Kofi Ampeah Woode
The Ghana Armed Forces Command and Staff College (GAFCSC), Academic Division, has held the 9th version of its Bi-Annual Public Lectures under the topic: THE TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE AND AFRICAN UNDERDEVELOPMENT: THE JUDICIAL BASIS FOR REPARATIONS.
The public lecture was held on Wednesday 29 March, 2023, at the Hamidu Hall, Otu Barracks, Teshie Ridge, Accra, with a distinguished former Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister of Ghana – Ambassador Thomas Kwesi Quartey, as the speaker.
In his presentation, the Ambassador made a strong call for African societies to better study their history, close ranks and foster stronger social solidarity, in order to present a formidable and unified agenda for reparation for the 400 years Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, which he deemed as constituting judicial bases with irrefutable documented evidences.
Below are a few of the chilling accounts in the lecture to form the bases of Ambassador Quartey’s assertions:
The European governments promulgated a policy of setting up slave shipping companies, legally mandated, resourced, encouraged and militarily protected them on their expeditions.
Dr Alexander Falconbridge – a British surgeon, who served as surgeon aboard 4 voyages of slave ships in the late 1700s, whose testimony before British Courts disputed slave traders’ claims that there was no cruelty involved in their trade, describes scenes he witnessed on the high seas:
“With slaves tied together and the lavatory buckets overflowing, the slaves defecated where they lay, the floor also covered with blood and mucus, that it resembled a slaughter house. It is not in the power of human imagination to picture one’s self in a situation.
Sharks would smell a slave ship more than a mile away. In this situation, there was always resistance and slave traders developed theories of how to crush slave revolts onboard slave ships. One theory by a slave ship captain who had a reputation of crushing a slave ship rebellion in 1721, was that slave traders were advised to identify slaves who seemed most indifferent to their leaders and give them preferential treatment. Women were routinely raped.”
John Newton, a former slave captain who wrote the Hymn ‘Amazing Grace’, said to have once seen a slave woman with a baby, the little one unable to stop crying, after she had been warned several times. A crew member grabbed the baby from the mother and casually tossed the baby overboard. The mother without warning jumped overboard too. Their fate, your guess.
John Newton said; in slave ship uprising, brute force was not a surprise. This should terrify the viewers and keep them obedient, a way of making clear to them. The punishment that scared the Africans the most is cutting off the live limbs of rebellious slaves with an axe and hanging out the pieces before them.
There was one report in the Boston Newspaper in 25th September 1789, where Negroes rose up and rebelled in a slave ship. The captain and crew of the ship took a boat and escaped. The Negroes sailed the ship, turned it around, and returned to Cape Coast and escaped. As a result of that action by the slaves, the British bombarded Cape Coast in search of their lost goods.
They had laws, after they had taken the slaves to the Americas, to make sure that they remained slaves and did not dare to revolt.
Before the demand for Abolition of Slavery, there was one occasion in a legal case: GREGSON VRS GILBERT, and the ship was known as THE ZONG. The Zong was said to be a slave ship owned by a large Liverpool company. In 1781, it went from Liverpool to Cape Coast and from there carried a cargo of 476 slaves headed for Jamaica. 12 weeks into the voyage, it had lost 60 Africans and 7 of the 17-man crew.
The captain called his crew together and suggested to them that water was running short and that 6 slaves should be thrown overboard; this would allow the shipping company to claim insurance – if the slaves died a natural death, it would be a loss to the owners, but if they were thrown alive to sea, it would be a loss to the insurer.
On 29 November, the first batch were pushed overboard, the next day, 42 more were drowned, and on the third day, 36 more went down. A total of 431 Africans were murdered. Nobody would have heard of this but for the claim for insurance which necessitated documentation. There was a claim for 30 pounds for each slave from the underwriters, when the case came for hearing at a court in London.
At the hearing, the insurance company made a claim not to pay, whiles the slaves owners lawyers argued that to bring a criminal prosecution would be madness because the slaves were property. The legal system perceived slaves as property, actually.
When the agitation for slavery abolition finally got to the British Parliament, the then Secretary for Commerce – Charles James Fox argued that it is to be hoped that Africa would be relieved of oppression, arresting the progress of the system of fraud, treachery and violence, which covered a large part of desolation, for then Britain shall begin to atone to the Negroes race for the attributed wrongs.
Charles Fox further stated that to deal and traffic, not in the labour of men, but in men themselves, was to devour the roots instead of enjoying the fruits of human beings. It was therefore, contrary to justice and humanity.
The then Member of Parliament for Liverpool – William Huskisson, during arguments on the motion for the Abolition of Slavery stated before the British Legislature that, “I have no difficulty in saying that the prosperity of Liverpool is intimately connected to the slave trade. It is difficult for me to accept any measure that will appear injurious to the interest of my constituents. As for the situation in Liverpool, it was once a mere fishing hamlet, but has risen to prosperity in exact proportion, to the extent of the African slave trade. This measure is to cut off our roots and also the source of our wealth.”
The then Solicitor-General of Britain and Foreign Secretary – Sir Samuel Romney, who became Chief Justice, argued in this wise: “I, as an individual of this country, can well understand that nations as well as individuals may be guilty of these acts, but they are not having the courage to inquire of all their consequences. Before the year 1789, this nation had not the courage to inquire into the certainties of this trade, preferred against it.
A committee sat and after careful and anxious investigations, reported to this house a great body of evidence, which was established beyond the possibility of dispute, that the African trade brought pain and murders. After being sold in their native land, they were carried across the Atlantic, in the most deplorable states, and under circumstances of too much horror.
