By John Amoda

PROFESSOR Gates piece was published in The Nation Monday, April 26 2010 edition. As to be expected the problem he was addressing was elegantly stated in the introductory paragraphs reproduced below:

“Thanks to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics-the fact that he is African American and President, Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the thorniest contentious issues of America’s racial legacy; reparations’, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labour and bondage. There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such sustained heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain”.

Professor Gates raising of the issue at such a time as this is important, especially in contexts of discourse on how to apportion blame to those responsible for the poverty amongst African Americans in the New World of the Americas and the Caribbean and amongst Africans in Africa’s post- colonial states.

The prevailing consensus is that the African Americans in post-slavery America and Africans in post-colonial Africa are to be blamed for corrupt use of political and economic opportunities. For those defining what is equitable consideration of history who share the above opinion political change is seen in the main as change in policy, a position that does not include the restructuring of the political economy and of the state that secures it.

To such, freedom for slaves is emancipation and sovereignty for colonised Africans was the ending of colonial rule. Within such perspectives of political change the raising of the question of reparation at such a time as this will be seen as a cheap exploitation of the
fact that an African American is the president of the United States. Why, such would ask, did Professor Gates not raise the question earlier and if he did why did he not demand that President Bush provide the leadership for addressing the issue of reparation? Such would see Henry Louis Gate’s call for reparation as in fact clever attribution of the cause of the current conditions of the Black underclass in the Americas and the Caribbean and of the post-colonial poor in the urban and rural Africa to Transatlantic Trade in Slaves and to colonialism in Africa. For those holding such views the raising of the issue of reparation is not about the past but the exploitation of the fact that Obama is the President. Such a view of the intent of Henry Louis Gates will appear to be justified by the role he sees President Obama playing in the resuscitation of the slavery issue. In our opinion such a view of Henry Louis Gates policy intervention is wrong. It is a fact of international morality that history does matter, that the present cannot be detached from the past, nor the future emerge from eternity, it is the unfolding of the past. Holocaust has been acknowledged as crime against humanity and the Germans have sought expiation through a structure of reparative foreign policy towards the state of Israel.

The Italians have agreed to pay to the Libyans reparation for Italian colonial rule. Defeated Germany was burdened with reparatory responsibilities for Hitler’s Nazi programmes, projects and policies in Europe.

Therefore the past does matter and if it so why not the past of slavery and colonialism? It matters, for in law there are crimes that time cannot void and slavery and colonialism fall under this category. Haven taken sides with Gates in this issue, I can call attention to the fact that Gate’s call for reparation may be vitiated by his delinking of Transatlantic Trade in Slaves from colonialism. Both slavery and colonialism were strategies of economic and political development by the same political cla