Bert Samuels | If only they realised they were slaves

The workers in the reparation movement have long recognised the importance of public education to garnering wider support for their efforts.

We, Jamaicans, have only just begun to write our own history. For centuries, we have been fed the views, prejudices, and deliberate misinformation of those who had no interest in, or empathy for, our people. As a young student, I was not taught our history prior to Africans arriving to Jamaica in chains. This explains why many of us are focused more on our emancipation and lives as slaves, and not on our years of glory prior to the sad history of the transatlantic slave trade.

The low self-esteem of a people miseducated to feel that our bloodline is simply that of former enslaved people - and nothing else - condemns us to being twice defeated in the race of life. As a young man, I would hear domestic servants - in discussions at bus stops - making it clear that "dem no like work fi black people" and could not understand that self-hate mindset, until I matured into a deeper understanding of the concept of post-slavery traumatic syndrome.

I firmly believe it is this trauma that is responsible for the view that our enslavement is long gone, that it should be forgotten, that we should be happy and content that we are free, that we need to move on, and that our enslavers owed us nothing.

How this view persists, alongside the knowledge that British planters were paid multimillion pounds as compensation for the cost of them freeing our bodies from slavery, while we received no wages for hundreds of years of free labour, is worthy of deep study.

It is, in my view, a coping mechanism to remain in denial over events too traumatic to reconcile, and demonstrative of the self-hate we now battle. In other words, how can the perpetrators of the evils of slavery be deserving of compensation while their victims accept freedom without a penny in their pockets?

BACKWARD STATE OF DENIAL

It seems so disturbingly easy for those who deny that we should be compensated to advocate that we should accept years of discrimination without redress. This irony stretches to the United States, in its own hypocrisy when, long before slavery ended there, President Thomas Jefferson said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This was America's boast at the very same time that Jefferson and his white brethren owned slaves!

We cannot remain in this backward state of denial. It is said that Harriett Tubman - 'Moses' to the enslaved people she helped escape from southern US plantations to freedom in the north - when asked how she saved hundreds through the Underground Railroad, replied, "I could have saved thousands, if only I had been able to convince them they were slaves."

The call for the support of reparation is a call to emancipate our minds - to understand that we seek to repair the ills of the past. We seek compensation for the descendants of people compelled to build a new nation in 1838, while penniless, landless, and illiterate. Ours is a just cause to ensure that, like those who benefited from the enslavement of our forefathers, we, as a people, receive and invest the economic benefit denied them, in order to better prosper and pursue our own happiness.

- Bert S. Samuels is an attorney-at-law and member of the National Council on Reparation. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and bert.samuels@gmail.com.