuba, the US attacked Brazil when President Jo‹o Goulard sought to establish agrarian reforms and limit the control of US transnationals. The US went on to invade the Dominican Republic in 1965, engineer and finance the coup against Allende's Chile in 1973, ship in the Contras and hard arsenal to destabilise Nicaragua in the 1980s, invade the tiny island of Grenada in 1983, and hit Panama in 1989. Order was thus restored on the continent: US transnationals continued to have a free hand and the threat of destabilising land reforms was averted.
Thus "history as a continuum" was guaranteed. To recognise the ripple effects of slavery that remain visible in Southern poverty and the continued accumulation of wealth in the North would be to work against this mantra of continuity -- something that the US chose, not surprisingly, to avoid in Durban.
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