Y Safle

It is nearly 200 years since the evangelical revival in Britain led to the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. This trade was a nasty piece of our history, and it is right that we are aware of our nation’s role in the trade and that we know deep regret that it ever happened.

But some people want to go further. Yesterday mornings 8.00 O’clock interview on the BBC Radio 4 “Today” programme included an interview with one Esther Stanford, co-chair of the Rendezvous of Victory campaign that seeks repartions for the descendents of those affected by the trade.

Esther Stanford is a lawyer, and it seems that lawyers are afflicted by a belief that the best way to affect reconciliation is to make someone pay. But her reasoning was astounding.

Asked by the interviewer to comment on the fact that there were African leaders involved in the trafficing of people for this trade, Stanford argued that we cannot hold such people to account in the same way that we would not hold Jewish collaborators with the Nazis to account. That the only people we hold to account are those involved in the systematic genocide of a nation.

But the slave trade was not a genocide. It was a crime against humanity in much the same way, but the only genocide caused by the slave trade was the genocide of the native Americans that originally inhabited the West Indies.

So if we are paying for a genocide, we have no decendents left to pay. Those people were wiped out.

What of the African slave trade? Who pays whom?

This is an impossible task. Does someone of mixed ancestry pay on behalf of slaver ancestors to themself on behalf of enslaved ancestors?

And where do we stop? We should ask all who profited from the trade to make reparation, shouldn’t we? So that is inidigenous Africans as well as Europeans and Americans.

On the other hand, should descendents of abolitionists be held to account in the same way?

The whole issue is a nonsense and really very unhelpful.

There are very real issues with regard to under-representation of Africa in international politics, and the plight of millions in poverty because of Western protectionist policies. It is right that western nations should invest enormously in Africa. I believe that if the UN is to persist in having permanent members on its security council, then Africa must be somehow represented in the same way on the council.

But the exploitation of Africa has not stopped. Slavery is not the issue. The issue is our inhumanity to one another, and our deliberate ignorance of the plight of those beyond our petty little borders.

But back to the issue of reparations: Should Norway and Denmark pay reparations to the UK and Ireland for Viking raiding and its slave trade? Should the French government pay reparations for the Norman invasion and enslavement of the Anglo Saxon peoples? (Or maybe that should be Norway again – the Normans being of Norse descent).

I have a simple rule of thumb for such issues: A man is responsible for his own actions and choices, but not for those of anyone else.

I have some very interesting ancestors (as do we all, no doubt).

One of my ancestors was apparently a village constable, and confessed on his death bed to committing two murders, and then failing to investigate them (as would have been his duty).

But I am not responsible for that ancestor’s actions.

On the other hand, I have Scottish highland ancestry (apparently an ancestor who fought for the Jacobites at Culloden), and the highlanders suffered under the ensuing clearances as people enriched themselves at the expense of the people they displaced and dispossessed. Should the government pay me recompence for this?

No. Because no one alive to day was responsible for this act.

Society has often been violent, immoral and unjust. We rightly seek a more just society now – and that is our right contribution and response to the lessons of history.

As for woolly headed thinkers such as Esther Stanford, that simplistically wants people of European descent only to pay people of African descent only – too many people mistake that point of view for liberalism. In fact it is historical fascism. If we cannot move beyond that debate then we have learned nothing from history.

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