Now, Sir, after all these have been proved and ascertained by these evidences, this trade cannot be carried out under the ubiquitous practices by murder which are the foundations. I do say that this ought not to be suffered to continue for an hour. It is a stain on our national reputation and ought to be wiped away”.
When the British Parliament voted to abolish slavery, the British Navy went into action to stop slave shipping activities in the Atlantic.
Commentary by the Moderator – Ambassador Lawrence Satuh
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was a crime, committed by states like England, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, France, and other European countries which were consciously involved by state-sponsored companies against people of Africa.
There are several documents about the founding of various companies, the legal mandates, the companies’ agenda, which all indicate a state-sponsored intervention to create wealth for the various companies, to be taxed at a certain rate, and by exploiting the human resources of Africa as the major source of profit and income.
On the basis of these legal arguments, the first case for reparations even started from among the companies themselves, when clients of insurance companies deliberately set themselves about to exploit the insurance laws because of various losses – a nefarious scheme that is still persistent against insurance companies.
What has not been told is the impact of the slave trade on African development, for by conservative estimates, more than five (5) million Africans were being transported yearly, across to other continents, with the trade lasting from the end of the 15th to mid-19th Century, totaling about four hundred million (400 million) souls from Africa. A continent has been drained of its most important resource – the human capital, and this was consciously done by the so-called developed civilized enlightened countries, for their own benefits.
The story of Liverpool is to some extent, part of the reasons for which voices of enlightenment are beginning to argue that, there is a legal basis to ask for reparation from legally constituted states countries, which via their legal processes, determined to use all forces available to them, to criminally exploit African resources for their own benefits. A crime has been committed and when we are able to identify the criminals, international laws should pursue them for reparations.
Views from the Audience
1) Now the Chinese are here, and as rightly observed by their Ambassador in a media interview, the expatriates do not know where the minerals of the country are, unless they are led by the natives. So cocoa farms are being destroyed together with water bodies and anything that may stand in the way of exploiting the minerals. Are we not sitting down now for our descendants to arise and blame the Chinese, similarly as Africans now are blaming Europeans?
2) When the slave traders came to Africa, they had some agreement with the chiefs who were leaders of the people at the time. Today, the powers that chiefs wielded then are now with the political leadership, relating history to contemporary times, it looks like same act is being repeated, but this time by the political leadership.
3) If there are reparations to be paid by the slave masters, are these the right times? The question arises because the European Union says Africa loses 140 billion USD to corruption annually. Should Africa receive such reparations now, will it be put to good use?
4) There has to be a proper conviction with the issue of Slave Trade reparations, what form would it take, by whom and to whom? Or should we organize the society in a much more productive manner, and use the debate to negotiate better terms-of-trade between Africa and the countries that perpetrated the acts of slavery?
5) What is being talked about is state-organized criminal activities which resulted in the depopulation of Africans in their millions. And the reparations being asked are at the level of state. Human trafficking, criminal as it is, is possibly not at the state level. It may be transnational organized crime, but cannot be at the same level as a state using its superior power, found companies (such as the Royal African Company in England).
6) Between December 2022 and March 2023, two states in the United States of America (USA) – Illinois and San Francisco – set up a team and mandated them to come out with recommendations for reparations for slavery. They presented over 100 recommendations, one of which was that about USD 5 million should be paid to each African American. There are divided views to monetary payments by the Federal government or the state, and citizens may not even allow such payments. Are the reparations calls realistic and should the past not be forgotten, and there be a forward-looking?
7) As a descendant of those who were taken by slavery, I do not know whether slavery is taught in Ghanaian schools today. I come from the USA where I am not considered African, and here in Ghana where I have come back to settle, I am called Obroni (Whiteman). I believe reparations are on the side of those who were taken, because they did not agree to be taken. If Ghana wants to receive reparations, then she will have to understand its history and teach it to her children, so that slave descendants who come back home will not feel alienated. It is one thing to come to Ghana as a tourist and another as coming home, and not feel like a step-child that nobody wants. Majority of the education in Ghana is European. How can you raise a child who is African on European curricula and still expect him/her to be African?
View from the Dean’s Office
Public lectures are very important milestones in institutions of higher learning, and to the student body, in particular. The audience, including the general public, are an integral part of the lecture.
The substance of the lecture is at the bedrock of the African peoples, everywhere on Earth. The lecture coincides with the visit of the USA Vice President – Kamala Harris – to the Slave Castle, Cape Coast, Ghana. During her visit on Tuesday 28 March 2023, the Vice President laid a wreath in the Female Dungeon, and had this to say; “… We must then be guided by what we know also to be the history of those who survived slavery in the Americas, in the Caribbeans, and those who proudly declared themselves to be the Diaspora (that is Africans).”
The overriding message is that there is a need for reparations, considering that there is a history of crime against humanity, and on morale basis, our own conscience as Africans needs to be reexamined. There is a divide amongst Africans, which calls for self-examination, which is a morale imperative.
The reparations agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany, was signed on September 10 1952, entered into force on March 27 1953. West Germany was to pay Israel for the costs of resettling a great number of uprooted and destitute Jewish refugees after the war, and to compensate individual Jews, through the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany.
The African Union – including personalities from the Diaspora – is asking for a minimum of USD 640 billion as reparations, aside the USD 5 million per African American demand.
The Guardian Newspaper – whose founding member, John Edward Taylor, participated in slavery and had his wealth to establish the newspaper, has apologized for its participation in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, in a March 29, 2023 publication.
By Kofi Ampeah-Woode
