Nairobi — Former Secretary General of the Accra-based Organisation of African Trade Union Unity OATUU James Dennis Akumu has described a Pan-African conference held here last month as "a great contribution to the struggle for the liberation of Africa and a step toward unity of our Motherland".

In a paper entitled A Global Demand for Apology and Reparations, the veteran trade unionist paid tribute to key Pan-Africanists such as W.E.B. DuBois and Kwame Nkrumah saying that it was "such modest but determined efforts which have sustained the African struggle in Africa and globally".

This was the first ever conference of its nature convened in East Africa by East Africans. Similar conferences have been held in Jamaica, Trinidad, the United States, parts of Europe, and in the West and North Africa.

Akumu attributed the absence of such conferences in East, Central and Southern Africa to "the strong presence of former colonialists who trivialise the conferences and exert strong neo-colonial pressure on both our intellectuals and politicians".

Quoting from the book, Christopher Columbus and the African Holocaust, the Kenyan trade unionist said that it is now believed the world over that the African Holocaust was the greatest single crime in the world committed against a people.

Nothing else can match this massive genocide and destruction of a race. He added that with the Atlantic slave trade, the Europeans had set in motion a holocaust for African people that is still active in some form on the 500th anniversary of Columbus' "alleged discovery".

Akumu maintained that it was Columbus and other contemporaries like Bathlomew Diaz and Vasco da Gama who launched the holocaust with Queen Elizabeth providing a vessel named Jesus to transport slaves.

Quoting W.E.B Du Bois, he said the "Atlantic Ocean is bleached with bones of millions of Africans who lost their lives in the sea". He pointed out that the decline in African population is due to the fact that between 16th and 19th centuries, 10 to 20 million Africans were taken as slaves. Other writers, he said, give the estimate of between 60 and 150 million persons.

The United Nations Demographic Year Book, 1958,according to Akumu, tabulated that Africa's population had dropped from 21.3 percent of the world's total population, that is 100million in 1650 to 8 percent of the world population in 1950, that is 199million people.

The population of Europe during the same period increased from 103 million in 1650 to 574 million in 1950 which represented 23 percent of world's total population. No doubt, Akumu declared, Africa lost nearly 400 million people between 15th and 19th centuries.

He further noted that there are sad stories on how slaves were hunted, captured and kept waiting for shipment. Ghana's Cape Coast and the El Mina Castle, and Senegal's Goree Island, he added, are living monuments representing doors of no return.

The unionist wondered how Europeans could lecture Africa about morality and asked them instead to feel remorse, apologise and pay reparations. He said he could not understand how slave owners came to be compensated in Europe, instead of the slaves themselves.

Saying that the African has been rejected by the world, he observed that outside Africa, the black man is confined in the ghettos be it in Latin America, North America or Europe. Everywhere, he maintained, the African is still being exploited.

"If you see the arguments the British are advancing in Zimbabwe, and whites insisting on owning land and resources in Namibia, South Africa and in Africa generally, you can only come to the conclusion that in their minds, Africans should remain their slaves and should not own their own land and mineral resources," he said.

Akumu further maintained that African labour and looted African wealth "built these strong Western economies. Therefore what we are claiming is what our people contributed to substantially and is therefore rightly ours".

The unionist proposed a global campaign for the restoration of "our culture and re-educate ourselves about our culture and heritage". He also advised on judicious use of the continent's natural resources keeping what we cannot process instead of giving it away to multinationals.

Akumu said the world owes Africans an apology for the cruel crimes they committed against Africans for over 500 hundred years. The apology, he added, should come from governments, churches, commercial institutions and communities which committed the holocaust.

He noted that no amount of financial compensation would justify and replace the loss of lives, suffering and dignity. The ghettos in Europe and the Americas, the police shooting of African-Americans and the prisons in the United States confirm Africans' claim for reparations, he said.

A study, he suggested, should be done of all Africans who survived the holocaust and their current residences identified. Discussions held with them on their priorities and priorities of Africans in Africa should be compiled and harmonised.

Reparations, Akumu said, could take the form of building roads, communications, housing, schools, hospitals, memorial and cultural centres, including economic empowerment, creation of banks and public companies among other services.

Africans demand up to US $777 trillion, and the detailed claims should be presented to the European Union, the United States, Brazil, the United Nations among others, he said, adding that Africa should warn remnants of colonialism who have some design on "our land and other resources that the notion of re- colonising Africa is out of question".