{"id":124,"date":"2006-12-01T15:06:41","date_gmt":"2006-12-01T19:06:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=124"},"modified":"2006-12-01T15:14:52","modified_gmt":"2006-12-01T19:14:52","slug":"mr-blairs-regrets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=124","title":{"rendered":"Mr. Blair’s Regrets"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Linda E. Edwards<\/i> <\/p>\n

\"TonySo Mr. Blair regrets that Britain participated in the Atlantic Slave Trade. How gracious of him. I wonder, though, why his regrets, as if he is declining an invitation, was not addressed simultaneously in The Times, The Guardian, and The Independent. These are the papers created and sustained by profits from slavery. Why address it to a paper in the Black community?
\n
\nIt seems to me that the direction of the regrets should have been a universal call to all British institutions that profitted from the Slave Trade: the shipbuilders of Liverpool, the banks of London and Scotland, the insurers, the manufacturers of cheap good used to trade for humans- they should all be called upon, not only to express regret, but to straight up apologise, and to take corrective action for the ill-gotten profiteering from the Atlantic Slave Trade. The slave trade gave rise to the Industrial Revolution, so the profits were spread pretty far, and have continued to multiply expoentially, while every year the G-8 countries get together and hold a pity-party for Africa and agree to dole out a pittance- many of whose publicly made pledges are not honored later. <\/p>\n

Africans of the diaspora are not idiots. <\/p>\n

In 1838, when slaves were finally freed in Trinidad, Jonas Mohammed Bath, head of the Mandingo Society, wrote to the monarch pointing out that the Mandingoes who had purchased their own freedom, were owed the six hundred pounds each that the slave owners were compensated for each slave freed. He was laughed at in Truinidad for so doing. Who ever heard of compensating a slave for having to purchase himself and his wife and child as well as other members of his community?. In any case the letter was written in Arabic, which no British monarch ever read, and Bath never got a reply, but the money was never paid either.(Documented by Prof. Carl Campbell of UWI Journal of Caribbean Studies) <\/p>\n

So Mr. Blair’s regrets are just words. Actions speak louder. What will Britain, the United States, France, Spain, Holland, and Denmark do about the depredations of their sailors into the cultures of Africa, into the population of Africa, which lost an estimated fifty to a hundred million people, its ablest bodies? What will new world countries like the USA, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico and the Caribbean nations do to erase the evil legacy of slavery, where in every country named, (including the European ones)the people of the African diaspora occupy the lowest rung of the economic ladder? <\/p>\n

What will Britain do about the people of Diego Garcia and other islands of the Chagos Archipelago, whose African population was forcible removed less than thirty-five years ago, to make way for an American base on Diego Garcia? What will Mr. Blair do to get the British Museun to return the Benin Masks stolen more than a hundred years ago from the Kingdom of Benin in Nigeria? These are all slave related questions, because they apply to people of African origin, and the attitude to Africans engendered by the slave trade led to these subsequent actions – a total contempt for the welfare of the people of Diego Garcia, and a brazen theft of sacred African artifacts. <\/p>\n

No, Mr. Blair, you can regret not going to a party that you were invited to. There was no RSVP on the bills of lading that took my ancestors away from their sacred homelands. Regrets are not enough. Our colonial masters taught us the language well enough for us to understand a watered down non-apology when we see it. <\/p>\n

What of the long term effects of racism on the psyches of both those whose ancestors were made slaves, and those who profitted from the evil trade? Will regrets address and amerliorate those issues? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Linda E. Edwards So Mr. Blair regrets that Britain participated in the Atlantic Slave Trade. How gracious of him. I wonder, though, why his regrets, as if he is declining an invitation, was not addressed simultaneously in The Times, The Guardian, and The Independent. These are the papers created and sustained by profits from … Continue reading Mr. Blair’s Regrets<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}