Philip P. Smith* – Special for Other News
The Bahamas, 1st September 2021. In a strange sort of way, I feel for Mr. Andrew Bailey, the Chairman of the Bank of England, in office for just over one year, beginning his term just at the beginning of the COVID Pandemic. The Pandemic has been stressful for most people. Maybe it is COVID related stress, more than passion surrounding the “Black Lives Matter” Movement, which caused the Bank of England to engage in a Public Relations stunt promising to remove from public display paintings of certain former chairmen.[1] Those former Chairmen are identified by the Bank only as having being involved in the slave trade.
It is interesting that, just a few years ago, in 2015, an enthustiastic employee of the Bank of England proudly tweeted advice that the 1833 £20million loan made to pay reparations to registered slave owners had been satisfied![2] This, of course, elicited an angry response from Black citizens of Britain at this proof that some of their tax dollars had been used to pay slave owners reparations even up to 170 years after the original 1834 “gift” to them. The “deal” was that these private citizens would invest the “stimulus” money in Britain’s industrial revolution! It worked, as Britain rapidly expanded its industry and its economy.
And, of course, please recall that no payments were ever made to the enslaved who were to be “emancipated’ and who were also being required to provide a period of enforced free labour to the former owner equal in value to some £22.5Million‼‼ In short, the formerly enslaved paid to the slave owners @53% of the assessed “value” of those enslaved for their “emancipation”!
I just might be guilty of cynicism on this, but it seems to me that Britain’s Central Bank, “The Bank of England”, is playing a crass game of “cover-up” in its picture exercise. It appears to be nothing less than a ‘parlour trick’ hoping to provide useless comfort to Reparations Campaigners that they are making an impact on British sensibilities.
If the Bank of England played any part in this loan payment process then they all “played a part in the slave trade”. And, yes they certainly played their part in the loan payment process right up to 2015 – if not a major part.
This “picture removal exercise” may serve to salve their consciences, but it does absolutely nothing to advance the cause of Justice. The Ancestors – those who lived before and after “emancipation” – never received any reparations payments, though they were promised education, training for “free” life and land to cultivate. Their descendants are consciously being denied any Reparatory Justice by the sanctimonious hypocrites who go through the process of taking down statues and pictures of old white men dead for more than 150 years now.
This is a most abhorrent case of Justice Denied through seven generations now.
It took until just recently for the Gurkhas – whose brave comrades gave their lives to protect Britain during WWII – to get some legal rights in Britain.
Those who, at the invitation of the British Government, came from the British colonies in the Caribbean following World War II (the ‘Windrush” Generation) to work in coal mines and hospitals owing to labour shortages in the United Kingdom at the time, learned just how casually the British would deport them sixty years later.
Britain raped countries all over the world of their natural resources to feed British industrial needs during their “age of empire” from the seventeenth century into the mid-twentieth century.
Similar stories are rife for France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden. All are guilty of varying degrees of horror inflicted on less technologically abled societies in Africa, the Americas, the Middle East and Asia. None of these European states are even prepared to talk formally with the govrnments of formerly enslaved and colonised states. A perfectly logical and fair set of demands have been offered European States by the Caribbean Community.[3] Abject silence or denial of responsibility is the only response. Though some states have offered some compensation for past criminal activities, it is specific and does not seek to “repair the massive damages done”.[4]
The Church of England, with a history of ownership of Plantations and slaves in Barbados, have recently created a Commission to study the origin of the wealth in its “Queen Anne’s Bounty” $9.2Billion Endowment Fund.[5] There is reason to hope that, should the Commission find that the Fund is seriously tainted with the blood of enslaved people, talks will take place within the context of the CARICOM Ten Point Reparation Plan to help heal the wounds.
In the Americas, the European colonisers and their successor governments have all determined to coverup this part of their history rather than face the shame of their war crimes – kidnapping, rape, pillage, degrading human trafficking, murder, gross theft, to name but a few crimes.
One must remember that the Latin American elite who control the press – print and otherwise – is made up of the descendants of white Europe. They are the local inheritors of some of the stolen wealth. The “Liberator”, Simón Bolivar, was not an Indigenous or African man, but a member of the elite European colonisers. He “liberated” ethnic Europeans in an area of South America from direct Spanish control.
Indigenous and Black people in Brazil are still on the economic and political margins as is the general case in Latin America.
In the United States and Canada, the reality is of the descendants of white Europeans controlling the economic, social and political regimes. The Indigeneous People sufffered concerted efforts to eliminate them and their culture. In the United States, the average Black citizen’s wealth is just 10% of that of the average white citizen brought about by enslavement, succeeded by “Jim Crow” laws, racial descrimination and denial of basic human rights including that of voting.
Justice cries out for Reparations for the Indigeneous People and the descendants of enslaved Africans.
REPARATIONS NOW!
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/27/bank-of-england-removes-paintings-of-governors-linked-to-slavery.
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/30/fact-check-u-k-paid-off-debts-slave-owning-families-2015/3283908001/
[3] https://caricomreparations.org/caricom/caricoms-10-point-reparation-plan/
[4] https://www.france24.com/en/africa/20210528-germany-recognises-colonial-genocide-in-namibia-commits-%E2%82%AC1bn-in-reparations
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/16/c-of-e-investigates-possible-slave-trade-origins-of-92bn-fund
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*Philip Smith served three terms in the Bahamian Parliament. A former Trade Unionist, tourism manager and Ambassador, his social justice commitment as an activist youth continue in his politics.
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