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<emeagwali@mail.ccsu.edu>
Special thanks to Chris Lowe for his illuminating piece. Africa's claim
for reparations is not to be confined exclusively to the Atlantic Slave
Trade, crucial as it may be. We must also reflect on the well-documented
European military invasions of the 19th century and the genocidal wars of
occupation which prevailed? Africans fought valiantly for several decades
but millions lost their lives in the process. The pillage of historic
artifacts and antiquities from major kingdoms and empires, the best
documented being the Benin bronzes; the forced recruitment of continental
Africans to serve in European Civil Wars in 1914 and 1939, during the era of
British, French, German, Belgian, Portuguese and Italian colonial rule; the
years of colonial occupation; and the systematic pillage and degradation
which in turn would generate long costly wars of liberation in Algeria, the
Somali region, Kenya, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and after 1961
South Africa......these must all be taken into consideration. Moreover,
institutionalized racism was not confined to the Americas but extended into
settler colonies for most of the 20th century in the context of land
alienation, psychological warfare, forced labor, wrongful imprisonment and
widespread discrimination.
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