UN International Day on Slave Trade and its Abolition

August 23rd was the United Nations International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition and the launch of the UN’s International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024). This was the day of glorious uprising of the enslaved Africans of Santo Domingo (Haiti) on the night of 22nd to 23rd August 1791. The Black Jacobeans as described in the book of the same name written by our own C.L.R James.

Led by the African revolutionary General T’Oussiant L’Overture, Africans rose up on the plantations overcame every European in sight. They went on to defeat both, the French Napoleon and British Wellingtons armies, in victories that stunned the world.

These defeats caused the global price of sugar to plummet and rendered plantations unprofitable. Sugar was as important to the world economy then as is oil to our economy today. The substantive drop in the price of sugar on world markets as a result of the African revolution in Haiti, meant that European nations like the UK could no longer afford to maintain the huge military garrisons need to quell African insurrections and revolts.

Of course, looking at the media and on line, you wouldn’t know the significance of August 23rd. The Government ignores the UN day and refuses to formally acknowledge the day in stark contrast to the support enjoyed by Holocaust Memorial day. Here the whole national curriculum is subverted to prioritise the Jewish Holocaust at the expense of African enslavement. We are eradicated from history, there can be no greater violation of our humanity, than the denial of our true historical agency.

Living in Britain every time I raise this issue in public, white British people and a small number of black people, will tell me it’s time to move on, time to forgive and forget. Newsflash people: I have no intention of ‘getting over’ the enslavement of Africans during transatlantic slavery.

I’m one of those Africans who can hear the woeful call of our ancestors and their plaintiff cries for justice. It is my belief, that transatlantic slavery is the greatest crime in human history, period. A crime so grievous, so prolonged in its duration, so brutal in its execution, that its contemporary legacy can be seen to continue to affect the modern day lives of the descendants of enslaved Africans.

When we examine the toxic legacy of slavery, racism, war, xenophobia, genocide, religious prejudice, racial inequalities in health, justice, the economy, education and lack of representation in public life, we see the continued social, philosophical and pseudo scientific legacy and present day realities of a deep hate born in the dark heart of Europeans 500 years ago

Such is the power of the idea of racial hierarchies in the context of white supremacy that this highly contagious social sickness has claimed more human lives than any other single human action in our entire history. I believe it was the failure to learn the lessons of slavery that led to the Jewish holocaust, of that I am 100% certain.

In Britain, as in Europe, the lack of acknowledgement of the huge contribution of hundreds of years of forced labour to the economies of Europe represents the most heinous assault on the memory of the dead and the lives of the living. The national curriculum taught in our schools is no more than colonial propaganda that hails the ingenuity, creativity and courage of white Britons with little more than an oblique reference to slavery.

This ideological attempt to rewrite history is a form of historical revisionism worthy of the Nazi claims they were the master race, descendants from mythological Ayran nations.

One look at my Twitter timeline tells you all you need to know about the pitiful state of some peoples understanding of the extent to which modern Britain benefitted from the enslavement of Africans:

‘ What about Africans selling each other?’ ‘ Muslims did it too!’ ‘ We abolished the slave trade!’

This European trait of minimising contemporary racism and refusing to acknowledge that enslaved Africans and colonial domination of the continent, has funded the building of modern the British infrastructure. Hospitals, schools, railways, motorways, council houses, parks, universities, whole towns and cities such as London, Liverpool, Birmingham and Bristol, the Army, the Navy, science and technological developments were all funded by the unprecedented profits generated by sugar and slaves.

So take a look around you what you see is a product of profits of slavery. Britain is a great nation built on great crimes. The British were forced to abolish slavery as a result widespread African revolts inspired by the Haiti uprising, the mass petition, campaign and sugar boycott (the first of its kind) led by the ordinary people of Britain against the Government and plantoccracy, and the fall in the world price of sugar.

Wilberforce did not ‘free the slaves’, like most MP’s he joined the campaign when all the hard work was done. In my estimation, it was Thomas Clarkson who was the outstanding British man, a man who should be regarded as an icon for the British anti-racism and human rights movements.

The African, Olaudah Equiano autobiography about his enslaved life (again the first of its kind) was read and heard by thousands of working class Britons who heard for the first time authentic accounts of plantation life and were horrified. We do well to remember these are people who have never met an African in their life, but who were compelled by common humanity to rise up in the first and largest politically lobby campaign in British political history.

Forget Wilberforce, it was foremost African revolutionaries who made the plantation system ungovernable at huge cost, Olaudah Equinanoh and the likes of Thomas Clarkson to whom we owe a huge debt of gratitude for our freedom today.

In 1833 the Slavers received their compensation upon abolition. The previously enslaved Africans were simply re-employed as the labourers and sent back to the field.

The UN’s Irina Bokova message for August 23rd

“The crime of slavery has forged irreversible bonds between peoples and continents, and reminds all peoples of the world that their destinies are linked, because their histories and identities were partly made across the seas, sometimes even on other continents,” The history of the slave trade is that of a battle, and eventually a victory, for freedom and human rights, symbolized she continued, noting that this message and the spirit of the Day, dovetailed with the Decade's goal to promote knowledge of and respect for the contribution of people of African descent to cultural diversity and the development of societies’.

On August the 1st recognised as Emancipation Day by Africans across the world, 7,000 people marched on the annual Reparations March from Brixton to Downing Street. This was the biggest black march to be had this year and guess what? It was ignored by the mainstream media. Worst of all this important day s is being ignored by us. That has got to change if we are to achieve success in claiming reparations.

In 2016 we have to seriously reclaim this day and step up our reparations campaign. We are coming - expect us.

Lee Jasper