Patrick Wilmot

"Reparation" shares a Latin root with "repairs" - to make whole again what has been broken. Despite attempts by rulers to bury the term, reparation keeps rising in all countries which have been under the cosh of slavery or colonialism over the past 500 years. In countries like Jamaica or continents like Africa or South America, people who have been pressed into the slaughterhouses of history cry out, even if their cries are drowned out by the noise of hypocrisy and machine-gun bullets.

In Jamaica, levels of poverty and degradation of the majority push victims to apocalyptic suffering and violence. In trying to assess what ails society, the leaders stick passionately to the present, ignore history, and come up with solutions which compound the problem. The violence practised against millions of our ancestors in the past is forgotten, so people marvel at the very limited violence of the mindless killers who murder their own in the ghettoes.

When Europeans arrived in this country in the 15th century, tens of thousands of people greeted them with gifts. Not one of these people is left - victims of the violence, greed and diseases of Europe. When Africans were brought in to replace the labour of the dead indigenes, they were worked to death, tortured, and massacred. Despite millions brought in to labour on the plantations, the island's population decreased over centuries until emancipation.

The life expectancy of a slave was in the mid-20s as it was cheaper to work one to death and buy another than to treat him or her humanely. This was not true of domestic animals which were cared for to make profits. That the Jamaican sugar trade was so profitable blinds many to the blood which made it so. At one time Jamaica was worth more to Britain than India, and the wealth pressed from the broken bodies of black slaves smothered England in the wealth which gave birth to the industrial revolution.

From this it is clear that reparation is necessary, not just in financial terms but in the historical and psychological processes which made the island what it is today. Serious historians such as Walter Rodney and Richard Hart have shown this in detail. But Rodney was blocked from returning to Jamaica then blown up in Guyana while Hart has spent most of his life in exile in the United Kingdom. Most Jamaican intellectuals do little to alter the stereotype of a tourist paradise drunk on reggae, sex and ganja, or an arena of hallucinatory violence where dancehall musicians glorify homophobia.
Tony Blair, the embattled prime minister of Britain, opposes reparation because, he said, slavery was legal at the time. Blair is a lawyer who should know that killing Jews was legal under Hitler, but this did not save the killers from hanging after the Nuremberg Trials. Crimes against humanity are so heinous they transcend national boundaries. His country recognised the need for reparations when it paid billions in today's money in 1833, not to the slaves but to British masters who "lost" their property to the emancipation.

The most important reparation movement of modern times was founded by the Nigerian Moshood Abiola who won presidential elections in 1993 but was denied and imprisoned by the dictators General Babangida and General Abacha. He died in jail in suspicious circumstances five years later, not long after Abacha had expired, foaming, in the arms of two Indian prostitutes.

I was Abiola's adviser, strategist and speech writer. I explained to him the logic of the reparation movement developed by Jamaicans like Garvey who influenced African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah and Nnamdi Azikiwe.
Africa, the Caribbean and South America had been damaged by Europeans who had used the slave trade and colonialism to extract the wealth which made Europe wealthy and Africa poor. The notion of racial superiority derived from the economic domination established from the 15th century. Just as the Jews were compensated for the 12-year German holocaust, Africans should be compensated for a holocaust lasting centuries.

Abiola presented the reparation arguments to the OAU which adopted them unanimously. He made visits to Brazil, Jamaica and Cuba to present them to the diaspora. He received enthusiastic support and the Black Caucus in the US Congress was preparing to present them to the American political establishment when Abiola entered Nigerian politics. If he had lived, reparation would now have been adopted by the United Nations, and Jamaicans today might have begun to understand why they behave the way they do.

The success of the movement under Abiola's leadership was due to some extent to his wealth, humanity, and charisma.
But the main reason was the logic which demanded that those who had been wronged and exploited for centuries should be compensated, financially, politically, and psychologically.

Patrick Wilmot is visiting professor at three Nigerian universities and writes out of London.

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