Posté le: Mer 17 Aoû 2005 21:57 Sujet du message: L'empire britannique doit 7.5 milliard de £ au pleuple noir.
Si c'est j'ai bien il y eu un show tv par rapport à cela.
The Amount Britain would have to pay in reparations for its part in the transatlantic slave trade has been calculated at a whopping £7.5 trillion.
The figure, set to be revealed in a new Channel 4 documentary, comprises £4 trillion in unpaid wages, £2.5 trillion for unjust enrichment and £1 trillion for pain and suffering. Theologian and broadcaster Dr Robert Beckford consults an economic historian, a compensation lawyer and an expert on loss of earnings to calculate the true cost of slavery for the programme The Empire Pays Back.
‘The figure we arrive at makes the sums talked about at the G8 pale into significance,’ Beckford (pictured), told New Nation. ‘I wouldn’t expect that £7.5 trillion to be paid, because it would bankrupt the country, but it provides a measure of how much we contributed to Britain and how much we would be due.
‘It’s also a measure for foreign policy. Many of the poorest African and Caribbean countries were bound up in slavery. It provides a new way of talking about aid and turns it on its head. Aid is often seen as charity, but it’s really about justice.’
In the hour-long documentary, Beckford looks at the legacy of slavery and how it impacts on everyday life in Britain through institutions such as the Bank of England, Barclays Bank, the National Gallery and the monarchy.
He visits The Guildhall in London and stands before the statue of William Beckford, a former Lord Mayor and slave master who once ‘owned’ Beckford’s ancestors and made his fortune off the back of his slaves. And he visits Liverpool, where slave children are immortalised in carvings on the side of one of the city’s major bank buildings.
Beckford tells viewers that, when slavery was abolished in 1834, slave owners received £20 million in compensation while the slaves received nothing. He argues that, while Britain has prospered from the toil of our ancestors, both here and on sugar plantations in the West Indies, African Caribbeans are still paying the price of slavery.
We are twice as likely to be unemployed, earn 60 per cent less than white people and there are more black men in prisons than universities.
Beckford may not be telling us anything we don’t already know, but he hopes to reach out to a wider audience: the white people who think these problems have nothing to do with them, and the African Caribbeans who believe we should just move on.
‘I’m hoping to raise consciousness of how Britain benefited from the slave trade and how the repercussions continue to negatively impact on African Caribbean life,’ he says.
‘We are looking at issues of employment, racism and underachievement as well as the economic difficulties experienced by Africa and parts of the Caribbean. They are linked to hundreds of years of exploitation.’
But just how likely is it that black Britons will receive reparations for something that happened so long ago? The US, which abolished slavery 30 years after Britain, seems to be moving in that direction.
In January, JP Morgan Chase – America’s second largest bank – admitted it took ownership of around 1,000 slaves as collateral on loans during the 1800s and set up a $5 million scholarship for African American students as a form of apology.
In June, financial services company Wachovia Corporation, based in North Carolina, apologised to African Americans after learning that two institutions it acquired – the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company and the Bank of Charleston – had owned around 690 slaves between them.
The company pledged to work with community partners to increase awareness of African American history. As yet there has been nothing to indicate that the same could happen here.
In 2001, slavery was condemned as a crime against humanity at the United Nations conference against racism in Durban, South Africa, but it was not until last year that the British government accepted it as such. Speaking in a Commons debate, Home Office Minister Fiona Mactaggart conceded: ‘Slavery is a crime against humanity. Slavery and the slave trade were and are appalling tragedies in the history of humanity.’ However, she stopped short of supporting reparations.
In an interview with New Nation in April, Prime Minister Tony Blair backed calls for a Slavery Memorial Day but added that he did not see reparations as ‘the way forward’.
Reparations campaigner Esther Stanford, of the Black Quest for Justice Campaign, says: ‘We launched a legal action [for reparations] in 2004. The response we had is that the British government does not acknowledge crimes against humanity that were committed prior to 2001.
‘The law in the UK is such that only the Attorney-General is empowered to bring perpetrators to trial for crimes against humanity. In effect, the legal system limits true justice from happening because it would be asking the Attorney-General of the British government to bring the British government to trial.’
Stanford believes there should be a ‘global approach’ to reparations and her group is working closely with N’COBRA (the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America). She says: ‘The battle we have is getting people of African descent to own the reparations movement and to see that their contemporary situation is not because they are lazy, bad or incapable but because of the legacies of the African holocaust.’
