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One of the reasons why some of us continue to demand reparations is the impression held by some that an act of genocide was committed against us. Those of us who continue to believe this really do not understand history.
The world of two hundred years ago was very different from ours today. Slavery and all of the “atrocities” that go with it may be seen as detestable today, but most people at that time considered such acts as normal. Also, many proponents of the claim that slavery was genocide are confusing criminal acts with genocidal ones.
Firstly, even if the slave traders (meaning both the Europeans and the Africans) planned to exterminate all of the Africans who were made slaves, that would not have been considered genocide at the time, as the slaves weren’t even considered people, but property. However, the question that these “reparationists” should ask is, “Was there a plan to exterminate these slaves?” Some would say yes. However, history is very clear that the true answer is no.
Consider this: Why would the Europeans go through all of that trouble of buying slaves from Africans only to have them killed, instead of to work on their plantations in the West? Clearly, the Europeans wanted labour, not corpses. They knew that the dead could not work.
Of course, it will be claimed that the slaves were “brutally” worked once they got here, they were “poorly” fed, many of them were thrown off the slaves ships and many were subjected to “abuses” here in the West. All of this, it is being claimed, amounted to a very high mortality rate, which, according to many, constitutes genocide. However, this is not so.
It may be true that slaves in the West were subjected to very harsh treatment, the type that caused many of them to die. However, such acts were not crimes then. Even if we were to look at those acts within the context of our time now, they may be considered crimes, but they certainly cannot be seen as genocidal.
In particular, the diet of the slaves has been cited as a good reason to consider slavery as an attempt at genocide. The slave diet, it is claimed caused the slaves to have shorter lives and to cause their descendants — us — to have all sorts of health problems today. However, this is all wrong.
The main aim of the planters in giving these slaves that diet was to get the most work out of them at the lowest cost. If their diet was a cause of their descendants — us — having these health “problems” today, these planters cannot be blamed. The actions of the planters were for economic reasons. It isn’t as if they would have known of the long-term effects, if any, of what they were feeding these slaves.
An act of genocide involves the killing of an entire people. If slavery were genocide, there would have been no slavery — and no slaves. Indeed, the terms “slavery” and “genocide” cannot go together, as one makes the other impossible.
There were no moral issues with slavery back then and for sure, no one saw anything genocidal within the institution. This is one of the primary reasons why equating slavery with genocide is nonsense. However, even if we looked at slavery from today’s moral and legal perspectives, we may see some crimes, but we will definitely see no genocide.
Michael A. Dingwall
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is a red herring at best since no one with even a passing acquaintance with Caribbean or other slavery would equate it with genocide.But what you fail to address is that slavery in much of the world — including SVG — was indeed accompanied by actual or potential genocide: the attempt to exterminate the indigenous people who stood in the way of plantation slavery through their occupation of lands the colonists coveted.
Anyone familiar with the history of SVG would surely recognize that the exile of most of the Garifuna from their homeland was one small step from their extermination had they not been fairly easily subjugated during the “Carib Wars.”
A lot of the people in the islands are still eating slave food 171 years later. Salt fish, pig tails, pig feet. pig snout, pig head. Beef bones, chicken back and ground provisions such as tania and dasheen.
The food generally fed to slaves was in general what they ate in Africa, perhaps even better.
They should be making more claims against the Africans that sold our people to the Portuguese, and the Spanish and the crap they fed them. Because the Portuguese and the Spanish were the exclusive marketers of African slaves for a hundred years before other Europeans became involved.
So if you think the slaves diet was bad, why are our poor people still eating the same diet today? Is it because they are now slaves of a regime and party known as the ULP and its nasty spiteful government.