Ras Bongo Wisely Tafari (far right) holds on to the CARICOM’s symbol of the reparatory justice movement, the reparations baton, in Castries, Saint Lucia. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

By Alison Kentish
DOMINICA, Oct 18 2021 (IPS)

The Rastafarian organizations in the Caribbean are determined that the issue of slavery reparations will emerge from the eclipse of COVID-19.

As the world deals with the impacts of efforts to contain the virus’ spread and regional governments tackle vaccine hesitancy and a wave of misinformation, issues not directly related to COVID-19 have had to be temporarily shelved.

However, members of the Caribbean Rastafari Organization are determined to keep the movement for slavery reparations in the minds of citizens and on the agenda of policymakers.

“From the time of emancipation in 1834, our ancestors have been clamoring for reparations. Some leaders have taken heed to the calling, some have ignored it, but the Rastafari nation from its inception has been appealing for reparations, and up to today, we are on that platform,” chairperson of the Caribbean Rastafari Organization, Burnet Sealy told IPS.

Sealy is known as Ras Bongo Wisely Tafari – part of a move by members of the Rastafarian faith to change the colonial names given at birth and advance the internal healing aspect of the reparations process.

He is a member of the Reparations Committee of Saint Lucia, one of 15 national reparations organizations in the member states of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) bloc.

In 2013, the group of nations established the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC), a body charged with making the ‘moral, ethical and legal’ argument for reparatory justice for organizations of the Caribbean Community.

The CRC is headed by Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies.

“It is the greatest crime ever committed against humanity – a crime whose harm and suffering continue to haunt humanity in this 21st century. A crime that has anchored the 21st century within a legacy of untold human suffering, and there is no carpet in the world that is big enough to brush this under,” Sir Hilary told a Slave Trade Remembrance Day online discussion earlier this year.

The movement for reparations in the Caribbean has risen and waned in the last decade. Changes in administration on some islands, with ensuing shifts in policy directions and budgetary priorities, meant that funding for national committees has also been wavered.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its consequent limitations on movement and in-person gatherings have added another obstacle to the movement.

However, Ras Bongo Wisely Tafari says that despite the challenges, the Rastafarian movement remains committed to healing from the effects of slavery.

“Reparations Cannot Die,” he told IPS.

“We have been educating the masses on what reparations are all about. People think that reparation is just about money, but we are letting them know that this is not true. Reparations really mean repairing the damage that was done as a result of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery, continuing to colonial rule. The damage was done mentally, physically, spiritually, financially, culturally.”

CARICOM, which is home to about 16 million people, has its reparations battle fought as part of a 10-Point Plan. Signed in 2013, the plan calls for:

• A full, formal apology for slavery by the governments of Europe;
• A repatriation program to resettle descendants of the over 10 million Africans who were forcefully transported to the Caribbean;
• An Indigenous Peoples Development Program to begin healing for genocide on the native Caribbean populations;
• The establishment of cultural institutions like museums and research centers;
• A program to remedy the public health crisis includes the African descended population in the Caribbean, which has the highest incidence of hypertension and type 2 diabetes globally. Regional health experts and historians say this is directly related to the ‘nutritional experience, physical and emotional brutality and overall stress profiles associated with slavery, genocide, and apartheid;
• Programs to eradicate the high levels of illiteracy that stem from slavery;
• The establishment of an African Knowledge Program;
• Psychological rehabilitation programs;
• Technology transfer;
• Debt cancellation.

“The argument has been won that reparatory justice is inevitable. The issue is how best to achieve it. Who should have the authority to conceptualize and structure it and how to ensure that while it has a reparatory function, it is also at the same time creating a greater sense of justice and humanity in the world,” says Beckles.

The road to reparatory justice has been tough to conceptualize in the Caribbean, and in the face of issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, and a global pandemic, slavery reparations often plummet on the list of priorities for governments.

For champions of the cause, however, the commitment is unwavering.

“It is our responsibility to maintain that focus of our ancestors and see to it that we have reparations,” Ras Bongo Wisely Tafari told IPS.

“This is not a quick fix. It is a long journey, but we refuse to give up. We will never give up the fight. Reparations are a must.”

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A young girl whose family fled the Boko Haram insurgency stands in front of a tent in a camp for internally displaced persons in Maiduguri, Nigeria. Boko Haram has abducted thousands of girls and forced them into unwanted marriages and enslavement. Credit: Sam Olukoya/IPS

By Sam Olukoya
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria, Apr 25 2019 (IPS)

“They forcefully took us away and kept us like prisoners,” Lydia Musa, a former Boko Haram captive who was abducted at the age of 14 during an attack on her village in Gwoza, in Nigeria’s north eastern Borno State, tells IPS. Musa and two other underaged girls were captured and forced to marry Boko Haram fighters in spite of their protests that they were too young to marry.

“You must marry whether you like it or not they told us as they pointed guns at us,” the now 16-year-old girl recalls.

Boko Haram’s violation of the rights of women and children paints a larger picture of human trafficking, forced marriages and enslavement in Nigeria.

As the extremist group enters the 10th year of its insurgency, it remains formidable enough to abduct women and children at will, continuing “to prey on women and girls as spoils of war,” Anietie Ewang, Nigeria country researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

This West African nation has the highest incidence of Africans being trafficked through the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. The north and north eastern parts of the country, where Boko Haram is active, have high incidences of forced marriages, while across the country there are frequent cases of young girls being ‘traded’ as modern day slaves.

The group, whose name means ‘Western education is forbidden’, is reputed to be among the five-deadliest terror groups in the world. It has been involved in a violent campaign for strict Islamic rule in north east Nigeria and in parts of the neighbouring states of Cameroon, Chad and Niger. More than 20,000 people have been killed since the start of the insurgency in 2009.

Boko Haram is also involved in the kidnapping, trafficking and enslavement of children and women. Hundreds of women and children have been abducted since the group’s insurgency started. But Boko Haram’s most well-known abduction occurred in April 2014, when 276 female students were taken away from their dormitory at the Government Secondary School, Chibok, in Borno State.

The abduction started a global campaign #BringBackOurGirls.

A few months after the Chibok girls were abducted, Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, said he would sell them. “I am the one who captured all those girls and I will sell all of them,” he said in an online video in which he justified human slavery. “Slavery is allowed in my religion and I shall capture people and make them slaves.”

Consequently there have been other mass abductions of children in the region since the Chibok incident. In March 2015, Boko Haram fighters abducted more than 300 children from Zanna Mobarti Primary School in Damasak; while 116 female students from the Government Girls Science and Technical College, in Dapchi, Yobe State, were abducted in February 2018 during an attack on the school.

“The way Boko Haram hold women and children against their will is by itself a form of slavery,” Rotimi Olawale of the group Bring Back Our Girls (BBOG) tells IPS. The group is involved in a powerful campaign for the speedy and effective search and rescue of the Chibok girls and other abducted women and children.

Olawale says Boko Haram is also using captives, like the Chibok girls, as “valuable bargaining chips” to collect ransoms and secure the release of their members held in Nigerian prisons. While many of the Chibok girls are still missing five years after their abduction, others escaped or were released by Boko Haram in deals made with the Nigerian government. But 112 girls are reportedly still missing.

In an apparent reference to Boko Haram, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says that since 2012, non-state armed groups in north east Nigeria have recruited and used children as combatants and non-combatants, raped and forced girls to marry and committed other grave violations against children.

Accounts by others who escaped from Boko Haram’s captivity confirm this.

Ali Mohammed is also a former Boko Haram captive. He tells IPS that while in captivity he saw Boko Haram members using captive girls as sex slaves. “At night they freely go to where the girls are kept to pick them for sex,” he explains.

Another former Boko Haram captive who preferred to be called Halima says male children born through sexual slavery are being breed to be the new generation of Boko Haram fighters. Halima, who gave birth to twins (a boy and a girl), tells IPS how Boko Haram members always celebrate when a baby boy is born in their camps.

“Once they realise it is a male baby they will start shooting their guns into the air in happy mood saying that a new leader has been born,” she says.

“After I delivered the babies, they carried the male in jubilation and were chatting Allah Akbar, in contrast, they did not show any joy with the female, they did not even touch her.”

Boko Haram’s abduction of young persons are in part aimed at turning them into fighters. UNICEF says between 2013 and 2017 more than 3,500 children, most of whom were aged 13 to 17, were recruited by non-state armed groups who used them in the armed conflict in north east Nigeria. UNICEF says the true figures are likely to be higher because its figures are only of those cases that have been verified.

Musa confirms that while in captivity she saw abducted boys being trained to be Boko Haram fighters. “In the mornings, they normally teach them how to shoot guns and carry out attacks,” she says, adding that some of the boys were just 10 years old.

Boko Haram is also known to train children to become suicide bombers. A UNICEF report in 2017, says between January and August of that year, 83 children, mainly girls, were used by Boko Haram as suicide bombers. The UN’s children agency said this figure was four times higher than it was for 2016.

Attempts to use legislation to address such abuses as child marriage, sexual abuse, trafficking and abduction have failed in the past. In 2003, Nigeria adopted the Child Rights Act as a legal documentation to protect children from these abuses. Currently the country’s constitution does not have a minimum age of marriage. Though the Child Rights Act set the marriageable age as 18, it failed in part because a number of Nigeria’s 36 states refused to domesticate the law.

“It was also a failure in states where it was adopted because it only existed on paper and was not enforced,” Betty Abah, a women and children’s rights activist, tells IPS.

In 2016, Nigeria’s male-dominated senate voted against a Gender and Equal Opportunities Bill. The bill in part prohibits trafficking, sexual abuse and exploitation of women and children. The bill, which also prohibits forced marriage, set 18 as the minimum legal age for marriage.

According to UNICEF, 43 percent of girls in Nigeria are married off before they turn 18. Some of the lawmakers who voted against the bill cited such grounds as their religion which permitted underaged marriage.

“It sends a very bad signal that we have a long way to go if those who are supposed to make laws to protect women and children feel these laws are not necessary,” Abah says.

In the meantime, Musa, may have fled the captivity of Boko Haram but she is too terrified to return home. She now lives in Maiduguri, which is also in Borno State and about 130 kms from Gwoza.

