Gladstone heirs’ apology must include compensation, reparative justice

Dear Editor,
I wish to take this moment to applaud His Excellency, President Dr Irfaan Ali, who has taken up the battle for reparation and justice for African slavery and Indian indentureship and the destruction of human psyche caused on both the African continent (more so the African continent) and Indian subcontinent. It is most welcome and is looked upon with great respect by all citizens of this country, inclusive of yours truly.
Slavery has always been a thing of great profit for wealthy, powerful nations. Where the strong and powerful will always prey on the peaceful and humble nations of the world, turning many of them in to slavery treated with the worst physical violence. Their labour exacted under the harshest and most dehumanising conditions. That it is inconceivable to comprehend and imagine that Nations could be over run, torn apart, leaders of those nations, for example in Africa; bought over with trinkets and some of them becoming collectors of their citizens in the form of human flesh to barter with the “white colonial peoples of Europe.” To fatten and enrich Europe!
Imagine for a moment, readers, for generation after generation, the best, the most powerful, the strongest men and women, boys and girls being stolen and pulled out of their country in degradation, pain, in nakedness, in starvation, in beatings and rapes in the boats by those who thought that they were superior. Yet to this date most of Europe and the UK refuse to even apologise for the great hurt that they have done.
For these reasons and others, it is most worthy to note the comments of His Excellency Dr Ali, where he stated in the media that: “The intended apology by the heirs of the colonial master John Gladstone include issues of compensation, reparative justice, and those involved to be posthumously charged for crimes against humanity.” (Guyana Times 25th August, 2023). Historical records revealed that John Gladstone was an absentee owner of plantations in Jamaica and Guyana, building on his wealth earned from the mercantile trade in India, the United States, and the West Indies. John Gladstone enslaved over 2500 persons during the colonial era. (Guyana Times 25th August, 2023). According to Dr Ali, the descendants of John Gladstone have already admitted that it benefitted from African enslavement and indentureship on the Demerara and other plantations in Guyana, and has offered a formal apology for the actions of their ancestors (Guyana Times 25th August, 2023).
We know of the stories of old of the countries in Europe, but we also know of all the worst of all the European colonials, King Leopold II of Belgium, who destroyed over ten million African people, behaving as if he and his Empire owned the Congo; as if the diamonds and lands of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (The Free Congo) belonged to his Empire solely. The Chopping off of limbs of the natives of the Free Congo when the required quota of rubber and ivory, set by Leopold’s Empire, could not be met, to enrich Belgium. Human beings were mauled, kidnapped, brutalised and sold in Europe, North America, and Canada, during King Leopold II of Belgium’s reign never without a sense of humanity or a care. Always the Africans being seen as a lower class of peoples, yet their women were something special to be raped and preyed upon by the colonial masters.
As I said before, our President is one of the true leaders of the world who is taking this and making it an example in the world. But we also know that there are many Afrocentric organisations and individuals of other ethnicities, including yours truly, who over the decades have been fighting for reparative justice. Apologies is not enough, the descendants of slavery, the peoples of Africa and Guyana and the other former colonial enslavement countries, must be paid for the misery they caused on nations and peoples.
Now slavery was not only specific to the Africans, the Spanish and the British enslavement of the native Indians in Guyana (the Indigenous people of Guyana) and the peoples of the Caribbean is also written in the historical records, they too must be issued with an apology and compensation for the atrocities committed against them by the colonial masters. By far the Spanish colonial masters were the most cruel and tyrannical. The historical documents of enslavement in the Caribbean and South American countries records that the Spanish were herding people into a straw building and setting fire to it, burning the occupants alive. In addition, “they sent the males to the mines to dig and bring away the gold, which is an intolerable labour; but the women they made use of to manure and till the ground, which is a toil most irksome even to men of the strongest and most robust constitutions, allowing them no other food but herbage, and such kind of unsubstantial nutriment, so that the nursing women’s milk was weakened and so dryed up, that the young infants lately brought forth, all perished”. What the Spanish were doing drove many natives to commit suicide. In Cuba, the ferocity and cruelties and inhumanities of the Spanish colonial masters caused two hundred indigenous people to hang themselves of their own accord; and a multitude of people perished by this kind of death” and “six thousand children and upward were murdered, because they had lost their parents who laboured in the mines (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas, 1542).
Las Casas of Seville, Spain took part in the conquest of Cuba and was given lands and Indians (natives) to work for him. Las Casas, being a man of the cloth, was struck by his text: “He that sacrificed of a thing wrongfully gotten, his offering are ridiculous and his gifts of unjustment are not accepted.” Tireless lobbying, Las Casas cross the Atlantic 12 times to plead the cause of the Indians (Indigenous peoples). He was successful. However, he erred by suggesting the importation of slaves from Africa (The Making of the West Indies Book 4). The enslavement of the Indians (the Indigenous peoples) by the Romans were historic. Similarly, the enslavement of Africans by the Arabs was also historic and of major proportions.
Indeed, I quite agree with His Excellency Dr Ali, that “the call for reparations is an essential response to right a historical wrong and mitigate the enduring legacy of slavery.”

Sincerely,
Roshan Khan