Reparations
ONLY mankind is brutal to its own species. A passage from Mani Shankar Aiyar’s latest book A Maverick in Politics (2024) scrapes the scab of memory, reminding one of the horrors of the African slave trade.
Visiting Senegal in the 1990s, Mani is taken to Gorée island where the first slave auction was held in 1536. For the next 300 years, it became the staging point from where millions of Africans were exported — by the French, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British.
It is itself an indictment that no one from these countries knows for sure how many able-bodied men and women (who had to be healthy to become workhorses) they uprooted from their homes and transported like unfeeling cargo across the Atlantic. Estimates vary from 20 million to 40m. Six million — the equivalent of a Black Holocaust — died in transit.
Mani notices a modern sign above what was once the tiny Gateway of No Return: “Lord, give my people who have suffered so much the strength to rise above their suffering.” Independent Africans are attempting to forgive. They cannot forget.
British collections bulge with artefacts taken after military exploits in India.
Black Americans sought a catharsis in Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), in which a black author Alex Haley wrote a ‘factionalised’ account of Kunta Kinte, abducted from The Gambia aged 17 and taken to America. Weaving verifiable fact and imaginative fiction, Haley recreated Kinte and then seven generations of his descendants into modern United States.
During his research, Haley encounters African griots, or oral historians, “trained from childhood to memorise and recite the history of a particular village. A good griot could speak for three days without repeating himself”.
The parallel written tradition in India were the bahis or genealogical records maintained by pandas (or priests) at Haridwar. Some go back over 400 years. Fortunately, the British did not obliterate them.
British imperialism has other sins to answer for. Over 70 years until 1939, more than 100,000 ‘home children’ were sent from Britain to Canada and farmed out with families in rural areas. Some were treated no better than animals.
In Australia, ‘Stolen children’ were forcibly removed from their aboriginal parents by the government and handed over to adoptive white couples. The exact number is not known. One estimate calculates that one in every three aboriginal families lost a child to this inhuman scheme.
None of these persons can be brought back. What their descendants have every right to demand is a return of their tangible heritage.
The Greeks have grown hoarse asking for the repatriation of the 5th-century BC marble statuary that once adorned the Parthenon temple in Athens. It was removed by Lord Elgin’s agents between 1800 and 1812. The British Museum remains obdurate in its refusal to return these Greek artefacts, or the 16th-century bronzes looted in 1897 from the royal palace in Benin (now Nigeria). These were then shared by various Western museums.
Individual pieces are now being returned under private arrangements. For example, in 2022, London’s Horniman Museum handed over 72 such bronzes to Nigeria. This has created a precedent which larger museums are loath to follow.
Just think of the huge volume of reverse traffic. London would have to part inter alia with its Cleopatra’s Needle — an Ancient Egyptian obelisk moored on the Thames, and New York with its companion column grouted in Central Park. Paris would be denuded of a 3,000-year-old obelisk in its central Place de la Concorde. It should be reunited with its twin in Luxor (Egypt).
British collections bulge with artefacts taken after military exploits in India. The Clive collection at Powis Castle contains items confiscated after the defeat of Tipu Sultan at Seringapatam in 1799. And in Windsor Castle rests the belt studded with huge emeralds that once belonged to the Sikh Darbar in Lahore. The late Prince Philip showing it to a Pakistani visitor admitted that it had not been acquired but ‘looted’ from Lahore.
The most coveted jewel — literally in a British crown — is the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Returnable certainly, but to which government in the subcontinent?
One is reminded of the story of an old crone who sought in court an end to her 30-year-old marriage. The judge awarded her 30 gold guineas, one for each year of unhappiness. She flung the coins at her former husband, screaming: “You can keep your money. Just give me back the 30 years of my life.”
Former colonies are not content with the repatriation of physical relics of their past. Some go further. ‘Keep your imperial memories and your faux Commonwealth,’ they contend. ‘Just give us back the 300 years of our stolen heritage.’
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, December 26th, 2024