 |
 |
Dear Arthur Your comments “Every effort should be made to draw attention to the benefits of the commemoration. I believe it is an opportunity to bring about reconciliation between Black and White, as well as between African and African Caribbean” has moved me to respond. Please do not see my response as a personal attack, I make it as I have had confirmed over the past days by being involved in Dan’s Guardian Blog debate The Black History Blog (http:[log in to unmask]@.77505ddc/26 ) my belief that there are still far too many people involved in education (and obviously elsewhere) who are ‘assassins’ to the truth as BASA see it and reconciliation is a one-way thing only. I mean Black people have to accept the pitiful attempts at apology that the establishment is willing to make about the four hundred years of slave trade. Do present day descendants of the victims of slavery have the right to reconcile their fore parents’ misery with people who have never accepted the enormity of the damage that their ancestors and nations inflicted on countless millions of souls? This is not to say that anyone living today is guilty at all of being directly involved in the barbarous trade that helped to develop the Western world into the power that it is today, but Western Society (with the minor exception made by the French President recently) have never fully accepted the responsibility of their ancestors actions even in an historical perspective. They do like to speak of the White libertarians who finally opposed this form of slavery but allowed other forms of slavery to continue right under their noses. One somewhat basic but immensely useful book is The Black Holocaust, For Beginners by S.E. Anderson ISBN 0-86316-178-2. One myth that this book challenges is the actual numbers of people that we are talking about who were involved in this "Holocaust". I quote: "The total numbers of slaves imported [into the USA] is not known. It is estimated that nearly 900,000 came to America in the 16th century, 2.75 million in the 17th century, 7 million in the 18th century, and over 4 million in the 19th century – perhaps 15 million in total [just to the USA]. Probably every slave imported represented, on average, five corpses in Africa or on the high seas. The American slave trade, therefore, meant the elimination of at least 60 million Africans from their fatherland”. Please remember that this was merely to feed the USA market. If one adds to this the slaves that were sent to Brazil and the Caribbean the total would be in excess of 100 million people and the country that had one of the largest involvement's was Britain. Following the collapse of the racist regime in South Africa, Nelson Mandela sought to establish reconciliation without retribution. If it was good enough for Mandela, then it should be good enough for us all, but what people do forget though is that firstly South African was returned to its rightful ownership and secondly reconciliation did not mean forgetting or dismissing the past but actively acknowledging what had happened and learning from it. Germany today is seeking a similar practise with regard to getting its own youth to acknowledge without guilt the part that their fore parents played in the atrocities committed by the Nazis regime. They are not though seeking to get Jewish, Roma and other peoples to ‘forgive and forget’. Is the UK mature enough yet to follow this example? The Government will not even make a definitive apology? I honestly do feel that there could be some form of reconciliation but without acknowledgement this will never happen. The Honourable El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz once said "You can't drive a knife into a man's back nine inches, pull it out six inches, and call it progress". The same is true of acknowledgement, in order to start down the road of reconciliation, there should be national acknowledgement of the hundreds of years of suffering that the African peoples of the world have suffered and how they are still debilitated today by the actions of the past. In 1999 following the publication of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, Neville Lawrence, Stephen's father said in a press interview "This is a very small place this world of ours. We have to live together & we have to say, let us put the past behind us. Join hands & go forward". I so want this to be a reality, but my experience is that the rhetoric of apology is worthless without some tangible and meaningful action. I use Neville Lawrence's quote, because I work with the service that rightly was criticised for its ignorance and swore to change. All these years on, I have seen no change and Black people are still over represented within the criminal justice system and Black youth are still disproportionately stopped and searched without genuine reason. Lastly, you are right though in that we have a golden opportunity to start down the road, so lets use all our influence to make 2007 genuinely meaningful rather than just an opportunity for meaningless governmental liberal ‘gum bashing’ and self praise. Yours with respect and fraternally Ruwan Uduwerage-Perera Dan, your idea is appreciated. Every effort should be made to draw attention to the benefits of the commemoration. I believe it is an opportunity to bring about reconciliation between Black and White, as well as between African and AfricanCaribbean. Arthur