26 November 2006
Sunday
Tony Blair has stopped short of apologising for Britain’s role in the slave trade. I believe that the United States has also failed to apologise.
It seems to me that this is all nonsense. Why not apologise? What would be the implication? If the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom says he’s sorry – and, indeed, he says he’s sorry on behalf of the nation – that Britons sanctioned, participated in and profited from the slave trade – there’s nothing wrong with that. It seems to me it’s the right thing to do. There’s something of an irony in the fact there’s a controversy in one action that’s moral and healing in the tawdry history of an unprecedented crime against humanity.
Personally, I’m sorry that so much of the history of the United Sates is built on the blood of unknown and unrecognised men and women held as slaves. The whole concept, if you stop and think about it even for a moment, is so revolting and unimaginable, that you cannot conceive of any reasonable objection to a national and personal apology for it.
Consider: If your grandparents had been kidnapped from their homes, survived a hellish voyage in chains across the ocean and sold into involuntary servitude, would that not be sufficient crime against your ancestors for you to ask for an apology from the inheritors of the culture that committed that heinous crime? And it was even worse, you not only had to survive, you frequently had to survive completely alone, with strangers, fellow-slaves, who did not speak your language and worshipped different gods. Then, having survived these challenges, having been renamed, forced to worship the white man’s god and forced to labour at the whim and sole direction of the ‘master’, imagine the hopeless sense that there was no alternative to this existence, neither for you nor for your descendants (frequently products of a pairing in which you had no choice). It sure doesn’t seem to me that both personal and national apologies are out of order!
The argument may be about where you stop. Are the descendants of the victims entitled to reparations? Should money be given to the societies from which these people were taken? Well, probably not; I think our economies – made up of both former slaves and former ‘masters’ – would be stretched too far to pay for it. What we can do is ensure that we have created a fair and just society for the descendants of those people who suffered this enormous crime.
