Tuesday, April 15, 2008

A Reparation Call


There has been a great many atrocities committed by man on man over the history of mankind, why the holocaust perpetrated on the Jews has assumed a more significant dimension is due partly to the number at such a short space of time. The Japanese occupation of china also witnessed these unfortunate incident, it should be mindful to note that the seed of this inhumanity was sown many centuries ago with an atrocity perpetrated upon a people that to a great deal led to the justification of further acts of mans inhumanity to man.

While some of the perpetrators of these dastardly acts have hidden behind the cover of "a lack of verifiable evidence", the evidence of this particular acts abound everywhere for ease of observation.

I mean here an event that has been allowed to remain undebated, further consolidating the beliefs that no iota of remorse is felt by the descendants of these perpetrators. The pillaging of Africa by slave dealers and slave traders and the encouraging of the slave market by Europe led to a number of people being taken away from their homeland, families and friends against their will (most times under inhuman transport conditions which further led to the deaths of millions others enroute their capturers destinations). The number of those that survived populated plantations in far flung areas of the world, but nobody seems to be talking about this.

To be honest, not just Europe is guilty of the slave trade and the near extinction of the young and vibrant populations of these ancient African societies as parts of Arabia was also an active participant. The argument that these people were primitive and bestial has been proven a fallacy as contemporary academic research under historical, anthropological and archaeological findings have shown that most if not all of these societies had complex and well defined societal and cultural practices which worked well enough to maintain peace, stability, development and political organization. The famous Portuguese explorer, Ruy de Sequeira in his first visit to the kingdom of Benin, located in the southern coast of modern day Nigeria in the 15th century, marveled at the political organization of the city, her road networks and town planning and officially noted that the city was more developed and organized than the Portuguese capital, Lisbon at the time.

Had the slave trade not been allowed to occur, Africa might not have posed the problem to the world that it unenviably does today. This is how Africa has been underdeveloped, how her youths who would have acted as the intellectual catalyst to her indigenous modernizing process at a point that Europe was also emergent in industry and ideology were forcefully extracted. Rather than a symbiotic relationship that should have existed between these two different peoples with different orientations, it became a parasitic relationship of exploitation and domination.

The fact of the abolition at least lends credence that it was a great wrong perpetrated on a people, but the issue should be seen in the present light of reality. The longer the world keeps mum on this issue, then no one has any moral standing nor justification to speak up against any other subsequent atrocity...