She tells IPS she is home sick. “I am always praying for the crisis to end so that I can return home, for now I cant go back because I don’t want to risk being taken away by Boko Haram again.”

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalization of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

Excerpt:

A little girl peels manioc to make flour in Acará, in the state of Pará, in the northeast of Brazil's Amazon region. In the rural sectors of Brazil, it is a deeply-rooted custom for children to help with family farming, on the grounds of passing on knowledge. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet / IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 14 2018 (IPS)

Child labour has been substantially reduced in Latin America, but 5.7 million children below the legal minimum age are still working and a large proportion of them work in precarious, high-risk conditions or are unpaid, which constitute new forms of slave labour.

For the International Labor Organisation (ILO) child labour includes children working before they reach the minimum legal age or carrying out work that should be prohibited, according to Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour, in force since 2000.

The vast majority of these children work in agriculture, but many also work in high-risk sectors such as mining, domestic labour, fireworks manufacturing and fishing."They work in truly inhuman, overheated spaces. They are not given even the minimum safety measures, such as facemasks so they do not inhale lint from jeans, or gloves for tearing seams, which hurts their fingers. The repetitive work of cutting fabric with large scissors hurts their hands." -- Joaquín Cortez

Three countries in the region, Brazil, Mexico and Paraguay, exemplify child labour, which includes forms of modern-day slavery.

In Paraguay, a country of 7.2 million people, the tradition of “criadazgo” goes back to colonial times and persists despite laws that prohibit child labour, lawyer Cecilia Gadea told IPS.

“Very poor families, usually from rural areas, are forced to give their under-age children to relatives or families who are financially better off, who take charge of their upbringing, education and food,” a practice known as “criadazgo”, she explained.

“But it is not for free or out of solidarity, but in exchange for the children carrying out domestic work,” said Gadea, who is doing research on the topic for her master’s thesis at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (Flacso).

In Paraguay, the country in South America with the highest poverty rate and one of the 10 most unequal countries in the world, some 47,000 children (2.5 percent of the child population) are in a situation of criadazgo, according to the non-governmental organisation Global Infancia. Of these, 81.6 percent are girls.

“People do not want to accept it, but it is one of the worst forms of work. It is not a solidarity-based action as people try to present it; it is a form of child labour and exploitation. It is also a kind of slavery because children are subjected to carrying out forced tasks not appropriate to their age, they are punished, and many may not even be allowed to leave the house,” said Gadea.

According to the researcher, most of the so-called “criaditos” (little servants), ranging in age from five to 15, are “subjected to forced labour, domestic tasks for many hours and without rest; they are mistreated, abused, punished and exploited; they are not allowed to go to school; they live in precarious conditions; they are not fed properly; and they do not receive medical care, among other limitations.”

Only a minority of them “are not abused or exposed to danger, go to school, play, are well cared for, and all things considered, lead a good life,” she said.

The origins of criadazgo lay in the hazardous forced labour to which the Spanish colonisers subjected indigenous women and children, said Gadea.

Paraguay was devastated by two wars, one in the second half of the nineteenth century and another in the first half of the twentieth century, its male population decimated, and was left in the hands of women, children and the elderly, who had to rebuild the country.

“The widespread poverty forced mothers to give their children to families with better incomes, so they could take charge of their upbringing, education and food, while the mothers worked to survive and rebuild a country left in ruins,” she said.

The practice continues, according to Gadea, because of inequality and poverty. Large low-income families “find the only solution is handing over one or more of their children for them to be provided with better living conditions.”

On the other hand, “there are people who need these ‘criados’ to work as domestics, because they are cheap labour, since they only require a little food and a place to sleep,” she said.

Campaigns to combat this tradition that is deeply-rooted in Paraguayan society face resistance from many sectors, including Congress.

It is a “hidden and invisible practice that is hardly talked about. Many defend it because they consider it an act of solidarity, a means of survival for children living in extreme poverty,” she added.

The case of Mexico

Mexico is another of the Latin American countries with the highest levels of child labour exploitation, in sectors such as agriculture, or maquiladoras – for-export assembly plants.

A boy works in a maquiladora textile plant in the state of Puebla, in central Mexico. Credit: Courtesy of Joaquín Cortez

In Mexico, with a population of 122 million people, there are more than 2.5 million children working – 8.4 percent of the child population. The problem is concentrated in the states of Colima, Guerrero and Puebla, explains Joaquín Cortez, author of the study “Modern Child Slavery: Cases of Child Labour Exploitation in the Maquiladoras.”

Cortez researched in particular the textile maquilas of the central state of Puebla.

Children there “work in extremely precarious conditions, in addition to working more than 48 hours a week, receiving wages of between 29 and 40 dollars per week. To withstand the workloads they often inhale drugs like marijuana or crack,” the researcher from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) told IPS.

In some maquilas “strategies have been used to evade accountability. As in the case of working children who, in the face of labour inspections, are hidden in the bathrooms between the bundles of jeans,” said Cortez.

“They work in truly inhuman, overheated spaces. They are not given even the minimum safety measures, such as facemasks so they do not inhale lint from jeans, or gloves for tearing seams, which hurts their fingers. The repetitive work of cutting fabric with large scissors hurts their hands,” he said.

In short, Cortez noted that “they are more at risk because they work as much as or more than an adult and earn less.”

At times, these children “are verbally assaulted for not rushing to get the production that the manager of the maquiladoras needs. Girls are also often sexually harassed by their co-workers,” he added.

Cortez attributes the causes of this child labour, “in addition to being cheap labour for the owners of small and large maquiladoras,” to inequality and poverty and to poor social organisation, despite attempts at resistance.

The situation in Brazil

In Brazil, a study by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), published in 2017, found that of the 1.8 million children between the ages of five and 17 who work, 54.4 percent do so illegally.

In this South American country of 208 million people, the laws allow children to work from the age of 14 but only as apprentices, while adolescents between the ages of 16 and 18 cannot work the night shift and cannot work in dangerous or unhealthy conditions.

One of the authors of the report, economist Flávia Vinhaes, clarified to IPS that although child labor does not always occur in conditions of slavery or semi-slavery, “children between the ages of five and 13 should not work under any conditions, as it is considered child labour.”

Among those employed at that age, 74 percent did not receive remuneration.

Another indicator revealed that 73 percent of these children worked as “assistants”, helping family members in their productive activities.

“Both domestic tasks and care work make up a broad definition of child labor that may be in conflict with formal education as well as being carried out over long hours or under dangerous conditions,” Vinhaes said.

The research showed that 47.6 percent of workers between the ages of five and 13 are in the agricultural sector, part of a deep-rooted custom.

“In traditional agriculture, children and adolescents perform work under the supervision of their parents as part of the socialisation process, or as a means of passing on traditionally acquired techniques from parents to children,” she said.

“This situation should not be confused with that of children who are forced to work regularly or day after day in exchange for some kind of remuneration or just to help their families, with the resulting damage to their educational and social development,” she said. “There is a fine line between helping and working in a way that is cultural and educational.”

Raquel Dodge, Brazil’s new attorney general, called for the repeal of the ministerial decree that undermines the efforts to fight modern slavery. An expert on the subject, Dodge presented the legal arguments that resulted in the conviction of Brazil in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, in 2016, for failing to adequately prevent slave labour. Credit: José Cruz / Agência Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 31 2017 (IPS)

The wave of conservativism is testing its limits in Brazil, as reflected by a Labour Ministry decree that seeks to block the fight against slavery-like working conditions, which has been provisionally revoked by the justice system.

The powerful “ruralist” parliamentary bloc that represents agribusiness has been chalking up victories, such as keeping Michel Temer in the presidency, despite the disapproval of more than three-quarters of those interviewed in the latest polls, who see him as corrupt and are calling for his resignation.

According to political commentators, the weakening of the fight against slave labour, by means of the Oct. 13 ministerial resolution, was aimed at ensuring the ruralist bloc’s support for the government in the lower house of Congress which, on Oct. 25, blocked by a vote of 251 to 233, the judicial process against Temer on charges of obstruction of justice and criminal organisation.

The measure could be a fatal blow to the actions of the Mobile Inspection Group which has already freed more than 50,000 modern-day slave labourers, warned Xavier Plassat, a Dominican friar who coordinates the campaign against slave labour in the Catholic Pastoral Land Commission (CPT).

The operations of the group, created in 1995 with Labour Ministry inspectors, federal police officers and prosecutors from the Labour Public Prosecutor (MPT), have already decreased sharply in recent years due to a shortage of budget and staff.

“It used to have ten teams, today there are only eight,” Plassat lamented in a telephone interview with IPS.

The ministerial decree modifies the concept of “work in slavery-like conditions,” limiting it to cases in which the worker is subjected to coercion and prevented from leaving the premises by armed guard and retention of documents, because supposedly the worker has “debts contracted with the employer.”

Other situations are now excluded from the concept and defined separately as “forced labour”, “exhausting workday” and “degrading conditions”, when imposed without the worker’s consent, made “contrary to law” and violating the rights and dignity of the person.

“The decree deconstructs the concept of slave labour, since between 70 and 80 percent of the cases recorded in the last 15 years were of degrading work, and the rest are a mixture of degradation, debt, physical control and confiscation of documents”, observed the friar who has won several awards in his fight for the eradication of modern-day slavery.

“Excluding ‘exhausting workday’ and ‘degrading work’ means ignoring three-quarters of the problem; there will be no punishment,” he argued.

The situations considered now by the Labour Ministry as modern-day slave labour were more frequently seen in activities such as deforestation, preparation of land for cattle and crops, production of charcoal and sugar-cane cutting, Plassat said.

But almost all of these activities have been mechanised, the deforestation of the Amazon has been reduced, and the use of charcoal in the production of pig iron has dropped sharply, due to a fall in international demand.

These were also some of the reasons for the decreasing number of workers freed in recent years.

From 2003 – when the National Plan for the Eradication of Slave Labour was inaugurated – to April 2017, 34,940 workers were rescued, reaching a peakof 5,610 in 2007, followed by a sustained decrease down to 742 in 2016, according to CPT data on workers who received unemployment insurance after being released from slavery.

