The world set aside January 27 every year as International Holocaust Remembrance Day to remember one of the worst human tragedies of all times. The holocaust was a systematic genocide against European Jew population during the second world war, carried out by the Nazi party of Germany as led by Adolph Hitler, the then chancellor and Fuhrer of Germany.
To those who had never grasped the extent of the evil that was Nazi Germany and its hatred for Jews, the holocaust led to the persecution of about nine million Jews, leading to the forceful expulsion and relocation of hundreds of thousands from their homes into ghettos and the mass extermination of six million others, most of whom were innocent German, Polish and Russian Jews either rounded up and sent to forced labour camps to die from starvation, exhaustion, or used as guinea pigs for nefarious scientific experiments.
Others were murdered in poisonous gas chambers and through mass shootings in several concentration camps across the German-occupied territories. These atrocities were against the back drop of the war in which Hitler and the Nazis sought to rule all of Europe and Russia in the quest for “living spaces” for the so-called “Aryan” race.
That was the tragedy. The world rejected antisemitism, Nazism and its leader Hitler then and has continued to reject and condemn any form of profiling or discrimination directed at the Jew population anywhere as antisemitism. World leaders reserve the sharpest of criticisms for advocates of or perpetrators or supporters of such acts anywhere in the world. This situation of complete and absolute abhorrence for all forms of antisemitism is the upshot of the tragedy we have come to identify as the holocaust.
The world has done better than condemn and halt the wrongful and evil persecution of the world population of Jews. The 1947 UN Partition Plan (Resolution 181) established the state of Israel, offering European Jews
the option of being settled, rehabilitated and integrated in a homeland of their own. Till this date, I believe, the world community is still grappling with the high moral cost of creating modern Israel; millions of native Palestinians were displaced and the settler-colonial enterprise of successive governments of Israel has caused such atrocious conditions of civil rights and non-existent liberties for Palestinians that political activists the world over have called to question the assumption that the international community has treated all parties —sides— equally and fairly.
It is often suggested that from surviving the pogrom through concerted global action, Jews in Israel have become the most privileged group of people in the world. The United States of America and the European Union nations bend backwards to support Israel in most of its critical endeavours of politics, development and wars and they often pick substantial portion of the bill, to boot. These most-influential nations of the world routinely provide development aid, trade advantages, and scientific research funding to Israel. Apart from being EU’s largest trade partner, Israel continues to enjoy preferential trade access to European markets.
The foreign aid and capital flowing into the Israeli military industrial complex and commercial economy dwarfed that of other countries of similar size and political importance by far. Currently, the U.S. provides approximately $3.8 billion annually to Israel, in a 10-year MOU signed in 2016, making her the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid. It is estimated that since 1948 the US has provided over $158 billion in bilateral assistance to Israel in military aid, primarily. It suffices to say that Israel could take its friendship with European countries and America for granted, and it might have done exactly so on occasions without consequences.
All in all, the world has done well and good to have focused so extensively on the need of Jews and Israel to be, first, understood, resettled, and then pampered. To state the obvious, Israel’s right to be paid reparations —after the holocaust— in so many guises in past and current world scenarios is fully recognised, respected and evidently deferred to. Germany has paid reparations to Israel, under the 1952 Luxembourg Agreement, to the tune of over €70 billion till date. The last may not have been heard of further transfers. Nation States and races all over the world agree with the West that their sentiment of compassion and fair play towards Israel and its population is warranted. The global South has not begrudged Israel or its Jew population this privileged position.
What the global South and the rest of the world is dismayed over is, why has the conscience of the international community refused to bear on an equally monstrous case of evil and global injustice predating 1944? Before the holocaust, there was a horrendous culture of man’s inhumanity to man that was perpetrated on Africans. Millions of Africans were forcefully removed from their homes and transported to faraway lands acquired by the West for commercial plantations with which they grew the wealth of their empires. Slave masters owned slaves, use them for creating wealth to tend their future and the future of their generations, and killed them —the slaves—off according to their whims. Holocaust was done to man after man, Africans after Africans in tens, hundreds and thousands when the white slave ship owners threw black slaves overboard for being worn weak, unhealthy and nonviable or simply to evade external scrutiny.
