What Did the Black Man Do to Deserve this Suffering?

Sometime last year I watched the Hollywood blockbuster titled ‘’12 Years A Slave’’ starring Brad Pitt and the Nigerian-born actor, Chiwetel Ejiofor.  After watching the film, I was at a loss for words. It was a masterpiece. It was a powerful rendition of a true and heroic story. After watching the film I could not help asking myself the following question: what did the black man ever do to deserve such wickedness and suffering? What did our forefathers do to deserve such barbarity and mindless torture in the hands of those that held them captive in a distant land?

May God forgive those that brutalised and enslaved us. I cannot hate them. I can only love and forgive them because only love and forgiveness can drive out hate and heal the wounds that they inflicted on the souls of our people. What they did to us was far greater, far more damaging and far more devastating than the Germans ever did to the Jews. Though we are compelled to forgive by scripture, we must never forget.

And never must such a thing be allowed to happen again. No minority, whether he or she be black, brown, yellow, red, white or in any other way ‘’different’’ should be allowed to suffer like that or to feel the pain of humiliation, indignity, servitude, persecution and the denial of the most basic and fundamental rights because we are all God’s children.
It is incumbent on us all to stand up for the weak, the vulnerable, the deprived, the despised, the enslaved, the voiceless, the ‘’different’’ and the persecuted wherever and whoever they are because to love others as we love ourselves is God’s primary law.

They must never be allowed to walk alone because it was that spirit of standing up for others and fighting for the weak and helpless and the display of such love and selflessness that eventually freed the so-called ‘’slave’’ from his hideous captivity in the film titled ‘’12 Years A Slave’’. It was the goodness, love, kindness courage and inherent power of those who refused to remain silent and who were ready to take a risk and stand up for truth and justice that caused the man to regain his freedom and to be returned to his family in Washington after being enslaved for twelve long years. What a man. What a film. What a great and powerful rendition of truth and what a testimony of man’s inhumanity to man.

What compelling evidence and confirmation of the eternal truth that tells us that no matter how dark the night may be, ‘’joy comes in the morning’’. What an affirmation of the undeniable fact that ultimately good always triumphs over evil. What a magnificent example of God’s power, grace, manifold blessings and great mercy. I urge as many as possible to find the time to watch ‘’12 Years A Slave’’. You will never be the same again. Having watched this film I believe that the case for reparations for the slave trade must continue to be made. If the world can give the State of Israel back to the Jews as compensation for persecuting them for thousands of years and killing 6 million of them during the Second World war alone why can’t that same world pay reparations to the African for enslaving him for thousands of years and for killing at least 30 million of our people over the ages.

Why can’t the western powers be made to pay reparations to Africa for what they subjected our people to even after the institution of slavery and the slave trade was formally abolished and particularly during the colonial era? As a glaring example of the sheer cruelty of the Europeans during that period, King Leopold 11, who ruled Belgium from 1865 to 1909, actually owned the Congo and all that was in it as part of his personal estate. By virtue of his supposedly blue blood, one man owned millions of Africans and all their land and chattels even though he resided thousands of miles away in a distant Europe.

Such was this man’s innate brutality and monstrous power that he orchestrated and directed the slaughter of no less than 15 million Congolese Africans whilst he ruled from Brussels. This was so even though he never set his foot in Africa throughout his long reign. Yet the world sat by silently and did nothing. As a matter of fact, many of his fellow Europeans actually applauded his actions and described him as a good example and indeed the epitome of all that was noble and all that ought to be expected from the very best of European royalty. I ask again, what did the black man do to deserve this?

What about Cecil Rhodes, the Englishman man who, according to European historians, ‘’literally and lawfully bought’’ a large part of southern Africa and all that was in it and who named that new frontier after himself by calling it ‘’Rhodesia’’? He also sent millions of Africans to their early graves. This is the same Cecil Rhodes who established the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship for Oxford University and whose money has helped, and still helps, to educate some of the western world’s most distinguished and celebrated leaders by paying for their fees at Oxford. One of those leaders was a young man by the name of Bill Clinton who took immense pride in being a Rhodes Scholar and who later became the President of the United States of America.

Little did Clinton and all those other ‘’great’’ future leaders of the western world know that the money that was used to pay for their ‘’Rhodes scholarship’’ at Oxford was in fact blood money which had its origins and roots in the suffering of the tormented souls, wasted lives and barbaric slaughter of millions of dispossessed and enslaved southern Africans that were bought, sold, maimed, enslaved and butchered in the diamond mines of Cecil Rhodes’ De Beers company. It was this pernicious state of affairs that provoked Mr. Ronald King to post the following words on his Facebook page on august 3rd 2015:

‘’Every black child in grade school is taught that Adolf Hitler killed 6 million Jews and is the worse human being that ever lived. On the other hand our children are taught that the ‘’Right Honorable’’ Cecil Rhodes, the founder of the De Beers diamond company in South Africa, who killed ten times that number of Africans is a hero and a statesman and if they study hard and do well in school they may win the Rhodes Scholarship, the oldest and most celebrated international fellowship award in the world. They don’t mention that those scholarships are paid for by the blood of their ancestors’’.

Such was the power of Rhodes’ sinister, evil, pervasive and malevolent legacy that it took over 100 years and a bitter and prolonged 15 year civil war (from 1964 to 1979) for the black Africans of that country to secure their rights, to be recognised and acknowledged as being human beings, to win the right to vote and to install democracy and majority rule.

It was only after all this was achieved in 1979 that the name ‘’Rhodesia’’ was dropped like a hot potato and was changed to ‘’Zimbabwe’’. I ask again, what did the black man do to deserve this? We need not go into the sufferings of our black brothers and sisters in apartheid South Africa at the hands of the white Boers from the day that the Dutchman, Van Riebek, arrived on the southern African coast in 1604 and saw what he graphically described as ‘’stinking black dogs’’. We need not talk about the humiliation and enslavement of our fellow black Africans at the hands of the Arabs of the Sudan, whether it be in Darfur or Southern Sudan for over 500 years.

We need not go into the sheer barbarity and inhuman suffering that our brothers and sisters were subjected to in the sugar cane fields and the coffee and bannana plantations of the West Indies and South America for many centuries. Everywhere we look throughout world history the story is the same: Africa and Africans have been pillaged, raped, tortured, humiliated, enslaved, butchered, wrenched from their families, scattered, bought and sold, considered as chattel and treated with the most explicit and extreme forms of brutality and violence by those who have a different skin color to us and those from outside our shores.

Yet still there have been no reparations and no formal apology. Instead what they have given us today is the ‘’second slavery’’ of foreign debt and humiliating servitude by every single African country to the western monetary agencies such as the IMF, the Paris Club, the Bretton Woods Institutions and the World Bank. Those evil and opaque bodies and their paymasters and agents are today’s slave masters and they have turned successive African governments into little more than desperate pimps, shameless prostitutes and indebted and pliant little beggars.

For the full story, check the full story in the This Day newspaper.