Discovering workers enslaved in the most brutal conditions has become more difficult, because these situations have moved deeper into the Amazon, along with “the deforestation that is now selective, in smaller areas, invisible to satellites, clandestine,” said the French-born friar, who has lived in Brazil since 1989.

Complaints from tax inspectors in the Labour Ministry and from public prosecutors, judges and human rights organisations, in addition to criticism from the International Labour Organisation (ILO), forced the government to agree to review the measure.

But the temporary suspension of the ministerial decree, decided by Supreme Court Justice Rosa Weber, in response to a lawsuit brought by the Sustainability Network party, placed the final decision in the hands of the Supreme Court, which will deliberate on the validity of the decree.

The Brazilian government’s decision to change the definition of slave labour “interrupts a successful trajectory that turned Brazil into a role model and a global leader in the fight against slave labor,” and may undermine and restrain law enforcement efforts in labour, leaving “a portion of the Brazilian population even more fragile, unprotected, and vulnerable,” the ILO warned in a public statement.

The United Nations agency regretted that Brazil may move away from a definition of modern slave labour aligned with ILO conventions and the fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

In addition to narrowing the definition, the ministerial decree stipulates that the Ministry of Labour must approve the inclusion of employers found by inspectors to break the law on slave labour on a black list.

The so-called “dirty list” would thus enter into the political sphere, stripping the labour inspectors of their traditional autonomy established 126 years ago, protested the National Union of Auditors-Labour Prosecutors (SINAIT).

The measure would further hinder actions already “reduced due to a lack of resources, and to red tape,” according to Ivanete da Silva Sousa, administrative secretary of the Açailandia Centre for the Defence of Life and Human Rights (CDVDH), a non-governmental organisation that is active in Brazil’s Amazon region.

“The operations of the Mobile Inspection Group dropped from eight per year to four in 2016 and only one this year in Açailandia and nearby municipalities in which we operate,” she told IPS from that city.

The Centre continues to receive reports of forced labour, but the Mobile Group only intervenes “in exceptional cases, when there are more than 20 people enslaved,” said da Silva, an activist with the group since it was founded in 1996.

“Our focus is slave labour, but we address other violations of labour rights, we provide job training and we defend urban and rural workers,” she said.

Açailandia stands out in this field because it was a recruiting city for hard labour in the Amazon in the past decades, being located in the state of Maranhão, a major provider of farmhands, and on the border with Pará, the state with the largest number of slave-like workers.

The reduction of inspections by the Mobile Group is also explained by the decrease in complaints of places where slavery is practiced, which exceeded 100 per year at the height of Amazonian deforestation between 2005 and 2007, and fell to 16 in 2016, Plassat said.

“But the commitment to the cause remains the same among the members of the group, be they labour inspectors, public prosecutors or federal police,” she said.

The inspections were also scattered around the country. Slaves are discovered even in large cities, especially in the construction and textile industries. The state of São Paulo, the most developed in Brazil, has accounted for two percent of rescued slave workers since 2003.

A vigil for Ferguson at McGill University in Montreal in November 2014. Credit: Gerry Lauzon / Flickr Creative Commons CC BY 2.0.

By Phoebe Braithwaite
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 31 2016 (IPS)

Stressing the enduring relationship between injuries inflicted by slavery and contemporary injustices, a UN committee has recently issued a strongly-worded call for reparations for black U.S. Americans.

“A systemic ideology of racism ensuring the domination of one group over another continues to impact negatively on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of African Americans today,” said the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, in a report released in August.

So far this year 212 black people have been killed by police in the United States, according to statistics collected by The Guardian. This is almost a quarter of the total 883 people killed by police in 2016, despite the fact that only 14.4 percent of US Americans are of African descent.

While only 6.5% of the US population are African American men, they constitute 40.2% of prison populations, according to Ana DuVernay’s recent film 13TH. While 1 in 17 white men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime, one in three black men can expect to be incarcerated.

The group’s report, which focuses especially on police brutality against black Americans as “reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching,” makes 35 diverse recommendations, from establishing sovereign human rights commissions to the reinstatement of voting rights of former felons.

Yet critics question whether the liberal human rights paradigm can adequately address this kind of cruelty and oppression, originating as it does in 20th century Europe, where fascism had recently taken root, and in light of Europe’s own role in creating and perpetuating racial injustice.

“In the era of the Atlantic slave trade,” says Andrew Johnson, Professor of African American Studies at Harvard University, “new notions of difference – absolute, racial notions of difference – were used to define, describe, and justify the political economy of slavery”, articulating the centrality of racism in capitalist exploitation.

Demands for reparations have been largely ignored in the political mainstream. A bill, HR-40, introduced in 1989 to establish a commission examining the “fundamental injustice, cruelty” and brutality of slavery has gained little traction – though the UN committee recommends its passage through Congress. Last year, then-presidential candidate democratic socialist Bernie Sanders dismissed the question of reparations saying that it wouldn’t get through Congress and would be “too divisive”.

Noting Sanders’ determination to push the boat out on issues of class, celebrated writer and proponent of reparations Ta-Nehisi Coates deplored this lack of political imagination: “I thought Sanders’s campaign might remind Americans that what is imminently doable and what is morally correct are not always the same things, and while actualising the former we can’t lose sight of the latter,” Coates said.

He urged that class-based solutions are inappropriate to address “racial plunder” – borne out by the fact that the median income for African American households ($36,898) is almost half their white counterparts ($62,950). The median value of total assets of black families, $4,900, versus white families, $97,000, reveals an even starker difference.

Movement for Black Lives

The Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of over 50 black-led organisations, has set out five key requests which would begin to restore what has been being stolen “since the time that the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa,” in the words of Black Panther Angela Davis.

They focus especially on education, a particular site of harm since it was made illegal to teach enslaved people to read, a law which began in South Carolina in 1740 and was punishable by death in Louisiana. Since then, owing to redlining policies and explicit disinvestment in primarily-black schools, African Americans have continued to suffer from worse educational opportunities, with black students expelled at three times the rate of white students.

“You’re more likely to walk into your hallway and interact with a police officer – in a school – than a guidance counselor,” Kesi Foster, Coordinator at the Urban Youth Collaborative, and contributor to the policy recommendations for the Movement for Black Lives’ demand for reparations, told IPS, saying that in New York, there is one guidance counselor for every 322 students, but a police officer for every 192 students.

These officers are more prevalent in schools with metal detectors, which are usually primarily non-white. Describing what is often called the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’, Foster says that reparative justice could begin by defunding the COPS programme which stations police in schools in line with the perception that black and brown males are “inherently dangerous”.

Reparations

After the end of the American Civil War in 1865, people who were formerly enslaved were given forty acres of tillable land – and, sometimes a mule. But after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination the same year, his successor Andrew Johnson reversed Lincoln’s directive for redistribution.

Calls for reparations have a long history proceeding from this date, and have tended to focus on material restitution, which makes the Movement for Black Lives’ emphasis on education salient. “Not only is there no curriculum recognition about the real history of our country… but there’s also no cultural recognition,” Foster says. “In Germany and other places… where really atrocious things have taken place, there are markers.”

They call for “mandated public school curriculums that critically examine the political, economic, and social impacts of colonialism and slavery, and funding to support, build, preserve, and restore cultural assets and sacred sites to ensure the recognition and honoring of our collective struggles and triumphs.”

It is clear that fulsome reparations for the continued atrocities perpetrated against people of African descent are not about to be freely given simply because whites are made to see the error of their ways. In the words of Mariame Kaba, organiser, educator and founder of Project NIA, speaking at a recent conference on the disproportionate effect the war on drugs has had on black communities, “the system can’t indict itself. You can’t think that the system that is killing you is going to save you.”

Kaba, who helped in the fight for plaintiffs’ justice in the Burge torture trials, discussed the extensive public apology that was eventually won by some of those Burge tortured, and the history’s inclusion in Chicago’s curriculums, demonstrating the essential role honest expressions of responsibility can play in processes of healing for black communities who have been brutalised by the state.

But the Movement’s foremost demand is for the “full and free access for all Black people (including undocumented and currently and formerly incarcerated people) to lifetime education” in its every form, including the “retroactive forgiveness of student loans”.

Professor Harold McDougall, who teaches law at Howard University, has, among many others, argued for the necessity of black-only education. McDougall would like to see Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), like Howard, funded to set up “Reparations Academies” for the descendents of people who were “damaged by educational racism”. This is a practical measure as much as it compounds Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s view that “group solidarity is necessary before a group can operate effectively from a bargaining position of strength”.

McDougall, like others in this struggle, wears two hats: “you have to be able to firmly advance your point of view in the governance process, but even at that time to have your feet firmly grounded in the community, so that the broad-base of the population is continually informing your sense of what needs to be done,” he told IPS.

“When this is going to happen is not something we’re necessarily wrestling with,” Foster says. “For me, it’s more important [to ask]… how does this struggle lead us forward in a way that’s actually transformational, and that’s actually trying to significantly change the material conditions that black people are living under, because of the way that the system was set up, which is to basically profit off of our bodies, profit off our labour, and then give nothing back to us,” citing Chicago’s victory as an example.

Taking a long view, McDougall says that “it’s important to look at these struggles as multi-generational – the problems were not created in a generation. It is unlikely, although not impossible, that they will be solved in your lifetime, so what you do is you roll the ball forward for as long as you can.”

Africa's children still stand as the number one victims of suffering and destitution across the continent. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Aug 26 2015 (IPS)

“Poverty has become part of me,” says 13-year-old Aminata Kabangele from the Democratic Republic of Congo. “I have learned to live with the reality that nobody cares for me.”

Aminata, who fled her war-torn country after the rest of her family was killed by armed rebels and now lives as a as a refugee in Zimbabwe’s Tongogara refugee camp in Chipinge on the country’s eastern border, told IPS that she has had no option but to resign her fate to poverty.

Despite the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, African children still stand as the number one victims of suffering and destitution across the continent.“Poverty has become part of me. I have learned to live with the reality that nobody cares for me” – Aminata Kabangele, a 13-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo

“In every country you may turn to here in Africa, children are at the receiving end of poverty, with high numbers of them becoming orphans,” Melody Nhemachena, an independent social worker in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Based on a 2013 UNICEF report, the World Bank has estimated that up to 400 million children under the age of 17 worldwide live in extreme poverty, the majority of them in Africa and Asia.

