Likewise when will the man who sleeps in a White House built by Black Slaves, and U.S. legislators who work in a Capitol building built by slaves, bring themselves to make a formal government apology to the world in general and the descendants of those slaves in particular, for their role in slavery? How can they sleep and work without their conscience bothering them daily?
Peace, Curtis Sharif
Houston, Texas
"G.Waleed Kavalec" <kavalec@gmail.com> wrote:
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*Why I am saying sorry for London's role in this horror.*
The state failure to issue an apology for a crime as monstrous as the slave
trade diminishes Britain in the eyes of the world.
By Kenneth Robert Livingstone(Mr. Livingsrone is the Mayor of London)
Wednesday March 21, 2007
Next Sunday marks the bicentenary of the abolition of one of history's
greatest crimes - the transatlantic slave trade. The British government must
formally apologise for it. All attempts to evade this are weasel words.
Delay demeans our country. Recalling the slave trade's dimensions will show
why. Conservative estimates of the numbers transported are 10-15 million;
others range up to 30 million. Deaths started immediately, as many as 5% in
prisons before transportation and more than 10% during the voyage - the
direct murder of some 2 million people.
Conditions imposed on survivors were unimaginable. Virginia made it lawful
"to kill and destroy such negroes" who "absent themselves from ... service".
Branding and rape were commonplace.
A Jamaican planter, Thomas Thistlewood,
in 1756 had a slave "well flogged and pickled, then made Hector shit in his
mouth" for eating sugar cane.
From 1707, punishment for rebellion included
"nailing them to the ground" and "applying fire by degrees from the feet and
hands, burning them gradually up to the head".
When in 1736 Antigua found there was to be a rebellion, five ringleaders
were broken on the wheel, 77 burned to death, six hung in cages to die of
thirst. For "lesser" crimes, castration or chopping off half the foot were
used. A manual noted: "Terror must operate to keep them in subjection."
Barbarism's consequences were clear. More than 1.5 million slaves were taken
to the British Caribbean islands in the 18th century, but by its end there
were only 600,000. By 1820, more than 10 million Africans had been
transported across the Atlantic and 2 million Europeans had moved. But the
European population grew to 12 million while the black slave population
shrank to 6 million.
If the murder of millions, and torture of millions more, is not "a crime
against humanity", these words have no meaning. To justify murder and
torture on an industrial scale, black people had to be declared inferior, or
not human. As historian James Walvin noted, there was a "form of bondage
which, from an early date, was highly racialised. By 1750, to be black in
the Americas (and often in Europe) was to be enslaved." The 1774 History of
Jamaica argued black slaves were a different species, able to work "in a
very bungling and slovenly manner, perhaps not better than an orangutan".
Material being produced today to mark the anniversary of the abolition of
the slave trade makes it appear that white people liberated black - the
assumption being they could not do it themselves. In reality, slaves rose
against the trade from its inception. This broke it.
The first recorded slave revolt was in 1570. There were at least 250
shipboard rebellions. Jamaican slave society faced a serious revolt every
decade, in addition to prolonged guerrilla war. In 1760, 30,000 Jamaican
slaves revolted. The culmination, recorded in CLR James's magisterial The
Black Jacobins, was the 1791 slave revolt in St Domingue. After abolition of
the trade, slavery in British possessions was abolished following revolts in
Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823, and Jamaica in 1831, in which 60,000
slaves participated. For this reason Unesco officially marks August 23, the
anniversary of the St Domingue rebellion's outbreak, as slavery's official
remembrance day.
No one denigrates William Wilberforce, but it was black resistance and
economic development that destroyed slavery, not white philanthropy.
Slavery's reality is increasingly acknowledged outside Britain. One of the
few things on which I agree with George Bush is his description of
transatlantic slavery as "one of the greatest crimes of history".
The
Virginia general assembly last month expressed "profound regret" for its
role, stating slavery "ranks as the most horrendous of all depredations of
human rights and violations of our founding ideals".
The French national assembly declared slavery a "crime against humanity".
n 1999, Liverpool became the first major British slaving city to formally apologise. The Church of England Synod followed suit.
The British government's refusal of such an apology is squalid. Until
recently, almost unbelievably, it refused even to recognise the slave trade
as a crime against humanity, on the grounds that it was legal at the time.
It helped block an EU apology for slavery.
Two arguments are brought forward against official apology - not only by the
government but by David Cameron. First, an apology is unnecessary because
this happened a long time ago. This would only apply if there had been a
previously apology - there hasn't been. Slavery was the mass murder of
millions of people. Germany apologised for the Holocaust. We must for the
slave trade.
Second, that apologising is "national self-hate". This is nonsense. Love of
one's country and its achievements is based on reality, not denying it. A
Britain that contributed Shakespeare, Newton and Darwin to human
civilisation need fear comparison with no one. A British state that refuses
to apologise for a crime on such a gigantic scale as the slave trade merely
lowers our country in the opinion of the world.
It is for that reason that I invite all representatives of London society to
join me in following the example of Virginia, France, Liverpool and the
Church of England, by formally apologising for London's role in this
monstrous crime.
UK News paper.
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