The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Vice Chancellor Professor Hilary Beckles recently announced that fifteen descendants of West African monarchies that were wiped out when their forefathers were taken and sold into slavery in the Americas will travel to Jamaica this month as guests of the university.
During his presentation at the American Society of International Law’s second reparation symposium, Beckles said that the African agreement on a course of action on restitution for slavery had changed the game.
- Advertisement -
“Many of the royal families that have survived were driven into exile. Many developed a survivalist approach to the balance of power that had shifted in the favor of slave traders. These voices are now beginning to speak out,” Beckles, a historian, and activist for reparations remarked.
Beckles announced that the University of the Virgin Islands (UWI) will conduct a symposium contrasting the fortunes of the royal families of West Africa and Europe, looking at who controlled the enterprises, who utilized official assistance to ensure compliance in West Africa, and who benefited financially.
The visit is slated to take place in two weeks. The movement for reparations has gained momentum in recent years, and the intention of a British family to formally apologize to the people of Grenada has brought it back into the public eye. The wealthy Trevelyan family, who controlled six sugar estates in Grenada, said they would make amends to islanders because their forefathers had more than a thousand slaves.
Family member and BBC correspondent Laura Trevelyan called slavery “really horrific.”
Beckles commended the CARICOM Reparations Commission for including governments and non-governmental groups from the African continent and the diaspora in the pursuit of justice against those responsible for crimes against humanity.
He said that the European government declined requests for a conference on reparations but instead offered to give assistance.
According to Beckles, he has spent the last two years concentrating on participatory diplomacy in order to create a worldwide movement.
Beckles said that speaking with a unified voice would counter the narrative that African countries were participating in the trafficking and emphasized the importance of their support for reparations negotiations.
According to Beckles, President Nana Akuto-Addo of Ghana has made it clear that the African Union would back the push for African reparations. In May, a similar meeting will be held in Kenya.
African countries, according to the vice chancellor of UWI, are disputing allegations that they were willing participants in the black holocaust.
“That, of course. was an absolute, dishonest, and Immoral argument because, on the one hand, they were speaking about the kidnapping, terrorism they unleashed In Africa, the destruction of nations and communities, and the specific targeting of elites to be destroyed if they stood in the way of slave trading and the business,” he noted.
“Instructions sent from the capital of Europe to destroy governments and leaders and monarchies that stood in the way…”
Jamaican- American professor of sociology, Orlando Patterson, recently criticized the British planters who owned slaves in Jamaica for imposing a genocidal labor system that reduced expected population growth by more than 90% right before emancipation.
Patterson cited projected modeling when he claimed that by 1830, Jamaica’s population of people of African descent fell short by more than five million people, including six million colored people.
Beckles said that although 600,000 slaves were brought to Barbados, by the time slavery was abolished, only 83,000 people of African heritage were living there.
Between 1650 and 1830, Jamaica acquired over three times as many slaves as the whole US did, yet by the end of that time, the island’s black population stood at 359,000 as opposed to more than two million in the US.