According to human rights activists, the growing poverty facing many African families is also directly responsible for the fate of 200,000 African children that the United Nations estimates are sold into slavery every year.

“Many families in Africa are living in abject poverty, forcing them to trade their children for a meal to persons purporting to employ or take care of them (the children), but it is often not the case as the children end up in forced labour, earning almost nothing at the end of the day,” Amukusana Kalenga, a child rights activist based in Zambia, told IPS.

West Africa is one of the continent’s regions where modern-day slavery has not spared children.

According to Mike Sheil, who was sent by British charity and lobby group Anti-Slavery International to West Africa to photograph the lives of children trafficked as slaves and forced into marriage, for many families in Benin – one of the world’s poorest countries – “if someone offers to take their child away … it is almost a relief.”

Global March Against Child Labour, a worldwide network of trade unions, teachers’ and civil society organisations working to eliminate and prevent all forms of child labour, has reported that a 2010 study showed that “a staggering 1.8 million children aged 5 to 17 years worked in cocoa farms of Ivory Coast and Ghana at the cost of their physical, emotional, cognitive and moral well-being.”

“Trafficking in children is real. Gabon, for example, is considered an Eldorado and draws a lot of West African immigrants who traffic children,” Gabon’s Social Affairs Director-General Mélanie Mbadinga Matsanga told a conference on preventing child trafficking held in Congo’s southern city of Pointe Noire in 2012.

Gabon is primarily a destination and transit country for children and women who are subjected to forced labour and sex trafficking, according to the U.S. State Department’s 2011 human trafficking report.

In Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, a study of child poverty showed that over 70 percent of children are not registered at birth while more than 30 percent experience severe educational deprivation. According to UNICEF Nigeria, about 4.7 million children of primary school age are still not in school.

“These boys and girls, some as young as 13-years-old, serve in the ranks of terror groups like Boko Haram, often participating  in suicide operations, and act as spies,” Hillary Akingbade, a Nigerian independent conflict management expert, told IPS.

“Girls here are often forced into sexual slavery while many other African children are abducted or recruited by force, with others joining out of desperation, believing that armed groups offer their best chance for survival,” she added.

Akingbade’s remarks echo the reality of poverty which also faces children in the Central African Republic, where an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 boys and girls became members of armed groups following an outbreak of a bloody civil war in the central African nation in December 2012, according to Save the Children.

Violence plagued the Central African Republic when the country’s Muslim Seleka rebels seized control of the country’s capital Bangui in March 2013, prompting a backlash by the largely Christian militia.

A 2013 report by Save the Children stated that in the Central African Republic, children as young as eight were being recruited by the country’s warring parties, with some of the children forcibly conscripted while others were impelled by poverty.

Last year, the United Nations reported that the recruitment of children in South Sudan’s on-going civil war was “rampant”, estimating that there were 11,000 children serving in both rebel and government armies, some of who had volunteered but others forced by their parents to join armed groups with the hopes of changing their economic fortunes for the better.

Meanwhile, back in the Tongogara refugee camp, Aminata has resigned herself. “I have descended into worse poverty since I came here in the company of other fleeing Congolese and, for many children like me here at the camp, poverty remains the order of the day.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

A visitor looking at a panel at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, England. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

By A. D. McKenzie
LIVERPOOL, England, Jul 21 2015 (IPS)

An exhibition on modern-day slavery at the International Slavery Museum in this northern English town is just one example of a museum choosing to focus on human rights, and being “upfront” about it.

“Social justice just doesn’t happen by itself; it’s about activism and people willing to take risks,” says Dr David Fleming, director of National Museums Liverpool, which includes the city’s International Slavery Museum (ISM).

The institution looks at aspects of both historical and contemporary slavery, while being an “international hub for resources on human rights issues”.

It is a member of the Liverpool-based Social Justice Alliance for Museums (SJAM), formed in 2013 and now comprising more than 80 museums worldwide, and it coordinated the founding of the Federation of International Human Rights Museums (FIHRM) in 2010.

Dr David Fleming, director of National Museums Liverpool, which includes the city’s International Slavery Museum. Credit: National Museums Liverpool

The aim of FIHRM is to encourage museums which “engage with sensitive and controversial human rights themes” to work together and share “new thinking and initiatives in a supportive environment”. Both organisations reflect the way that museums are changing, said Fleming.

“Museums are not dispassionate agents,” he told IPS. “They have a role in safeguarding memory. We have to look at the role of museums and see how they can transform lives.”

The International Slavery Museum’s current exhibition, titled “Broken Lives” and running until April 2016, focuses on the victims of global modern-day slavery – half of whom are said to be in India, and most of whom are Dalits, or people formerly known as “untouchables”.

The display “provides a window into the experiences of Dalits and others who are being exploited and abused through modern slavery in India”, say the curators.

“Dalits still experience marginalisation and prejudice, live in extreme poverty and are vulnerable to human trafficking and bonded labour,” they add.

Presented in partnership with the Dalit Freedom Network, the exhibition uses photographs, film, personal testimony and other means to show “stories of hardship” that include sexual servitude and child bondage. It also profiles the activists working to mend “broken lives”.“Museums [in Liverpool, Nantes, Guadeloupe and Bordeaux ] hope that they can play a role in global citizenship, educating the public and encouraging visitors to leave with a different mind-set – about respect for human rights, social justice, diversity, equality, and sustainability”

The display occupies a temporary exposition space at the museum, which has a permanent section devoted to the atrocities of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the legacy of racism.

Along with the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in the French city of Nantes and the recently opened Mémorial ACTe in Guadeloupe, the Liverpool museum is one of too few national institutions focused on raising awareness about slavery, observers say.

But it has provided a “vital source of inspiration” to permanent exhibitions on the slave trade in places such as Bordeaux, southwest France, according to the city’s mayor Alain Juppé. Here, the Musée d’Aquitaine hosts a comprehensive division called ‘Bordeaux, Trans-Atlantic Trading and Slavery’ – with detailed, unequivocal information.

These museums hope that they can play a role in global citizenship, educating the public and encouraging visitors to leave with a different mind-set – about respect for human rights, social justice, diversity, equality, and sustainability.

“We try to overtly encourage the public to get involved in the fight for human rights,” Fleming told IPS in an interview. “We’ve often said at the Slavery Museum that we want people to go away fired up with the desire to fight racism.

“You can’t dictate to people what they’re going to think or how they’re going to respond and react,” he continued. “But you can create an atmosphere, and the atmosphere at the Slavery Museum is clearly anti-racist. We hope people will leave thinking: I didn’t know all those terrible things had happened and I’m leaving converted.”

Despite Liverpool’s undeniable history as a major slaving port in the 18th century, not everyone will be affected in the same way, however. There have been swastikas painted on the walls of the museum in the past, as bigots reject the institution’s aims.

“Some people come full of knowledge and full of attitude already, and I don’t imagine that we affect these people. But we’re looking for people in the middle, who might not have thought about this,” Fleming said.

A poster sign for the ‘Broken Lives’ exhibition under way at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

He described a visit to the museum by a group of English schoolchildren who initially did not comprehend photographs depicting African youngsters whose hands had been cut off by colonialists.

When they were given explanations about the images, the schoolchildren “switched on to the idea that people can behave abominably, based on nothing but ethnicity,” he said.

Fleming visits social justice exhibitions around the world and gives information about the museum’s work, he said. As a keynote speaker, he recently delivered an address about the role of museums at a conference in Liverpool titled ‘Mobilising Memory: Creating African Atlantic Identities’.

The meeting – organised by the Collegium for African American Research (CAAR) and a new UK-based body called the Institute for Black Atlantic Research – took place at Liverpool Hope University at the end of June.

It began a few days after a white gunman killed nine people inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in the U.S. state of South Carolina.

The murders, among numerous incidents of brutality against African Americans over the past year, sparked a sense of urgency at the conference as well as heightened the discussion about activism – and especially the part that writers, artists and scholars play in preserving and “activating” memory in the struggle for social justice and human rights.

“Artists, and by extension museums, have what some people have called a ‘burden of representation’, and they have to deal with that,” said James Smalls, a professor of art history and museum studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).

“Many times, artists automatically are expected to speak on behalf of their ethnic group or community, and some have chosen to embrace that while others try to be exempt,” he added.

Claire Garcia, a professor at Colorado College, said that for a number of academics “there is no necessary link between scholarship and activism” in what are considered scholarly fields.

Such thinkers make the point that scholarship should be “theoretical” and “universal,” and not political or focused on “the specific plights of one group,” she said. However, this standpoint – “when it is disconnected from the embattled humanity” of some ethnic groups – can create further problems.

The concept of museums standing for “social justice” is controversial as well because the issue is seen differently in various parts of the world. The line between “objectifying and educating” also gives cause for debate.

Fleming said that National Museums Liverpool, for example, would not have put on the contentious show “Exhibit B” – which featured live Black performers in a “human zoo” installation; the work was apparently aimed at condemning racism and slavery but instead drew protests in London, Paris and other cities in 2014.

“Personally I loathe all that stuff, so my vote would be ‘no’ to anything similar,” Fleming told IPS. “And that’s not because it’s controversial and difficult but because it’s degrading and humiliating. There are all sorts of issues with it, and I’ve thought about that quite a lot.”

He and other scholars say that they are deeply conscious of who is doing the “story-telling” of history, and this is an issue that also affects museums.

Several participants at the CAAR conference criticised certain displays at the International Slavery Museum, wondering about the intended audience, and who had selected the exhibits, for instance.

A section that showed famous individuals of African descent seemed superficial in its glossy presentation of people such as American talk-show host Oprah Winfrey and well-known athletes and entertainers.

Fleming said that museums often face disapproval for both going too far and not going “far enough”. But taking a disinterested stand does not seem to be the answer, because “the world is full of ‘faux-neutral’ museums”, he said.

The most relevant and interesting museums can be those that have a “moral compass”, but they need help as they can “do very little by themselves,” Fleming told IPS. The institutions that he directs often work with non-governmental organisations that bring their own expertise and point of view to the exhibitions, he explained.