But others believe reparations are not the answer. Barrister Peter Herbert says: ‘It’s worth pursuing but if we are looking to the courts in Europe to provide reparations the track record is not good. They will probably say they don’t have jurisdiction or they may give such a nominal reward it’s hardly worth the bother.
‘I give all credit to the people who campaign and struggle for reparations but if we were written a cheque for £7.5 trillion tomorrow I don’t think the situation of Africa would improve. There would be an argument about who gets what. I think it creates a diversion. I would far rather see proper debt relief for African countries than people who are indigenous to Africa or the Caribbean having a few pounds extra in their bank accounts.’
But for Beckford, reparation is about retribution. ‘I am in no way saying that a cash dividend should go into the pocket of every African and Caribbean person,’ he says. ‘Reparation is about more than just finance; it’s about healing. I want to show that you can heal the past just by acknowledging what took place. Where a wrong is done in the past, if it continues to have a negative impact on the present, we need to make it right.’
He wants to see a monument to slaves in London, celebrating the contribution they made in creating the Britain we have today and acknowledging what was done to them.
The Empire Pays Back will be broadcast on Channel 4 at 8pm on Monday 15 August.
ki nèg nwè ki nèg klè
ki nèg klè ki nèg nwè
tout nèg a nèg
nèg klè pè nèg nwè
nèg nwè pa lè wè nèg klè
nèg nwè ké wéy klè
senti i sa roune nèg klè
mè nèg klè ké wéy klè a toujou nèg
sa ki fèt pou nèg vin' blang?
blang té gen chivé pli long?
pou senblé yé nou trapé chivé plat kon fil mang!!!
mandé to fanm...!
mè pou kisa blang lé vin' nwè?
ha... savé ki avan vin' blan yé té ja nèg!
a nou mèm ké nou mèm dépi nânni nânnan...
chinwa soti, kouli soti, indyen soti, blang soti
mèm koté nèg soti
ROBERT BECKFORD’S The Empire Pays Back (Channel 4) frequently felt more like stunt-TV than documentary; like Dennis Pennis with pretensions. What obligations does modern Britain have to the descendants of slaves? What is the culpability of 21st-century corporations which have, in the past couple of centuries, unknowingly acquired companies that may once have earned some of their profits through servicing some aspect of the slave trade? Slavery was clearly morally repugnant, but broke no laws of the time: so does that mean we should respond to it any differently to, say, the Holocaust, which contravened international law? These are intriguing questions which seem worthy of more grown-up investigation than Beckford’s prankish approach.
“I believe African slaves were ripped off by the British Empire,” Beckford began, punchily. “I’m going to track down some heirs to Britain’s slave past and ask them to pay reparations for the slave trade. To me, there’s no doubt that we African-Caribbeans are owed for our unpaid labour.” Of course, he never really got to ask anyone. He did stalk the Queen one night as she attended a banquet in the City of London, aiming to dun her for the £7.5 trillion he reckons that descendants of Britain’s slaves are owed, but he didn’t even catch a glimpse.
Beckford is a lecturer in the School of Historical Studies at Birmingham University, which makes his extravagant leaps of logic feel even more dispiriting. When he appears on a London radio programme to goad Londoners to pay up, he interprets their scornful response to his demands as postcolonial shock, rather than to dismay at his intellectual flabbiness.
An example? Try this: “Every day, African-Caribbeans in Britain experience the economic legacy of slavery: African-Caribbean men are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as white men; black workers earn up to 16 per cent less than whites; and more African-Caribbean men enter prison than university. To me, black people are still paying for slavery and should be compensated. But some people just don’t get it!” These statistics may all be true, but what is the link? We ’re not doubting that there is one, but couldn’t Beckford have taken a moment to detail it for us? Women still earn less than men; more men go to prison than women. And so? Statistics are meaningless unless anchored to something more solid than passion and polemics.
When Beckford asks passers-by if they think it would be a good idea to have some kind of permanent memorial to Britain’s slave past, and the passers-by say that they do, their response convinces Beckford that “British people do have a sense of fair play and want justice done.” The implication, given that this was the culmination of the film, is that the justice they want done is the trillion-pound reparations that Beckford had been demanding for the previous hour. But what the passers-by backed was Beckford’s worthwhile suggestion for some kind of memorial.
