The time has come

Bert Samuels, GUEST COLUMNIST

Enslaved

Oh when I think of my long-suffering race,

For weary centuries despised, oppressed,

Enslaved and lynched, denied a human place

In the great life line of the Christian West;

And in the Black Land disinherited,

Robbed in the ancient country of its birth,

My heart grows sick with hate, becomes as lead,

For this my race that has no home on earth.

Then from the dark depths of my soul I cry

To the avenging angel to consume

The white man's world of wonders utterly:

Let it be swallowed up in earth's vast womb,

Or upward roll as sacrificial smoke

To liberate my people from its yoke!

- Claude McKay (1889-1948)

Consider Jamaica 200 hundred years ago. It is 1813, with no freedom in sight for our great-grandparents living as slaves to some wealthy British family which has accumulated its wealth from 300 years of our fore-parents' free labour. The talk of freedom by slaves is seen as a worn-out idea, with the slaves themselves feeling that there will be no end to this three century-long way-of-life. Their hopelessness is based in the stories of parents before them, and in the living memories of survivors of this horrific and unprecedented treatment of one race by another. They despair in the failed attempts at escape or overthrowing of the oppressor class of slave owners.

That black men would walk free in Jamaica one day seemed more remote an idea then than the present demand of the now-free modern proponents of compensation for the centuries of slave labour. The just demand for payment to the survivors of the millions who laboured for three centuries will be a long walk, and as unwelcome an idea as freedom itself was to slave owners 200 years prior to today.

Let us remind ourselves that many who escaped were hunted (some by Maroons), returned and suffered amputation of the legs they used to escape. Teaching brave and rebellious slaves a lesson was crudely - but unceasingly - followed by the owners. No chance of the taste, talk, or desire for freedom was to be entertained. The lost lives of the 500 slaves executed with our national hero, Sam Sharpe, attest to this. Spies, lackeys and traitors were the weapons of the owners who could not let themselves imagine the 'nightmare' of freed Africans walking about in Jamaica, the land they captured and grew to love as their own. The fertile plains were fecund with their lush harvests of sugar, sweated over by bitter black labour, to sweeten the cups of British folk. That tea was never fully paid for, the labour input was never calculated in the bottom line, and today, those workers' descendants' demand is a just and serious call to account.

WILL TO WALK

The will to walk in Jamaica as free women and men was never destroyed by the whips, guns, and knives used to control. Freedom came, late as it was, 300 hundred years after the trans-Atlantic slave trade began. Fighting for freedom was a singular and focused task, as it had to be. No one stood for us, and none of us could have stood for the other to make the British Parliament consider our claims alongside the claims of the planters for compensation of the slaves the latter were about to lose. No slave had a seat in their Parliament. With our hands still chained, the planters demanded and got their money. No court in Jamaica recognised us as humans, so no claim could have been made by us then. Even white abolitionists - not being slaves themselves - could not fully empathise with our just entitlement in 1838 for redress beyond mere freedom. The appropriate time - we are now told - was to have made our claims alongside the oppressors, the planters. We were to have competed with lettered, capitalist, influential English planters in their Parliament when we were not even considered capable of being litigants at the time! So they paid others - their own - and now that we are ready and able to defend our claim, they sit on their chests full of sugar money, and tell us we are too late.

REVISED SENSE OF JUSTICE

Today, with a revised sense of justice, those who hold the money must consider that the planters' losses were only the slaves, for which they were compensated. Slaves had lost their freedom - something the planters had always had - and for 300 years' worth of unpaid labour plus the long years of accumulated crimes against humanity, they were not even considered for compensation. The losers have now come to the table for their case to be considered. The claimants are dead; they died in slavery. The planters' money is alive and well, but those who hold it say that, in law, we are out of time; that our claim cannot be resurrected to share in that identifiable, unjust enrichment.

The time has come. We are ready to lay before the Court of Justice our long-outstanding claim for reparations of the centuries of back-breaking, soul-excoriating work our fore-fathers bled into the prosperity of their owners. That prosperity has only grown in these ensuing years of preparation that we, the children of those wretched slaves, have been climbing out of the muck of colonial repression. We educated ourselves. We studied the narratives. We pored over the records. We now know the full truth, and we are documenting the claim our ancestors could not. The time has come. Pay us for their blood.

Bert Samuels is an attorney-at-law and a member of the National Commission on Reparation (NCR). Email feedback to bert.samuels@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com