Apart from slavery, individual museums around the world have focused on the Holocaust, on apartheid, on genocide in countries such as Cambodia, and on the atrocities committed during dictatorships in regions such as Latin America.

“Some countries don’t want museums to change,” said Fleming. “But in Liverpool, we’re not just there for tourism.”

Edited by Phil Harris

The writer can be followed on Twitter: @mckenzie_ale   

The lack of jobs after graduation frequently pushes Cameroonian girls into searching for work opportunities, sometimes overseas and sometimes with horrific consequences. Credit: Ngala Killian Chimtom/IPS

By Ngala Killian Chimtom
YAOUNDE, Jul 15 2015 (IPS)

Her lips are quavering her hands trembling. Susan (not her real name) struggles to suppress stubborn tears, but the outburst comes, spontaneously, and the tears stream down her cheeks as she sobs profusely.

The story of this 28-year-old’s servitude in Kuwait is mind-boggling. Between her sobs, she tells IPS how she left Cameroon two years ago in search of a job in Kuwait.

“I saw job opportunities advertised on billboards in town. The posters announced jobs such as nurses and housemaids in Kuwait. As a nurse and without a job in Cameroon, I decided to take the chance.”"We were herded off to a small room. There were many other girls there: Ghanaians, Nigerians and Tunisians … [then] bidders came and we were sold off like property" – Susan, a young Cameroonian women who escaped from slavery in Kuwait

With the help of an agent whose contact details she found on the billboard, Susan found herself on a plane, bound for Kuwait.

She was excited at the prospect of earning up to 250,000 CFA francs (420 dollars) a month. That is what the agent had told her, and it was a mouth-watering sum compared with the roughly 75 dollars she would have been earning in Cameroon, if she had a job.

“We work in liaison with companies in the Middle East, so that when these ladies go, they don’t start looking for jobs,” Ernest Kongnyuy, an agent in Yaounde told IPS.

But the story changed dramatically when Susan, along with 46 other Cameroonian girls, arrived in Kuwait on Nov. 8, 2013.

“We were herded off to a small room. There were many other girls there: Ghanaians, Nigerians and Tunisians,” then “bidders came and we were sold off like property.”

Susan was taken away by an Egyptian man. “I think I got a taste of hell in his house,” she says, tears streaming down her cheeks.

She would begin work at five in the morning and go to bed after midnight, very often sleeping without having eaten.

Very frequently, she tells IPS, the man tried to rape her but when she threatened to report the case to the police, she met with a wry response from her tormentor. “He told me he would pay the police to rape me and then kill me, and the case wouldn’t go anywhere.”

Cut off from all communication with the outside world, Susan says that she found solace only in God. “I prayed … I cried out to God for help,” she recalls.

Susan’s is not an isolated case. Brenda, another Cameroonian lucky enough to escape, has a similar story. She had to wash the pets of her master, which included cats and snakes.

“I was sharing the same toilet with cats … I called them my brothers, because they were the only “persons” with whom I conversed.”

Pushed to the limits, both girls told their employers that they were not ready to work any longer. Brenda says that when she insisted, she was thrown out of the house.

“At that time I was frail, I was actually dying and I didn’t know where to go.” After trekking for two days, she found the Central African Republic’s embassy and slept for two days in front of it before she was rescued.

Susan was locked in the boot of a car and taken to the agent who had brought her from the airport.

“Events moved so fast and I found myself spending one week in immigration prison and an additional three days in deportation prison,” she says.

When both girls were finally put on a flight bound for Cameroon, all their property had been seized, except for their passports and the clothes they were wearing.

The scale of the problem is troubling. According to the 2013 Walk Free Global Index of Slavery, about three-quarters of a million people are enslaved in the Middle East and North Africa.

The report indicates that for the past seven years, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have been ranked as Tier 3 countries for human trafficking and labour abuses. Tier 3 countries are those whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards in human trafficking and are not making significant efforts to do so.

Apart from Africa, people from India, Nepal, Eritrea, Uzbekistan, etc. … “migrate voluntarily for domestic work, convinced of the employment agencies’ promises of lucrative jobs,” said the report.

“Upon entering the country, they find themselves deceived and enslaved – within the bounds of a legal sponsorship system.”

Susan and Brenda are now back home, but they are suffering from the trauma of their horrible experience in Kuwait.

The Trauma Centre for Victims of Human Trafficking in Cameroon has been working to bring relief to the women. “We try to make them feel at home,” says Beatrice Titanji, National Vice-President of the Centre.

“They have been exposed to bad treatment. They have been called animals. They have been told they stink, and when they enter the car or a room, a spray is used to take away the supposed odour … I just can’t fathom seeing my child treated like that,” she told IPS.

She called on the government to investigate and prosecute the agents, create jobs and mount guard at airports to discourage Cameroonians from going to look for jobs in the Middle East.

Edited by Phil Harris   

A Portuguese slave ship that left Mozambique in 1794 bound for Brazil had hardly rounded the treacherous Cape of Good Hope when it broke apart violently on two reefs only 100 yards from shore.

The Portuguese captain, crew and half of the enslaved Africans survived. An estimated 212 Africans did not and perished at sea.

The ship lay undisturbed in its watery grave until a chance discovery by divers searching the wreck who found iron ballasts – evidence that slaves had been the cargo on the boat.

This week, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture, along with the Iziko Museums of South Africa, the Slave Wrecks Project, and other partners, will announce in Cape Town that the remnants of the São José have been found, right where the ship went down, in full view of Lion’s Head Mountain.

It is the first time, researchers involved in the project say, that the wreckage of a slaving ship that went down with slaves aboard has been recovered.

For the museum — set to open on the National Mall in Washington next year — the find represents the culmination of more than a decade of work searching for the remains of a slave ship that could help tell the story of the 12 million people who were forcibly moved, over some 60,000 voyages, from Africa to North America, the West Indies, South America and Europe.

So far, no skeletons or even partial remains have been found in the wreck.

On Tuesday, when Lonnie Bunch, director of the Smithsonian’s African-American museum, will join his counterparts in Cape Town to announce the discovery of the São José, there will be a memorial service near the site where the ship went down. Divers will place soil from Mozambique Island on the underwater site to memorialise the graves of the 212 drowned slaves.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Jazz musician Marcus Miller (left), spokesman for the Slave Route Project, is using music to help educate people about slavery. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Sep 14 2014 (IPS)

The Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave recently generated international discussion about the barbarity of slavery, but it is not alone in the attempt to break the silence around the 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade and to “shed light” on the lasting historical consequences.

At the United Nations level, The Slave Route Project observed its 20th anniversary this month in Paris and is pushing for greater education about slavery and the slave trade in schools around the world.

“People of all kinds suffered from slavery and people of all kinds profited from slavery just like so many people are now profiting from modern-day slavery. Racism is a direct result of this monstrous heritage and we need to increase the dialogue about this” – Ali Moussa Iye, head of UNESCO’s Slave Route Project
Ali Moussa Iye, chief of the History and Memory for Dialogue Section of UNESCO, the UN’s cultural agency, and director of the Project, says: “The least the international community can do is to put this history into the textbooks. You can’t deny this history to those who suffered and continue to experience the consequences of slavery.”

The Project is one of the forces behind a permanent memorial to slavery that is being constructed at UN headquarters in New York, scheduled to be completed in March 2015 and meant to honour the millions of victims of the traffic in humans.

UNESCO is also involved in the UN’s International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024), which is aimed at recognising people of African descent as a distinct group and at “addressing the historical and continuing violations of their rights”. The Decade will officially be launched in January next year.

“The approach is not to build guilt but to achieve reconciliation,” Moussa Iye said in an interview. “We need to know history in a different, more pluralistic way so that we can draw lessons and better understand our societies.”

He is aware that some people will question the point of the various initiatives, preferring to believe that slavery’s legacy has ended, but he said that international organisations can take the lead in urging countries to examine their past acts and the results.

“People of all kinds suffered from slavery and people of all kinds profited from slavery just like so many people are now profiting from modern-day slavery,” he said. “Racism is a direct result of this monstrous heritage and we need to increase the dialogue about this.”

According to UNESCO, the Slave Route Project has put these issues on the international agenda by contributing to the recognition of slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity, a declaration made at the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001.

Ali Moussa Iye, head of UNESCO’s Slave Route Project. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

It has also been collecting and preserving archives and oral traditions, supporting the publication of books, and identifying “places of remembrances so that itineraries for memory” can be developed.

For many people of African descent, however, much more needs to be done to raise awareness. Ricki Stevenson, a Paris-based African-American businesswoman who heads a company called Black Paris Tours, focusing on the African Diaspora’s contributions in the French capital, told IPS that there ought to be “national and international conversation about the continued effects of enslavement.”

“We need to break the silence on how racism continues to hurt, not just Black people, but all people in any country that would kill, imprison, deny education and rights to individuals,” she said. “The United States, France, and all of Europe made unimaginable money from the cruel, inhumane kidnapping and enslavement of millions of Africans.

“These nations grew rich, built their cities and economies on the enslavement of Africans, on the forced labour of Black people who were stripped of every basic human right, treated less than animals,” she added. “Today we are learning that the wealth of Wall Street and so many major corporations, insurance companies, shipping companies, banks, private families, even churches, is still tied to slavery.”

Stevenson said she knows that some find it hard to comprehend the legacy of slavery. “I doubt if anyone who has never lived in the United States can understand the overwhelming challenge of ‘breathing while Black’,” she told IPS. “It is a horrible, daily fact of life every Black man, woman, child has faced or will face at some point in their lives.”

In France, meanwhile, the rise of nationalism is leading to a culture of exclusion as well as racism, according to political observers. Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, for example, author of a 2001 law bearing her name that also recognises slavery as a crime against humanity, has been the target of racist depictions on social media and in certain publications.

Speaking at the 20th anniversary ceremony of the Slave Route Project, Taubira described her battle against “hatred” and said that the world’s challenge today is to understand the global forces that divide people for exploitation.

“We cannot accept this kind of inhumanity,” she said, adding that the “anonymous victims” were not just victims but “survivors, creators, artists, cultural, guides … and resistors”, despite the immense violence they suffered.

