Joseph Coomson
11 May 2006
The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America and Sucardif Association, on behalf of all Africans, are demanding reparation of not less than US$777 trillion from the West, especially Europe and America, for kidnapping over one million black Africans during the slave trade era. This could be in cash and kind.
The amount, if gotten, would be shared equally among African countries that experienced the slave trade including Ghana and all Africans on the face of the earth.
Reparation is the process of repairing, healing and restoring a people injured because of their group identity and in violation of their fundamental human rights by governments or corporations.
Groups that have been injured have the right to obtain from the government or corporation responsible for their injuries that which they need to repair and heal themselves. This is a principle of international human rights law.
According to Mrs. Njinga Ababio, the representative of the two NGOs, the funds would be used to develop educational infrastructure, social amenities, invest in activities that would reduce poverty, among others.
She said at the ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Relations yesterday that Africans around the world have been cheated for more than four hundred years by the European and American governments and previously by the Arabs.
These countries are directly and indirectly involved in the history of the mid-transatlantic Africans in human enslavement, which caused pain both home and abroad.
She said this pain has brought untold hardship on Africans such as poverty, disease, inadequate education, and improper health facilities, among others.
She said the Sucardif Association has been working for the past twenty years to get the government of Ghana to accept and support the Tower of Return monument which will be constructed in Cape Coast.
She accused the United States of paying reparation to the Red Indians, Japanese, and the Chinese but not to Africans after being slaves for many years.
On his part, the founder and president of Sucardif, Nana Kweku Egyir Gyebi of Cape Coast, said 200 acres of land had been acquired in Cape Coast to build the Tower of Return monument that will rise to the height of 777feet overseeing a historical library containing books, papers, magazines, films, newspapers, articles and collection of information from, by and about Africans throughout the world.
It will consist of information cataloguing inventions, developments of the arts, sciences, literature, agriculture, medicine, music and sculpturing, and all such information from lands in which African culture is expressed.
He said 138 libraries estimated at $128 million would be built throughout the country.
The final document on the reparation would be finalized in August at an international Reparation and Repatriation Conference to be held in Accra and Cape Coast dubbed "Create the future; Transformation, Reparation, Repatriation and Reconciliation".
The conference would educate and equip reparation movements with resources of successful organizing techniques and educational tools to engage the world.
Additionally, the overarching objective of the conference is to develop a programmatic framework that allows the international reparation movement to develop and coordinate activities and Africans and African descents reconciliation. Over 1000 Africans from the Diaspora would attend the conference.
The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America is a massive based coalition organized for the purpose of obtaining reparations for African descendants in the United States, whiles Sucardif Association is an indigenous Pan African Non-Governmental Organization dedicated to the reawakening of the African consciousness through education, community development programmes, human resource development, youth exchange programmes, job creation, investment generation and tourism as a tool for the unification of African people home and abroad.
The ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Relations are in support of the reparation.
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