Swept under the rug

African Americans, the Durban conference and US policy are tied together by the silent bonds of a gagged effort to seek reparations for slavery, writes David Du Bois from New York
All the arguments in support of reparations for chattel slavery in the US are strengthened a thousand-fold -- a hundred-thousand-fold -- when coupled with the demand for reparations and compensation to the nations and peoples of Africa for the European slave trade, colonialism and the four-century-long rape of Africa's rich natural and human resources. This is what the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, opening on 31 August in Durban, South Africa, means for African Americans. It is also the reason that the United States has launched a massive campaign to keep the conference from dealing with the question of reparations.
By vigorously opposing any reference to reparations in the Durban Declaration and any language equating Zionism with racism in the so-called Programme of Action, the US seriously endangers any meaningful success for the conference. Furthermore, a deliberate media effort has kept the American people from being informed about the African continent's developing campaign for reparations and compensation. As a result few African Americans -- or Americans in general -- are aware that the reparations movement on the African continent encompasses the African diaspora and calls for the right-of-return to be made continent-wide.
News of the First Pan-African Conference on Reparations to Africa and Africans in the Diaspora, held in 1993 from 27-29 April in Abuja, Nigeria, never reached the American people. The conference was sponsored by an Organisation of African Unity (OAU) working group on reparations, headed by the late Chief Bashorun Abiola, whose democratic election as president of Nigeria was wrested from him by former Nigerian ruler Sami Abasha. Former UNESCO Secretary-General Amadou Mahtar Mbow, of Senegal, co-chaired the group with Abiola.
Nor had Americans read about or seen reports of the powerful address made by Abiola to the Congressional Black Caucus on "Reparations to Africans in the Motherland and in the Diaspora", given in Washington, DC, on 27 September 1990. And yet, one Nigerian report of Abiola's appearance reported that "At the end of his address, there were such unprecedented emotional scenes as to make the spontaneous ovation that greeted it the longest in the history of any gathering of the US Congressional Black Caucus."
The Declaration of the First Pan-African Conference on Reparations in Lagos states in part: "Convinced that the issue of reparations is an important question requiring the united action of Africa and its Diaspora, and worthy of the active support of the rest of the international community ..." and "Fully persuaded that the damage sustained by the African peoples is not a 'thing of the past' but is painfully manifest in the damaged lives of contemporary Africans from Harlem to Harare and in the damaged economies of Africa and the Black World from Guinea to Guyana, from Somalia to Suriname ..." and "Emphatically convinced that what matters is not the guilt but the responsibility of those states and nations whose economic evolution depended on slave labour and colonialism, and whose forebears participated either in the selling and buying of Africans, or in owning them, or in colonising them ...", "This First Pan-African Conference on Reparations calls upon the international community to recognise that there is a unique and unprecedented moral debt owed to the African peoples which has yet to be paid -- the debt of compensation to the Africans as the most humiliated and exploited people of the last four centuries of modern history."
More recently the first international conference of the African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission, meeting on 17 August 1999 at the W E B Du Bois Memorial Centre for Pan-African Culture in Accra, Ghana, issued a demand for $777 trillion for the enslavement of Africans during the colonising of the African continent. The Accra Declaration on Reparations and Repatriation said the money would be demanded from "all those nations of Western Europe and the Americas and the institutions that participated in and benefited from the slave trade and colonialism." The commission said it would set up an international team of lawyers from Africa and among the diaspora to pursue all legal means to collect the money. And finally, the statement declared: "All those in the Diaspora who want to return and settle in Africa should be allowed to do so and that those who enslaved and colonised Africa should provide the means for such repatriation."
Despite the recent proliferation of African American demands regarding reparations for US slavery and a flurry of activity among lobby groups -- sparked in some measure by the upcoming Durban conference -- few of these groups reflect an awareness of the scope and strength of the reparations movement on the African continent. It is to deny this awareness to the African American community, and to Americans in general, that the US is insisting on the removal of any reference to reparations, compensation or repatriation in the resultant documents of the Durban Conference Against Racism.
Some years ago -- it was not widely reported, but some of us remember -- that former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali sent out letters to members of the UN General Assembly requesting reactions to his tentative suggestion for the convening of a world conference on racism. It is understood that he received only two responses -- from a Scandinavian country and from a South American country.
Yet again we are reminded of the prophetic declaration made 100 years ago by African American scholar and activist W E B Du Bois, who wrote: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line -- the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea." The 21st century's first global effort to engage this problem seems doomed to failure if the US position prevails.
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