There is certainly a fascinating programme to be made about the history, and the moral and social legacy of Britain’s slave past. But this wasn’t it. This was Speakers’ Corner TV.
The Week The Women Went (BBC Three) was a lower-budget version of Channel 4’s new US blockbuster drama, Lost; only instead of a bunch of passengers stranded on an island after a plane crash, there is a bunch of men stranded in an ancient Nottinghamshire village after they’ve been abandoned for a week by their womenfolk and left to fend for themselves.
Of course, the programme-makers’ idea was evidently that when the men’s wives announced: “When we are away you’re going to have to do all the cooking, cleaning, washing, shopping, and look after the children,” these undomesticated men would look back helplessly and start blubbing about how they couldn’t cook even a slice of toast on account of not being able to operate any machinery that doesn’t come with its own remote control handset; whereas the men just looked at their wives with a bold air of adventure and said: “We have children?” The menfolk’s first decision? To order in 28 tonnes of concrete. Now there’s something that those flighty women never thought of as they selfishly busied themselves raising the children, finding schools, cooking meals, washing and darning, booking holidays and paying the gas bill.
ki nèg nwè ki nèg klè
ki nèg klè ki nèg nwè
tout nèg a nèg
nèg klè pè nèg nwè
nèg nwè pa lè wè nèg klè
nèg nwè ké wéy klè
senti i sa roune nèg klè
mè nèg klè ké wéy klè a toujou nèg
sa ki fèt pou nèg vin' blang?
blang té gen chivé pli long?
pou senblé yé nou trapé chivé plat kon fil mang!!!
mandé to fanm...!
mè pou kisa blang lé vin' nwè?
ha... savé ki avan vin' blan yé té ja nèg!
a nou mèm ké nou mèm dépi nânni nânnan...
chinwa soti, kouli soti, indyen soti, blang soti
mèm koté nèg soti
Je suis en angleterre actuellement et ça me fait ch** mais d'une force d'avoir râter cette émission... Ce devait être super intéressant.
Mais bon, il faudra attendre encore longtemps pour voir les 7,5 milliards de £
The wealth of the west was built on Africa's exploitation
Britain has never faced up to the dark side of its imperial history
Richard Drayton
Saturday August 20, 2005
The Guardian
Britain was the principal slaving nation of the modern world. In The Empire Pays Back, a documentary broadcast by Channel 4 on Monday, Robert Beckford called on the British to take stock of this past. Why, he asked, had Britain made no apology for African slavery, as it had done for the Irish potato famine? Why was there no substantial public monument of national contrition equivalent to Berlin's Holocaust Museum? Why, most crucially, was there no recognition of how wealth extracted from Africa and Africans made possible the vigour and prosperity of modern Britain? Was there not a case for Britain to pay reparations to the descendants of African slaves?
These are timely questions in a summer in which Blair and Bush, their hands still wet with Iraqi blood, sought to rebrand themselves as the saviours of Africa. The G8's debt-forgiveness initiative was spun successfully as an act of western altruism. The generous Massas never bothered to explain that, in order to benefit, governments must agree to "conditions", which included allowing profit-making companies to take over public services. This was no gift; it was what the merchant bankers would call a "debt-for-equity swap", the equity here being national sovereignty. The sweetest bit of the deal was that the money owed, already more than repaid in interest, had mostly gone to buy industrial imports from the west and Japan, and oil from nations who bank their profits in London and New York. Only in a bookkeeping sense had it ever left the rich world. No one considered that Africa's debt was trivial compared to what the west really owes Africa.
Beckford's experts estimated Britain's debt to Africans in the continent and diaspora to be in the trillions of pounds. While this was a useful benchmark, its basis was mistaken. Not because it was excessive, but because the real debt is incalculable. For without Africa and its Caribbean plantation extensions, the modern world as we know it would not exist.
Profits from slave trading and from sugar, coffee, cotton and tobacco are only a small part of the story. What mattered was how the pull and push from these industries transformed western Europe's economies. English banking, insurance, shipbuilding, wool and cotton manufacture, copper and iron smelting, and the cities of Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, multiplied in response to the direct and indirect stimulus of the slave plantations.
Joseph Inikori's masterful book, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England, shows how African consumers, free and enslaved, nurtured Britain's infant manufacturing industry. As Malachy Postlethwayt, the political economist, candidly put it in 1745: "British trade is a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power on an African foundation."