Some individuals and municipalities in France have worked to highlight the country’s active role in the transatlantic slave trade, through cultural and memorial projects. The northwestern city of Nantes, which achieved vast wealth through slavery in the 18th century, built a memorial to victims in 2012.

Historians say that more than 40 percent of France’s slave trade was conducted through the city’s port, which acted as a transhipment point for some 450,000 Africans forcibly taken to the Americas. But this part of Nantes’ history was kept hidden for years until the move to “break the silence” cumulated in the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery.

In England, the city of Liverpool has an International Museum of Slavery, and Qatar and Cuba have also set up museums devoted to this history, carrying out partnership projects with UNESCO.

Acclaimed American jazz musician Marcus Miller, spokesman for the Slave Route Project, is also using music to educate people about slavery. Prior to an uplifting performance in Paris with African musicians, Miller said he wanted to focus on the resistance and resilience of the people forced into slavery and those who fought alongside to end the centuries-long atrocity.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Village women in Nalgonda district near Hyderabad leave for the city to work at construction sites. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS.

By Stella Paul
HYDERABAD, India, May 1 2014 (IPS)

The southern Indian city Hyderabad is witnessing a construction boom as it prepares to become the joint capital of two states – Andhra Pradesh and the soon to be formed Telangana. Buildings are coming up in almost every neighbourhood.

Under one such building coming up, three-year-old Amlu is scrubbing a plate. Her parents Sai Mohan, 33, and Sri Lakshmi, 29, work at the construction site. Mohan is paid the equivalent of 50 dollars a month, Lakshmi works without payment.“There is no better way to help a rural woman than providing her a village-based job. Once she migrates, it is very difficult to restore her life.”

With both parents labouring all day, Amlu is learning to take care of herself.

Mohan and Lakshmi come from Nelapatla village in Nalgonda district, 39 km east of Hyderabad. Mohan gave up cotton farming in 2011 after several crop failures, and migrated to Hyderabad to work for a real estate developer from whom he had taken an equivalent of 500 dollars as a farm loan.

Mohan was employed as a guard, but a few weeks later he was asked to do other work such as laying bricks, making concrete, and plastering walls. Unable to handle so much work alone, Mohan brought wife Lakshmi to help him.

“Our employer says if I don’t work, he won’t pay my husband any salary,” Lakshmi told IPS.

Asia has nearly 12 million forced, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The Global Slavery Index 2013 report suggests there are nearly 14 million forced labourers in India alone. They are mostly employed at construction sites, farms, brick kilns, mining quarries, private homes, and in the sex trade.

“Today some people are still being born into hereditary slavery, a staggering but harsh reality, particularly in parts of West Africa and South Asia,” the report says.

Lakshmi comes from a Dalit community of shoemakers. The ministry of labour and employment in India estimates that 86.6 percent of bonded or forced labourers belong to Dalit and tribal communities.

Mary Madiga, a Dalit rights defender in Hyderabad, says the caste system makes Dalit workers, especially women, vulnerable to exploitation. Now 39, she spent six years in Nalgonda as a forced farm labourer. When her family tried to send her to school at age 14, they were beaten and thrown out of the village by her employer, she said.

“I was lucky to escape, but many others stay in the job due to fear of physical violence,” Madiga, who is contesting to be a member of the state legislative assembly told IPS.

Fear of physical violence forces thousands of migrant women into the sex trade, says Jayamma Bandari, member of the planning committee for the National AIDS Control Programme. “Hyderabad has over 25,000 sex workers.  Sixty percent of them are rural women who migrated to the city and were forced into sex work,” Bandari told IPS.

In 1998, Bandari came to Hyderabad with her husband who then confined her to a room and forced her into sexual slavery for three years before she was rescued by a city-based NGO.

“A forced sex worker is often underfed and tortured by her employer. Almost every such sex worker has marks of torture on her body,” says Bandari, who runs the Chaitanya Happy Home in Hyderabad, a shelter for minor girls of sex workers rescued from the clutches of pimps.

Social norms also lead women into forced labour, says Tathagata Sengupta from the group Solidarity for Brick Kiln Workers. On Jan. 27 this year, Sengupta led a team that rescued 60 forced labourers from a brick kiln near Hyderabad. Over half of them were women, including one in an advanced stage of pregnancy, says Sengupta.

“At brick kilns, most migrant women workers are married to men who took loans from a local moneylender to meet the expenses of their marriage. After marriage, the moneylender forces both husband and wife to work to recover the loan. Since social norms require a good wife to share her husband’s burden, the woman doesn’t refuse,” Sengupta told IPS.

Under India’s Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976, forced labour is punishable by three years imprisonment. But conviction for forced labour is almost unheard of, says Satyavati Kondaveeti, a city-based lawyer associated with the Andhra Pradesh Human Rights Commission.

Employers of forced labourers make only verbal agreements, and it is threfore not possible to prove that the labourer was forced, says Kondaveeti. “They are smart, know the loopholes of the law well, and use these to their advantage.”

Most activists believe that organising workers is an effective way to end forced labour. “In an organised sector, it is easy to track or monitor the growth or decline of the industry. We can count the number of workers and, through workers unions, find out how well the law is being followed. None of this is possible in the unorganised sector,” says Bandari.

Officials say that India must address the reasons for worker migration if it has to end forced labour.

Nalgonda’s district collector T. Cheeranjivalu, the highest-ranked official in the district administration, says government programmes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) are helping.

“These programmes are designed to provide livelihood security and create durable assets in villages for poor people who are vulnerable to migration,” he told IPS.

Despite accusations of widespread corruption in these schemes, Cheeranjivalu says they are the most effective tools to end forced labour, especially for women. “There is no better way to help a rural woman than providing her a village-based job. Once she migrates, it is very difficult to restore her life.”

Meanwhile, Lakshmi hopes that Amlu will be able to go to school some day. “I and my husband can’t read or write. But if our daughter is educated, she can have a free life.”

A rural worker on a cassava plantation in Pesqueira, Pernambuco in northeast Brazil holds out his damaged hands, testimony to the appalling slave labour conditions he was forced to work under. Credit: Alejandro Arigón/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 30 2014 (IPS)

The upcoming mega sporting events in Brazil are paving a new route for slave labour among those migrating from rural areas to the cities in search of work.

The dream of a good job draws many rural migrants from Brazil’s poorest regions, as well as neighbouring countries, to try their luck in big cities. But sometimes their dreams turn into nightmares.

Slave labour remains largely a rural phenomenon in Brazil, where it still occurs on cattle ranches, sugar cane plantations and charcoal farms in remote areas. But it has been growing more recently in the textile and garment industry as well.

The shift to urban areas has made it difficult to fight, said experts consulted by IPS.

Cícero Guedes survived several decades of work in slavery conditions, like thousands of other rural workers in Brazil who move around the country in search of work and fall victim to forced labour.

“I worked hungry many times, without anything to eat,” he told IPS some time ago during a meeting of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST). “No one can work a whole day without eating a thing. My lunch was sucking on sugar cane; the suffering is marked on your face. I worked in plantations, sugar mills, factories, and the pay was next to nothing.”

Born in the state of Alagoas in Brazil’s impoverished Northeast, Guedes started to work at the age of eight and never went to school. He began to travel around the country in search of work on sugar cane plantations.

“I worked and worked and couldn’t see any way to improve my situation,” he said. “Slavery is when a person’s dignity isn’t respected, and when they are humiliated.”

In 2002, thanks to the government’s agrarian reform programme, he managed to settle on a piece of land in the north of the state of Rio de Janeiro with his wife and their three children.

But on Jan. 25, 2013, Guedes was shot to death at the age of 58 near the Cambahyba sugar mill in the municipality of Campos dos Goytacazes, in the north of Rio de Janeiro state, where he was organising an MST occupation of a 3,500-hectare complex of seven sugar plantations.

Nearly 20 years ago, Brazil recognised that slave labour exists in the country, formally labelling it “slavery-like labour”, since slavery as such was abolished in 1888.

There are widespread abusive labour recruitment practices in Brazil which lead to debt bondage and deprivation of liberty.

“We are far from putting an end to the problem and not only in Brazil, which took a big step by recognising it. There are countries that don’t acknowledge that it exists, and don’t take measures to fight it,” said Luiz Machado, national coordinator of the International Labour Organisation’s Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour.

By ratifying the ILO Forced Labour Convention in 1957, Brazil committed itself to eradicating the practice and promoting decent work.

But a public system to combat the crime was not created until 1995. According to the Labour Ministry, 44,415 people were rescued from slave-like working conditions between 1995 and 2012, and the victims received a combined total of 35 million dollars in compensation.

The ministry also reported that some 2,600 workers a year have been rescued since 2010.

Machado said the United Nations is worried about a sharp increase in slave labour ahead of and during the Jun. 12-Jul. 13 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, to be hosted by Brazil.

“These major events draw workers from around the country, and immigrants, for the construction of stadiums,” he explained. “Major infrastructure works also have a social impact, in terms of sexual exploitation and even child labour.

“We are on the alert, and we have negotiated agreements with the government and the private sector to promote and guarantee decent work,” he said.

A number of rescue operations have already been carried out this year by a special Labour Ministry mobile inspection team. On Apr. 4, the team rescued 11 crew members working in slave-like conditions on the MSC Magnifica, an Italian cruise liner, after raiding the ship in the northeastern city of Salvador de Bahía.

According to the authorities, the crew members were forced to work up to 16 hours a day and suffered from abuse, bullying and fraudulent recording of the hours they worked, while some were subjected to sexual harassment.

The ship belongs to the Italian company MSC Crociere, one of the world’s biggest cruise operators.

On Apr. 20, a Brazilian court rejected an appeal by Zara, an international fashion chain that belongs to the Spanish company Inditex, regarding its responsibility for the slavery conditions to which 15 workers were subjected. They were discovered in 2011 in a factory where the chain’s garments were produced.

The corporation argues that it was unaware of the irregularities committed by the factory, one of its 50 subcontractors in Brazil. But the court found Zara to be directly responsible for the abuses and asked for it to be included on a list of companies with exploitative labour practices.

