EXTRACT | 'The Black Atlantic's Triple Burden' edited by Adekeye Adebajo

ABOUT THE BLACK ATLANTIC'S TRIPLE BURDEN:

This book demonstrates the continuities of five centuries of European-led slavery and colonialism in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas, examining calls for reparations in all three regions for what many now regard to have constituted crimes against humanity. The Atlantic world economy emerged from the interactions of this triangular slave trade involving human chattel, textiles, arms, wine, sugar, coffee, tobacco, cotton and other goods.

This is thus the story of the birth of the modern capitalist system and a Black Atlantic that has shaped global trade, finance, consumer tastes, lifestyles and fashion for over five centuries.

The volume is authored by a multidisciplinary, pan-continental group encompassing diverse subjects. This collection is concise and comprehensive, enabling cross-regional comparisons to be drawn, and ensuring that some of the most important global events of the past five centuries are read from diverse perspectives.

EXTRACT:

Five centuries of European slavery and colonialism brought huge political, economic, social and cultural destruction to indigenous peoples across the Black Atlantic in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas. This was the route of the European-led transatlantic slave trade from the 15th to the 19th century, in which 12-15 million Africans were enslaved and transported as human chattel. Commercial companies such as the British South Africa Company, the Royal African Company, the Dutch West India Company, and the Dutch East India Company were all used to enslave and exploit black and brown peoples and their territories, greatly benefiting European imperial powers and enabling the West’s industrialisation. European planters often dominated parliaments across the Caribbean and the Americas, even after slavery formally ended in the 19th century. It was these slave owners rather than the enslaved who were compensated for these heinous crimes. The rape and abuse of indigenous women by European colonisers was very much a ubiquitous feature of this brutal four-and-a-half century subjugation.

These events have eventually triggered a global struggle for reparations across Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas and Europe, with deep roots in the church-based civil society activism in the United States (US) and the Caribbean. European imperialists exported their systems of government to Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas, but failed spectacularly to build viable institutions and extensive infrastructure, as well as provide social services and promote socioeconomic development in their colonies. The silver lining in this grim history of European imperial slavery is that enslaved and colonised black and brown people in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas survived against all odds. Indigenous populations in the Americas and Australia were not always as fortunate, with their populations decimated to a far greater extent by genocidal European holocausts and diseases.

About 40-million Africans currently live outside the continent. An estimated 10.6-million reside in Europe, while sizeable Afro-Caribbean minority populations continue to live in Britain and France (about two million each), and similar Antillean populations reside in the Netherlands. Africans are still estimated to constitute only about 1% of the total European continental population, yet many vulnerable Africans in Europe continue to suffer from racist stereotyping. A key source of tensions between Africa and the 27-member European Union (EU) has involved the migration and deaths of tens of thousands of African youths across the Mediterranean. Several European governments and populations continue to view Africa’s “boat people” as a security threat, often scapegoating and criminalising these migrants. “Fortress Europe” has thus resulted in EU governments strengthening border security and sometimes violating refugee rights.

Across the Atlantic, the African-born population in the US doubled every decade between 1970 and 2020 to reach 2.4 million: the majority are from Nigeria, Ethiopia and Ghana. The most effective recent African-American civil rights organisation, Black Lives Matter, seeks to “connect Black people from all over the world who have a shared desire for justice to act together in their communities”. The group effectively led global antiracism protests in 2020, and has great potential to forge links with similar movements across Africa and its diaspora. In the Caribbean, identification with Africa has grown tremendously as a result of Nigeria-produced Nollywood movies, and consequently West Indian populations experience cultures and people with whom they can readily identify. Netflix had 112 Nollywood films and television shows by 2023.

But the level of social interaction and trade between both Africa and the Caribbean remains abysmally low, despite periodic high-level inter-governmental summits between leaders of the African Union (AU) and the Caribbean Community (Caricom). The geographical pull of the US — where many Caribbean students study, and even more (until recently) desired to go — and the overwhelming American cultural pull still remain strong influences, especially among the region’s youth. Having united to attain the political kingdom from the 1960s, Africa and its neglected diaspora in the Caribbean and the Americas must, however, now collaborate to pursue contemporary struggles for reparations by rebuilding diasporic bridges to achieve a new people-driven Pan-Africanism.

As the AU commemorates 2025 with the theme of “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations”, it is worth reflecting on the Black Atlantic’s continuing triple tragedies of the lingering impacts of slavery and colonialism and the unfulfilled quest for reparatory justice. It is important to pose the fundamental question: how can European nations that enslaved and colonised black and brown populations for five centuries repair this pernicious damage that has left Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas with the triple burdens of a lack of development and crippling debt, diseases and deadly conflicts? As has often been noted, the movements to abolish slavery and colonialism took generations to succeed, and so also will the contemporary movement for reparations for slavery and colonialism. As African-American civil rights activist Frederick Douglass famously observed in 1857: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” We hope that this book can make a modest contribution to this noble struggle.

The Black Atlantic's Triple Burden is edited by Adekeye Adebajo and published by Jacana Media.