In The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz asked why Europe, rather than China, made the breakthrough first into a modern industrial economy. To his two answers - abundant coal and New World colonies - he should have added access to west Africa. For the colonial Americas were more Africa's creation than Europe's: before 1800, far more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic. New World slaves were vital too, strangely enough, for European trade in the east. For merchants needed precious metals to buy Asian luxuries, returning home with profits in the form of textiles; only through exchanging these cloths in Africa for slaves to be sold in the New World could Europe obtain new gold and silver to keep the system moving. East Indian companies led ultimately to Europe's domination of Asia and its 19th-century humiliation of China.
Africa not only underpinned Europe's earlier development. Its palm oil, petroleum, copper, chromium, platinum and in particular gold were and are crucial to the later world economy. Only South America, at the zenith of its silver mines, outranks Africa's contribution to the growth of the global bullion supply.
The guinea coin paid homage in its name to the west African origins of one flood of gold. By this standard, the British pound since 1880 should have been rechristened the rand, for Britain's prosperity and its currency stability depended on South Africa's mines. I would wager that a large share of that gold in the IMF's vaults which was supposed to pay for Africa's debt relief had originally been stolen from that continent.
There are many who like to blame Africa's weak governments and economies, famines and disease on its post-1960 leadership. But the fragility of contemporary Africa is a direct consequence of two centuries of slaving, followed by another of colonial despotism. Nor was "decolonisation" all it seemed: both Britain and France attempted to corrupt the whole project of political sovereignty.
It is remarkable that none of those in Britain who talk about African dictatorship and kleptocracy seem aware that Idi Amin came to power in Uganda through British covert action, and that Nigeria's generals were supported and manipulated from 1960 onwards in support of Britain's oil interests. It is amusing, too, to find the Telegraph and the Daily Mail - which just a generation ago supported Ian Smith's Rhodesia and South African apartheid - now so concerned about human rights in Zimbabwe. The tragedy of Mugabe and others is that they learned too well from the British how to govern without real popular consent, and how to make the law serve ruthless private interest. The real appetite of the west for democracy in Africa is less than it seems. We talk about the Congo tragedy without mentioning that it was a British statesman, Alec Douglas-Home, who agreed with the US president in 1960 that Patrice Lumumba, its elected leader, needed to "fall into a river of crocodiles".
African slavery and colonialism are not ancient or foreign history; the world they made is around us in Britain. It is not merely in economic terms that Africa underpins a modern experience of (white) British privilege. Had Africa's signature not been visible on the body of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, would he have been gunned down on a tube at Stockwell? The slight kink of the hair, his pale beige skin, broadcast something misread by police as foreign danger. In that sense, his shooting was the twin of the axe murder of Anthony Walker in Liverpool, and of the more than 100 deaths of black people in mysterious circumstances while in police, prison or hospital custody since 1969.
This universe of risk, part of the black experience, is the afterlife of slavery. The reverse of the medal is what WEB DuBois called the "wage of whiteness", the world of safety, trustworthiness, welcome that those with pale skins take for granted. The psychology of racism operates even among those who believe in human equality, shaping unequal outcomes in education, employment, criminal justice. By its light, such all-white clubs as the G8 continue to meet in comfort.
Early this year, Gordon Brown told journalists in Mozambique that Britain should stop apologising for colonialism. The truth is, though, that Britain has never even faced up to the dark side of its imperial history, let alone begun to apologise.
Dr Richard Drayton is a senior lecturer in imperial and extra-European history since 1500 at Cambridge University. His book The Caribbean and the Making of the Modern World will be published in 2006.
ki nèg nwè ki nèg klè
ki nèg klè ki nèg nwè
tout nèg a nèg
nèg klè pè nèg nwè
nèg nwè pa lè wè nèg klè
nèg nwè ké wéy klè
senti i sa roune nèg klè
mè nèg klè ké wéy klè a toujou nèg
sa ki fèt pou nèg vin' blang?
blang té gen chivé pli long?
pou senblé yé nou trapé chivé plat kon fil mang!!!
mandé to fanm...!
mè pou kisa blang lé vin' nwè?
ha... savé ki avan vin' blan yé té ja nèg!
a nou mèm ké nou mèm dépi nânni nânnan...
chinwa soti, kouli soti, indyen soti, blang soti
mèm koté nèg soti
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