Demanding reparations for slavery, a New Jersey group calling themselves the People’s Organization for Progress (POP) took to the streets demanding reparation for the slavery their ancestors endured well over a century and a half ago.
As reported by George Washington University’s History News Network;
Essex County was on the frontline of a continued campaign for African-American reparations in the United States last weekend when dozens of marchers took to the streets of Newark.
According to organizers, Saturday’s rally – spearheaded by the Newark-based People’s Organization for Progress – was held in support of HR-40, a bill which would create a commission to develop “reparation proposals” for African-Americans.
The proposed law is currently sitting before the U.S. Congress Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice and can be seen here. It would “establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery.”
While the members of POP, like all American citizens, have the right under the US Constitution to peacefully assemble and speak their minds, it’s a reasonable expectation that the exercise of those same rights be both informed and well educated.
Obviously holding the United States government solely responsible for both any admissions of responsibility as well as a future possible payout, POP members seem to have missed the historical reality of black-on-black slavery.
While many in the West have been taught in either government-controlled or left-leaning private schools that whites, specifically the English, Dutch, Portuguese and American Southerners were wholly responsible for the infamous Trans-Atlantic slave trade, what is widely ignored is the culpability of North African Arab-Muslim slavers.
Ignored to an even greater degree is the role Sub-Saharan black Africans had in sending their own people into captivity. All at a profit.
Without getting into the minutiae of the involvement of various West African kings, queens, chiefs, warriors, merchants and tradesmen culpable in the slave trade, suffice it to say that a number of West African governments and tribes have at least admitted that their ancestors were active participants in the Triangular Trade.
As The Atlantic magazine published in 2014;
In Nigeria, some tribal leaders have taken the position that since slavery occurred long ago, the perpetrators of the crime own their sins and did not bequeath remorse to their descendants.
In 2009, when Nigerian tribal chiefs sought a constitutional amendment formalizing their influential role in the country’s governance, the Civil Rights Congress of Nigeria, a human-rights organization, encouraged them to apologize for their role in the Atlantic slave trade.
These efforts failed—in declining to apologize, one elder told a Nigerian newspaper that his people were “not apologetic about what happened in the past,” explaining that the slave trade was “very very legal” when his forebears were involved in it.
In what could have easily been pointed at groups here in America constantly clamoring for someone else’s money, but ignoring the de facto poverty plantations the Democrats have turned most US inner-cities into;
Henry Bonsu, a broadcaster researching African apologies for slavery, told The Guardian at the time that among those he interviewed in Nigeria, “People aren’t milling around Lagos … moaning about why chiefs don’t apologise. They are more concerned about the everyday and why they still have bad governance.”
Also reported was the very different path Ghana had taken;
Ghana’s 2006 apology to African-Americans for slavery, by contrast, was largely a business decision. It formed part of a strategy to forge a stronger tourism economy, and closer ties to America, by making it easier for black Americans to visit, emigrate, own land, invest, and start businesses in Ghana.
Emanuel Hagan of Ghana’s Ministry of Tourism and Diasporean Relations told a local news organization that the history of slavery was “something that we have to look straight in the face because it exists. So, we will want to say something went wrong, people made mistakes, but we are sorry for whatever happened.”
Also noted were the actions of Benin’s then-President Mathieu Kérékou;
In 1999, Kérékou began a global apology tour, including multiple stops in America. He and members of his government appealed to the religious conception of forgiveness to frame the act of reconciliation as a divine pursuit that would make whole the relationship between offending states and the victims’ offspring. “We cry forgiveness and reconciliation,” said Luc Gnacadja, Benin’s minister of environment and housing…
Ignored by the reparations now crew is that slavery is still legal in Africa. Specifically in the nation of Mauritania.
In a separate article, The Atlantic magazine recently described the Northwest African nation as “a 21st-century slave state”. The Atlantic noted;
“… the practice [of slavery] remains pervasive, with an estimated half million Mauritanians enslaved, about 20 percent of the population. Mauritanian slaves are forbidden from owning property, a last name, or legal custody of their own children.
The BBC also reported that while on paper slavery is technically illegal;
In Niger, slavery was only criminalised in 2003 – and the local human rights organisation Timidria estimates 870,000 people are still held in bondage there.
The masters control the slaves totally, exploiting their labour, abusing them sexually and physically, and often forcing them to mate with other slaves so that their children are born into slavery.
We meet Azagar, a former slave who managed to escape his master. “I was considered an animal,” he says.
Perhaps best putting to words what many on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean already believe in their hearts would be the remarks of Ghanaian Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry Robert Ahomka-Lindsay, who told those of the African Diaspora (to include the American descendants of slaves) to “stop whining.”