In March, 17 Peruvian workers were freed from a textile sweatshop in the southern Brazilian city of São Paulo. They worked more than 14 hours a day, seven days a week, monitored by cameras. Their documents were being held by the owners of the company.

The workers were between the ages of 18 and 30 and earned 1.03 dollars per garment, which in clothing stores sold for 45 dollars each.

The ILO’s Machado said there is a new trend of exploiting mainly foreign workers.

“There is a large contingent of Bolivians, Paraguayans, Peruvians, and recently, Haitians, who come in search of a dream and the chance of a better life. Many of them come in to the country without papers and are afraid of being deported,” he said.

Fear of being caught by the authorities gives rise to “a pact of silence” among the immigrants, who do not file complaints about their employers, which would activate an investigation.

The slave workers tend to be mixed-race young people between the ages of 18 and 35. But in urban areas, there is a growing proportion of women and underage minors in clandestine textile sweatshops.

Nevertheless, slave labour continues to be more common in the agricultural sector in this country of 198 million people. Campos dos Goytacazes, a municipality of 463,000 people in a farming area in the north of the state of Rio de Janeiro, won the dubious title of the “national capital” of slave labour in 2009.

“The biggest rescue operation ever of sugar cane cutters in Brazil was carried out that year,” social worker Carolina Abreu, with the Pastoral Land Commission, which forms part of the Popular Committee for the Eradication of Slave Labour in the Northern Fluminense, told IPS.

“During harvest time, one single sugar mill can hire as many as 5,000 workers, and those who come from outside the area end up becoming trapped in debt to survive, working in precarious conditions.”

In 2009, the Labour Ministry rescued 4,535 workers from slave-like conditions, and 715 cases were discovered in Campos de Goytacazes alone.

“That’s why [the municipality] won the prize,” Abreu said. “Besides the sugar cane sector, irregularities have been found on pineapple plantations and cattle ranches. Workers do not have contracts, and they earn less than the minimum wage [of 320 dollars a month].”

The mechanisation of sugar cane production worries cane cutters, who are afraid of losing their jobs, and as a result accept exhausting hours. According to the Pastoral Land Commission, workers cut between seven and 10 tons of sugar cane each per day.

Labour accidents are frequent. An average of 70 workers a year with machete cuts are rushed to the municipal hospital where Abreu works, in Travessão, a rural area of Campos de Goytacazes.

Then there are the sugar cane cutters who come in because of cramps and other problems caused by the repetitive nature of their work, which are not registered as work-related cases.

“Many come to save up some money to send their families, because in their home regions there is no work,” Abreu said. “They live in the most absolute poverty, and are underfed and exhausted.”

The number of international migrants continues its inexorable climb even as reports of slave-like conditions continue to proliferate.

There are now a record high of 232 million people living and working outside their countries of origin, generating over 400 billion dollars annually in remittances, and counting."It is exceedingly unlikely the upcoming dialogue will result in anything more than nice words." -- Joseph Chamie

Migrant earnings were nearly four times the 126 billion dollars in official development assistance (ODA) from rich to poor nations last year, according to figures released by the United Nations.

The river of cash flowing into developing countries, including India, Bangladesh, Morocco, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Egypt and the Philippines, is one of the more positive effects of migration.

But what is a blessing for some is a calamity for others.

On the darker side is the continued exploitation of migrants, mostly in the Middle East, because of an increase in “slave labour” where workers suffer from low wages, inadequate medical care and atrocious working conditions.

Joseph Chamie, a former director of the U.N. Population Division who has written extensively on international migration, told IPS that while there is generally universal condemnation of such migrant “slave” labour, prohibitions are difficult to enforce, as it often takes place in households and small work sites.

One strategy to address this is the International Labour Organisation’s Domestic Worker’s Convention, aimed at stopping the abuse of domestic workers, which went into effect last month.

Speaking on the eve of a high-level dialogue on international migration and development, Abdelhamid El Jamri, chair of the Committee on the Rights of Migrant Workers (CMW), stressed Wednesday that migrants are not commodities but human beings.

“Changing patterns of migration and the exploitation and discrimination faced by migrant workers in sectors such as construction and agriculture have made protecting their rights more crucial than ever,” he said.

The International Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and their Families (ICRMW) is one of the core international human rights treaties. However, the convention, which has been in force for 10 years, has been ratified by just 47 of the U.N.’s 193 member states.

No major destination countries, among them the United States, the member states of the European Union (EU) and Gulf countries – where millions of migrants live and work – have ratified it, El Jamri said.

Asked about the U.N.’s high-level dialogue, scheduled to take place Oct. 3-4, Chamie said given current political realities and the continuing rift between labour-importing and exporting nations, “it is exceedingly unlikely the upcoming dialogue will result in anything more than nice words.”

The sharp division between the two sides, he said, relates mainly to family reunification, migrant rights, undocumented migration and responsibility sharing.

Kul Gautam, a national of Nepal and a former U.N. assistant secretary-general who was deputy executive director of the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, told IPS migrant earnings are now the number one source of national income in his home country.

Remittances comprise about 25 percent of Nepal’s gross national product (GNP), or four billion dollars per year, he said.

Of the 400,000 young adults who enter the job market annually, about 300,000 seek jobs as migrant labourers. The largest concentration of Nepali migrant workers are in Qatar and Malaysia (about 400,000 each), followed by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries.

Gautam was critical of the harsh treatment meted out to migrant workers, specifically in Gulf countries.

He said the latest allegation of modern-day slavery comes from one of the richest countries in the world, Qatar, where large numbers of migrant labourers from one of the poorest countries in the world, Nepal, have reportedly been mistreated in a high-profile construction project to build the infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup football games.

A recent investigative report by the British newspaper The Guardian paints a chilling picture of thousands of migrant labourers forced to work in inhuman conditions, without getting paid for long periods and lacking safety equipment.

The Nepalese government announced this week that 70 Nepalese migrants have died working on World Cup construction sites in Doha in the past two years.

Regarding the strengthening of international norms, Gautam said “it was hard to tell if the high-level dialogue [this week] will have significant impact – but it should.”

In Nepal, very few people have heard about it, he said, adding, “I do not think the Nepali delegation is well-prepared with specific proposals.”

“But I think migration for development is far more important than say, aid, trade, foreign direct investment, etc. in Nepal’s current context, and in the context of many countries that depend on remittances as a key source of their income.”

To be fair, he pointed out, it is certainly not the policy of the government of Qatar to practice or condone slave-like conditions. Rather, it is unscrupulous private companies, contractors and middlemen, both in Qatar and in Nepal, that are responsible for such inhuman practices.

Asked whether the United Nations was doing enough to prevent abuses, Chamie told IPS the issue of international migration has not been brought “front and centre” at the United Nations.

In contrast to other global issues, such as children, trade, environment, finance, women and ageing, all of which were the focus of U.N. world conferences, international migration is the U.N.’s “neglected stepchild”.

“It is now – and for the foreseeable future – outside the U.N. system, and addressed via the Global Forum on Migration and Development,” he said.

Asked why, he said: “The destination countries, especially the more developed countries, wish to keep it outside the United Nations.”

The slaves brought to the Caribbean lived in inhumane conditions. Above are examples of slave huts in Bonaire provided by Dutch colonialists. About five feet tall and six feet wide, two to three slaves slept in these after working in near by salt mines. Credit: V.C.Vulto/GNU license

By Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Jul 29 2013 (IPS)

As Caribbean countries prepare to observe Emancipation Day on Aug. 1, they are also caught up in an ongoing debate over reparations for slavery.

St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, who has stated publicly that he will “take no quarter on those issues”, told IPS, “We have in my view a very strong case to put to an appropriate tribunal.”

Last week, as he addressed an audience in Cuba marking the 60th anniversary of the attack on the Moncada Barracks that launched the 1953 Revolution, Gonsalves said the Caribbean is demanding reparations from Europe for native genocide and African slavery.

“The principal reason for underdevelopment in the Caribbean and Latin America is the legacy of native genocide and African slavery, and we do so with the spirit and with the examples, in this new period, of the combatants of Moncada,” he said.

At the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) summit here earlier this month, Gonsalves presented his fellow leaders with three position papers, including one by Professor Hilary Beckles, the pro-vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, who recently published the book “Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations owed the Caribbean for Slavery and Indigenous Genocide”.

Gonsalves is pushing for a common position on reparations and has welcomed the decision to establish a committee under the chairmanship of the Barbados Prime Minister Freundel Stuart to drive the issue.

The committee, which will oversee the work of a CARICOM Reparations Commission, will include Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Haiti, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Suriname, the chairs of national reparations committees, and a representative of the University of the West Indies.

Kafra Kambon, chair of the Emancipation Support Committee in Trinidad and Tobago, told IPS it is important for non-governmental organisations and the Caribbean population in general to support the initiatives of regional governments.

Kambon, whose grouping organises the annual Emancipation Day activities here, said that the support is necessary since he believes “European governments are going to try to corral them [Caribbean leaders] or even pressure them to abandon the idea.

”We have to give the strength to that call for reparations as a principle,” Kambon told IPS, calling the slave trade “massive crimes that go beyond the human imagination”.

“People have been damaged psychologically, we came out of slavery suffering extreme trauma,” he said.

“We were not behind Europe at the time of the contact and some people think of slavery as a rescue mission. It was not,” he said, adding that “slavery represents a generation of people that have been wiped out”.

In the Dutch country of Suriname, the National Reparations Committee said it would seek consensus and awareness for the correct version of history.

“We’re going to bring this dead information about reparations for slavery and about the genocide of our country’s first inhabitants to life,” said the committee’s chair, Armand Zunder, who has applauded the move by CARICOM.

“We thought we would be fighting this fight on our own, but we know now we have full support. We have made big strides,” said Zunder, an economist, who earlier this month filed the first ever petition to The Netherlands for reparations to the descendants of slaves in Suriname.

Zunder said that previously published research results that showed that the Netherlands earned some 125 billion euros from Suriname during slavery.

Meanwhile, the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe (PARCOE) has written a lengthy letter to Caribbean leaders warning that their “top down approach” will “end up not achieving the reparations aspirations of the masses of Afrikan descendants and indigenous citizens in the Caribbean.”

