Millersville University
         <beepsie@worldnet.att.net>

Chris Lowe's thoughts on Reparations concentrate mosty on the
American case, which is, in my opinion, much easier to make than the
African one.  But reparations issues are worth considering in African
history because they force us as historians to render the famous
"verdict of history" which a surprising number of people seem to care
about.  The problem is, the verdict can't be delivered in a form that
will satisfy most of those who call for reparations for Africa, who
pose the question the way it was once put to me by a hostile member
of the audience in a presentation on the slave trade in Miami:   "Who
was responsible for the slave trade, Africans or Europeans?"

Obviously, neither continent had democratic, responsible governments
that could engage in activities in which all the people of their
respective continents could be held somehow accountable.  But beyond
this, the process of enslavement was far too complex a combination of
war, diplomacy, raiding and brigandage to make a straightforward
answer possible.  When the rulers of Akwamu decided in the 1720s  to
dispatch raiders, _sikading_ to attack border villages of Akyem and
other neighboring countries, were they simply trying to wear down
enemies by draining manpower and keeping them offguard in a situation
of potential violence, or were they engaged in nothing more than a
form of economic activity like hunting wild animals in order to sell
them off?

Were there any African wars (from which the losers were enslaved) that
were caused by anything other than the demands of the slave trade?  If
so, how many, where, and when?  Were there some with mixed motives--a
little politics, a little slave raiding--and how do we assess them?
When the Portuguese governor of Angola Luis Mendes de Vasconcelos
decided to make war on Ndongo in 1617, he probably did have getting
rich through the proceeds of the sale of slaves as a very important
objective, as even Portuguese observers of the time noted.  But when
in the midst of the war that followed, when Queen Njinga, who led a
heroic defence against this sort of Portuguese attack complained to
the Portuguese authorities in 1626 that one of their puppet rulers had
illegally siezed sixty-nine "pieces" (a particularly dehumanizing term
for slaves) she was sending to market to sell, is she equally
culpable?  How precisely would a court of law assign reparations to
the descendents of these two?

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