Why Reparations For Slavery Is Ludicrous — Part 1

The recent horrific death of the handcuffed black George Floyd at the knee of a white thug in uniform has been used and misused in many ways. Probably the most outrageous have been the destruction of statues that are central to the heritage of Western civilisation, and the renewed demand for reparations for slavery.

This demand is ludicrous for several reasons. Before going any further, let us quote race agitator Lee Jasper, according to whom the trans-Atlantic slave trade was the greatest crime in history. Anyone who wishes to argue against that proposition can do so elsewhere. With the ADL perhaps? While it is true that along with prostitution, the slave trade is very likely the oldest profession in the world and even more dishonourable, and while it is true that many whites who were sent to the New World were little better than slaves, none of that and nothing else can excuse or mitigate the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but here is the first objection to reparations.

If the slave trade had not happened, the people who are today clamouring for reparations would not have been born because the entire history of the world would have been different. Think about it, if your father had coughed during sex, you would not exist. The further back in time we go, the greater the influence of a trivial act on the present. Henry VIII was born June 28, 1491, but if his father Henry VII had coughed during sex, Elizabeth of York may instead have given birth to another daughter, or to a boy who although named after his father would have been a different child. Think of the effect this one aberration would have had. There would have been no dissolution of the monasteries, no schism in the church, no Elizabethan Age, wars that were fought might not have been fought, and others that were not fought would have been.

Another reason the reparations argument is ludicrous is who pays whom? For example, Condoleezza Rice is the descendant of both a slave and a slaveholder. She claims to be 51% African, 40% European and 9% Asian. Does she collect reparations for her black side and pay reparations for her white side?

Yet another argument against reparations is how far back are we to take this? The Romans occupied Britain from 43-410AD, about the same length of time as the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Should Britons be paid “reparations” from Italians, and then only those who could trace their ancestry back to that time? Here is one for the feminists. According to them, women have been under the thumbs of men since ancient times. Maybe women should be granted reparations and perhaps special rights as well?

But, the main and most important reason the reparations for slavery argument is flawed is because it isn’t whites who should pay blacks reparations but blacks who should pay it to whites, for dragging them into the Twentieth Century, whatever the suffering of their ancestors. Check out this film which dates to 1925; it show the Black African as he lived before the coming of the White Man. In The Land Of Giants And Pygmies is far from unique, there are many films from this period and books going back before that which tell an entirely different tale from the one with which blacks, especially American blacks, have been propagandised for decades.

Let’s look at one of the main propaganda texts: Roots. This book published in 1976 by the journalist Alex Haley was made into a TV miniseries. Although Haley wrote Roots as a novel, he claimed it was based on his researches into his African origins. The miniseries especially was presented as a dramatisation of historical events. In reality it was anything but.

Haley’s book was part distortion, and part plagiarism of two books. Margaret Walker (pictured) was a woman of letters. In 1966, she published Jubilee, a novel based loosely on the life of her great-grandmother, who was a slave. In 1967, the white author Harold Courlander published a novel called The African; he brought a lawsuit against Haley which was settled for $650,000.

Haley’s book portrayed the black African as living a fairly civilised life before he was snatched from the Dark Continent and condemned to a life of slavery. The reality is that many Africans were actually sold into slavery by their own kin, and there was no civilisation worthy of the name where the African had not interacted with the White Man or the Arab before him. Haley’s book should have been called Weeds rather than Roots.

We can be sure of this because the African had no written language, and it is generally acknowledged that civilisation in any meaningful sense cannot exist without one because knowledge cannot be transmitted down the generations. Folk tales can, yes, but a blueprint of even a fairly simple mechanical device is a no-no without a written language. The 1914 book NEGRO CULTURE IN WEST AFRICA… by George W. Ellis documents the Vai people of Liberia. In the INTRODUCTION, Frederick Starr writes “It was among the Vai that the only practical and actually-used script for the writing of an African Negro language has been produced”.

This written language was invented by Momoru Doalu Búkere who was born in the previous century. He was taught to read by a missionary. Swahili and other Bantu languages had no written script before the coming of the White Man. Worse  than that, the African never got round to inventing the wheel. This is something the likes of Melissa Harris-Perry should bear in mind every time they sit down at their keyboards to pen their vacuous polemics against racism. Everything in their world from the Kool-Aid in their refrigerators to the gas in their cars is the result of white genius, and they are the cultural appropriators.

To Part 2.