PARCOE co-vice chairs Esther Stanford-Xosei and Kofi Mawuli Klu wrote that the Caribbean should seek to avoid “the same errors that were made with the former Organisation of African Unity’s (OAU) Group of Eminent Persons (GEP) in failing to effectively consult on reparations strategies, be informed by and act in the best interests of the various Afrikan countries respective citizenries”.

They cited the work of the U.S. activist and law professor, Mari Matsuda, who argues that approaches to reparations incorporate a more grassroots, “bottom-up” approach.

“By ‘bottom’, Matsuda refers to the lived experience of those individuals and groups who are alleging the violation of rights rather than those who have traditionally defined the scope of legal redress such as judges, lawyers associations and other groups who are part of upholding the existing social, legal and economic status quo,” they wrote.

PARCOE is also urging Caribbean countries not to be taken in by the recent “historic victory for the Mau Mau survivors of British colonial era torture and abuses in detention committed between 1952 and 1963 during Britain’s suppression of the Mau Mau war of liberation”.

PARCOE said the “the financial compensation aspect of the settlement represents a paltry sum and is not commensurate with the torture and suffering of Mau Mau patriots considering that the British Government paid out £20 million, the modern equivalent of around £16.5 billion, to compensate some 3,000 slaveholding families for the loss of their ‘property’ when slavery was purportedly abolished in Britain’s colonies in 1833.”

By Sudeshna Chowdhury
NEW YORK, May 24 2013 (IPS)

Say “Africa” and myriad images flood our minds. Like its landscape and peoples, the continent’s history is rich and diverse. While numerous books have been written and films made on the African slave trade in the West, a lesser-known aspect of the continent’s history lies in India.

Courtesy of Sylviane Diouf.

On the occasion of Africa Day and the Asian-Pacific American heritage month of May, IPS correspondent Sudeshna Chowdhury interviewed Sylviane A. Diouf, a renowned historian who studies the African diaspora, about the presence of Africans in India and the rest of Asia.

Diouf is also one of the curators of an exhibition called “Africans In India: From Slaves to Generals and Rulers” which is on display at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: How different is the story of Asian Africans from the African diaspora in the rest of the world, such as in America or Europe?

A: Not all Africans arrived in Asia as slaves. Some were traders, artisans, and religious leaders. India had an abundance of local slaves to perform hard labour, so the Africans and foreign slaves were mostly employed in specialised jobs as domestics in wealthy households, in the royal courts, and in the armed forces.

Africans were regarded as exceptional warriors and they fought in armies all over India, alongside Arabs, Turks, Indians and Afghans. They could rise through the ranks and become “elite slaves”, amassing wealth and power and even becoming rulers in their own right.

Elite slavery was often a frontier phenomenon, often found in areas that underwent instability due to struggles between factions and where hereditary authority was weak. Rulers considered Africans reliable because they were outsiders with no family, clan or caste connections to the indigenous populations, so they promoted them as court officials, administrators, and army commanders."Elite slaves were frequently at the centre of court disputes and sometimes seized power for themselves." -- Sylviane A. Diouf

These elite slaves were frequently at the centre of court disputes and sometimes seized power for themselves. Slave soldiers, guards, and bodyguards were routinely freed after a few years of service, often married local women, and were integrated into the larger society.

Q: Why do you think Africans were able to distinguish themselves so easily in countries like India, unlike say in Western countries? Is there a greater story of assimilation here that made it possible for Africans to rise from slaves to generals and then rulers?

A: Due to Islamic laws, enslaved Africans tended to have much greater social mobility than West Africans did in the Americas. One distinctive trait of slavery in the Islamic world was that, contrary to what happened in the West, bondage and “race” were not linked. Instead, factors such as religion, ethnicity, and caste were often more influential than colour.

The Africans’ success in India was theirs but it is also a strong testimony to the open-mindedness of a society in which they were a small religious and ethnic minority, originally of low status. As foreigners and Muslims, Africans ruled over indigenous Hindu, Muslim and Jewish populations. It would have been unthinkable in the West.

Today, in a country of 1.2 billion people, there are about 50,000 to 70,000 African descendants. It is thus not surprising that most Indians have never heard of them. Many people know of the famous 16th century Malik Ambar, a former Ethiopian slave who became a prime minister and regent and was a bitter foe of the Moghuls, but some are not aware he was African.

Our exhibition will travel to India and this will help put the Africans’ place in India history in more people’s consciousness.

Q: What is the current state of these Africans in India? In most cases, why do you think they continue to live in poverty?

A: A majority of Sidis (Africans in India are called Sidis) live in poverty or are part of the working class: drivers, domestics, security guards, etc. Others are farmers and some belong to the middle class. According to their own organisations, the lack of education and of strong leadership is an impediment.

Some Sidis are recognised as “scheduled tribes” and benefit from affirmative action programmes, but others are denied the status or are not given the opportunity to make use of it.

Q: Any interesting observations during your visit to India? Was the African community in India aware of their roots and identity? Did they care?

A: It’s a diverse community. Some people are aware and do care, others are not and perhaps would not care. The people I met were very conscious of their identity as descendants of Africans and as Muslims. They were also very conscious of being Indians.

For the past several years, Western and Indian scholars have been doing research on the communities for books, photographs, articles, exhibitions, and documentaries and that has led some Sidis to learn about and value their own past and history.

Q: Do you see the image of Africa changing in today’s world? Has it managed to move beyond its stereotypical image of poverty, hunger and deprivation?

A: I think the image has already changed positively in some circles: the arts world, among younger generations, for instance, thanks to the extraordinary crop of writers, painters, musicians, designers, architects, and other artists who are producing wonderful work.

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By Johan Galtung
LIVERPOOL, Feb 20 2013 (IPS)

­That Liverpool was once the uncontested centre of the world slave trade, accounting for 40 percent, is well documented in the International Slavery Museum in the port where slave ships docked.

Johan Galtung

The trade was triangular: from Liverpool (Bristol, London) with Manchester textiles, metals, beads, alcohol and guns for slave traders in the Bay of Guinea; with slaves from there to the Caribbean, the ‘Middle Passage’; and from the Caribbean — with sugar, coffee and cotton grown by slaves ­ back to England.

To stealing people ­ two-thirds young men from 15 to 25 years of age ­ and killing their societies, the colonisers added stealing raw materials in return for cheap manufactures. This lasted from the beginning ­ practiced by the Portuguese in 1502 — till the slave trade was forbidden in England in 1807: but it continued in other ways.

We talk about millions of slaves landed in an arch from Rio to Washington with the point of gravity in the Caribbean, and some south of Rio, north of Washington and around the coast to the Pacific side of Latin America. An unspeakable crime against humanity.

Another unspeakable crime, the shoa, had its Holocaust Memorial Day on Jan. 27 in England. Should be remembered, indeed, but somebody else’s, Germany’s–enemy of England–comes more easily. No Slavery Memorial Day, no Colonialism Memorial Day.

Nor is there a memorial to the 10 million or so killed in King Leopold II’s Congo in Antwerp where the guns went to Africa and the rubber came in return. Guns converted into rubber is more easily understood than the manufactured goods converted into slaves converted into commodities. Maybe one day all three memorial days will come, land for slavery and imperialism in the U.S., with museums, next to the Holocaust museum, in Washington D.C. In no way diminishing the enormity of the shoa, but for perspective, for better understanding. All entirely intended, justified by seeing the victims as subhuman or worse, like Joseph Stalin’s murder of kulaks.

Back to slavery. Points worth remembering, from the catalogue:

* Sir Francis Drake, hero in English history for raiding the Spanish, getting the gold, navigating the world, was one of the first slavers, in the early years of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, and knighted by her;

* Liverpool ships carried around 1.5 million slaves, 45,000 in the peak year 1799;

* Liverpool still has streets with the names of slave traders;

* Between 10 and 25 percent died during the Middle Passage transportation under atrocious conditions;

* Only five percent of the enslaved Africans who survived ended up in British North America, lasting close to 250 years in Southern;

* When 131 Africans were thrown overboard from a Liverpool slave ship the case was treated as an insurance dispute, not as a murder trial;

* “Sold, branded–with hot iron, like cattle–issued with a new name, the Africans were separated from families and friends and stripped of their identity in a deliberate process which aimed to break their willpower and leave them passive and subservient, enslaved Africans were ‘seasoned’. For a period of two or three years they were ‘trained’ to obey or receive the lash, and acclimatised to their work and conditions. Here was mental and physical torture. Justified by seeing them as closer to animals than to white people”;

* Europeans considered the achievements of their own civilisation as paramount, and used their own rigid ideas of civilisation to justify the enslavement and abuse of Africans;

* After emancipation in 1863 came the Ku Klux Klan in 1866 by Confederate Army veterans and more than 3,000 lynchings of Blacks between 1882 and 1951–before Civil Rights in, say, 1962.

And this torture lasted throughout their lives, not some years; for centuries, not for years. Carefully, intelligently planned, based on cost-benefit analysis of resources, African humans and commodities.

Liverpool, however, has more to offer, like the remarkable Catholic Cathedral, modern, circular, no ship, the priests officiate in the centre not at the end. With a circular tower. Very beautiful. Stained glass windows with the occasional sunlight enhancing the Christian message. What message? How beautiful had it been, Jesus living with the poor, Jesus with other women than his mother, as baby, Jesus comforting and nursing the ill, feeding the hungry, cleansing the temple from the cult of Mammon.

Jesus turning the other cheek, not resisting evil; Jesus giving the cloak to whoever steals the coat.

Nothing of the kind. The Cross indeed, the suffering, the Father sacrificing His Son, giving us human sinners new hope. And the Son resurrected on the third day joining Father in Heaven.

Deep down we sense a connection. Merchants of Liverpool, with relatives and friends as rich planters “over there”, are the stern Father sacrificing the sons, the Negroes from Negroland in Africa, for the benefit of us all, ultimately also for the slaves: If or when they turn to Christ they will be resurrected and end up in Paradise, by all the criteria of the Sermon on the Mount.

Lincoln wrote, “My paramount object is to save the Union–not to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it” (letter to the editor of the New York Tribune, Aug. 22, 1862).

Better: neither slavery nor union.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

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