By Everton ‘Swagga’ Powell

As we commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the English slave trade I am left to ponder, how does this all benefit me or other black people? Yes it’s all well and good to commemorate such a historical and significant event but it must be noted that 200 years later we as black people are still catching our tails in this world that is comprehensively dominated by the Eurocentric world view.

Everett Powell is a Nevisian living and working as an engineer in the Washington DC metropolitan area. Email responses to eveton@yahoo.com

We as black people are still financially deprived and in most cases wallowing in stark poverty. We are militarily weak; none of our nations can successfully project their military power anywhere outside their borders like the Europeans or the Americans do constantly. We are culturally confused as we adapt other people's values and belief systems and make them our own.

But our place as a race of people in today’s world didn’t occur by happenstance but rather by the well orchestrated crime against humanity, the greatest that was ever perpetrated on a group of people. The unleashing of the most evil event termed in Afrocentric disciplines as the MAFFA (a Kiswahili word meaning terrible tragedy) or what is called the black holocaust of slavery, still has severe repercussions 170 years after the abolition of slavery in the English-speaking Caribbean.

The MAAFA or slavery robbed the cradle of civilization, mother Africa, of her brightest and strongest men, women and children who were captured and bonded in chains and were exported in conditions that were worse than that used for goats and pigs across the infamous Middle Passage to the Caribbean, United States, Brazil and elsewhere. These enslaved Africans worked under very hard and harsh conditions, planting and harvesting sugar cane, cotton and tobacco for the exclusive enrichment of Europeans and their descendants who today continue to benefit from this heinous legacy.

To paraphrase Randall Robinson, the author of the “Debt’; "Through keloids suffering, through coarse veils of damaged self-belief, lost direction, misplaced compass, faced resignation, racial transmutation, black people worked long, hard, killing days, years, centuries--and they were never paid. The value of their labor went into others' pockets--plantation owners, entrepreneurs, state treasuries, the United States government, British government and other European governments etc making them indescribably wealthy today while leaving Africans in Africa and the Diaspora in a state of stark poverty in many cases.”

In the Caribbean and specifically in Nevis, where three centuries of unpaid hard labor literally from before sun-up to after sun-down and also the subjection to a single-crop dependency, have to this day never been addressed. The millions that died in the Middle Passage and the intense psychological trauma of that crossing have not even been apologized for.

Four decades of political, but not economic independence in the English-speaking Caribbean, with little left behind by Britain for development, could never have fairly served to redress three centuries of exploitative and brutally inhumane policies. Part of the colonial legacy, is the absence of any just compensation coupled with a perpetuation of imperial domination via unjust terms of trade and a highly exploitative international monetary system, which has riddled almost every single country in Africa and the Caribbean with gargantuan debt burdens, and which is choking the economic life out of these countries, creating stagnation and dependency (neo-economic slavery). Britain’s mass transportation of people across the Middle Passage, followed by enslavement, warrants a serious and sincere apology, but more significantly the crime justly demands that fair reparations be paid now.

I believe that the case for reparations to Africa and Africans in the Diaspora, including Nevisians, is rooted in fundamental justice - a justice which overarches every struggle and campaign which people of African descent have waged to assert their human dignity.

The right to reparation is well recognized in international law. It has been defined by the Permanent Court of International Justice (the predecessor of the International Court of Justice) in these terms:

"The essential principle contained in the actual notion of an illegal act - a principle which seems to be established by international practice and in particular by the decisions of arbitral tribunals - is that reparation must, as far as possible, wipe out all the consequences of the illegal act and re-establish the situation which would, in all probability, have existed if that act had not been committed. Restitution in kind or, if this is not possible, payment of a sum corresponding to the value which a restitution in kind would bear; the award, if need be, of damages for loss sustained which would not be covered by restitution in kind or payment in place of it - such are the principles which should serve to determine the amount of compensation due for an act contrary to international law." Chorzow Factory Case, Germany v Poland, 1928.

So, understanding this, we as a people have not only a moral or ethical basis but also a strong legal grounding by which to pursue reparations at all cost. Our ancestors who suffered so much so we can be here today will not rest properly until we have achieved this goal.

But to accomplish this monumental task there will need to be a panoply of forces which will be needed - historians, archaeologists, artists, writers, politicians, sociologists, psychologists, and beyond them all people of goodwill, of all races, who perceive that the crime of slavery was a monstrous evil, for which atonement and reparation is long overdue.