How has such a horrendous case of injustice towards a well-known and easily identified people, perpetrated by subsisting circles of world influence and powers, been left unaddressed? Why has slavery, the dehumanisation of Africans for three hundred years, remained a case of an African heritage? Why is the world not acknowledging the need to, first, have a day set aside to remember never to forget, like the daywas allocated to remembering the holocaust?
Why are Africans left to their means without the same level of compassionate interventions and reparations to prop their progress as a civilisation, knowing how much they were singularly targeted and dehumanized, killed in their millions, and traumatised out of their cultural depth. Their human essence was stolen from them for centuries, and the strongest of their youth castrated and used like common beasts of burden to grow the famed prosperity of the West.
Let no one be mistaken, it is well acknowledged by renowned scholars the world over that the transatlantic slave trade and the holocaust have human cruelty and mass subjugation of the victim peoples in common. The two evils were similar in their severity of “dehumanisation, scale of suffering and global impact”. Yet, when the suffering, dehumanisation and intermittent genocide of over 300 years against Africans came to its slow and laborious end, freed slaves were segregated and scattered unceremoniously around the globe —of indiscriminate towns, cities, countries and continents— wherever the locals would endure them, without concerted heed to their need for protection or rehabilitation whatsoever. Exhausted bodies and traumatised souls were cut loose and pushed to go and fend for themselves in a world that had stripped them of dignity, personal relationships and left them and their forebears behind, materially and spiritually, for centuries.
On the other hand, the suffering, dehumanisation of the Jews in Europe, as we have noted but not begrudged them, has earned them the modern state of privileged Israel, which has among others received €70 billion so far in reparations, $158 billion so far in foreign aid and bilateral assistance, and been granted subsisting preferential trade access to the biggest market blocks in the world.
Why has the conscience of the West, which seemed to have served to address Israel’s existential disadvantages so well, been so muted or outrightly deadened when it comes to Africa’s development dilemma? In other words, why is the holocaust consequential on the modern treatment of and consideration
dilemma? In other words, why is the holocaust consequential on the modern treatment of and consideration for Israel, but 300 years of slavery is completely effaced in the modern treatment, consideration and discussion of the African question and circumstance? Would it be racist to suggest that the life of children of one people or race, say in Europe or of Jews, is more worthy of support, protection and economic security than their counterpart in Africa?
There were attempts in the past to make reparations for Africans, for the suffering in slavery, a cogent international concern. To back up calls for action, international scholar, W.R. Brock (1970s), estimated the value of enslaved Africans exported during the transatlantic slave trade to be over $2.5 trillion in today’s dollars. “Africana Studies Scholars,” using the value of unpaid labour and the intergenerational wealth disparities, recommended reparations of between $10 and $15 trillion.
During the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, 2001, activists and scholars were of the view that the cumulative cost of the slave trade and its consequences is in hundreds of trillions of dollars, owed to Africans who bore the brunt of slavery. Caribbean Reparation Commission (2013) calculated reparations estimate of $777 billion for “slavery, genocide, and colonialism in the Caribbean”. Authur Ta-Nehisi Coates in his argument for reparations (2014) referenced economists who estimated that reparations for African Americans alone could amount to between 6 trillion and $14 trillion.
Late Chief MKO Abiola, of blessed memory, was shouting from the top of every roof his immense business and diplomatic clout provided him, and he was not shy of sounding hoarse on the topic of reparation for Africans as long as the attitude of those who should be accountable, who owed Africa the responsibility for redress, remained lukewarm. If the West, Europe and America, shelves its selective possession of ethical scruples and endeavour to quantify the stolen and misused human development capital from Africa during
the years of slavery, pay a fraction of it back in reparation, Africa would stop being the poster child of global victimhood.
As the most populous black nation on Earth, Nigeria through the UN ought to lead the clarion call today. The world needs to establish a day to remember never to forget slavery. It is not an African legacy. It was a culture of evil and shame that blighted humankind while it lasted; now, it is a global community problem how we allow the memory of that curse to shape the world’s restitution conduct towards Africa and Africans. We can all stop wondering why Africa is poor. As Walter Rodney’s book title “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” suggested, our focus ought to have avoided all the distractions and stayed on primary point: what in God’s name are they —Europe and the collective West— ready to do about commensurate reparations for Africans? It is never too late to do the right thing.
