Kwabena Akurang-Parry: Some Perspectives on Henry Louis Gates's Reparations

[Kwabena Akurang-Parry is Professor of History at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, USA.]

LET me state some caveats that my effort at interrogating the conclusions of Professor Henry Louis Gates do not mitigate the marginality and chattel nature that reconfigured the lived-experiences of enslaved Africans worldwide, nor does it exonerate slave-holding societies in Africa as well as some African states’ participation in the Atlantic slave trade. Second, I do understand Gates to mean that the blame for the Atlantic slave trade should be debited to both Africans and Europeans/Americans, consequently reparations should also be the responsibility of Africans. Third, this is not about reparations, but more so about querying and rethinking some of Gates’ historical arguments and conclusions from the standpoints of “Akan” oral history wedded to “Western” sources, indeed, a bold departure from most of the commentaries framed around “Western” sources.

CAREFUL readings of Gates’ efforts at illuminating the Atlantic slave trade and the quest for reparations, pivoted on Obama’s presidency, illustrate Gates’ subtle preoccupation with blaming Africans for the slave trade. Gates’ present essay, full of inaccuracies and spiced with dizzying barber-shop narratives, revisits his perspectives on Africa and the Atlantic slave trade couched during his Conradian scholarly-tour of Africa, packaged as and standardized as homegrown African history for his conservative audience and sponsors.

THE viewpoint that “Africans” enslaved “Africans” is obfuscating if not troubling. The deployment of “African” in African history tends to coalesce into obscurantist constructions of identities that allow scholars, for instance, to subtly call into question the humanity of “all” Africans. Whenever Asante rulers sold non-Asantes into slavery, they did not construct it in terms of Africans selling fellow Africans. They saw the victims for what they were, for instance, as Akuapems, without categorizing them as fellow Africans. Equally, when Christian Scandinavians and Russians sold war captives to the Islamic people of the Abbasid Empire, they didn’t think that they were placing fellow Europeans into slavery. This lazy categorizing homogenizes Africans and has become a part of the methodology of African history; not surprisingly, the Western media’s cottage industry on Africa has tapped into it to frame Africans in inchoate generalities allowing the media to describe local crisis in one African state as “African” problem....

I SUPPORT reparations in the sense of creating equal opportunities for all, for instance, access to social mobility in the form of better educational facilities for the descendants of enslaved Africans worldwide. In my view, instead of UNESCO and Western governments and their capitalist institutional agents, the beneficiaries of the Atlantic slave trade, using millions of dollars to fund numerous, albeit recycled, conferences on slavery in Africa, Atlantic slave trade, abolition, slave routes, etc. that use mostly European/American sources to marginalize African voices, such “global-family” funds should rather be used to improve educational facilities, etc. for the victims of the Atlantic slave trade in Africa, the Americas, Europe, Middle East, etc. This approach would help restore the voices of the descendants of the victims of the Atlantic slave trade to history....

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