Satyajeet Marar | I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and soul-searching lately. It has become a regular part of my procrastination between work and macchiato-sipping sessions in my favourite cafe. I’ve come to the conclusion that it is time to pay reparations for the injustices of slavery and colonialism. Hear me out because this makes complete cents (pun intended).

For over 200 years, the Atlantic slave trade brought vast amounts of wealth to the west. America’s slave owners and their descendants built an inter-generational fortune which can be traced to the forced toil of millions of Africans. It is not enough that we acknowledge this historical injustice.

Acknowledgement doesn’t put avocado and toast on the table.

Money does. And the west must pay.

Justice can be served easily through a lump-sum payment to the descendants of the slaves. It might result in a billion dollar loss to the American GDP which means a few less bombs dropped on patchy-bearded terrorists in the Afghan mountains and a few less scholarships for liberal arts students, but isn’t this a small price to pay for justice? The UK can pay too – they abolished slavery well before the US which means they get a small discount. Fair’s fair.

Actually, while we’re at it – let’s follow that paper trail.

Europeans often didn’t need to wage war against the Africans to capture slaves – African tribes and kingdoms were doing that themselves. The kings of Asante in West Africa, for example, subjugated peoples to their North for the purpose of trading them to Europeans’. This supplemented their existing wealth amassed from trade in kola nuts and gold. Conveniently, the Ashanti kingdom survives today as a sub-national, proto-state in modern day Ghana and a bill for reparations running into hundreds of millions of dollars can easily be mailed to the Ghanaian parliament. I am sure Ghana and other modern-day African states will have no qualms about doing what is fair. So what if it means bankrupting some of their treasuries?

But the Europeans and the Africans weren’t the only ones involved in the slave trade. The Arabs had that idea centuries before the Europeans. Historians estimate that up to 17 million people were sold into slavery on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa with over 5 million African slaves bought by Muslim slave traders and taken to towns and cities in the Middle East by land and sea between 1500 and 1900. As early as 869 AD, there was a slave revolt in modern-day Iraq caused by protests against harsh conditions. Considering that many of these slaves were used as concubines and some of the male slaves were even castrated, it isn’t hard to imagine why.CONTINUES...

READ MORE AT: Time for reparations for the slave trade? | The Spectator Australia http://j.mp/2rbYjom