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TimesLIVE
06-05-2025
- General
- TimesLIVE
'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.
New York Times
02-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
320 Years Before the Muppets, the English Took Manhattan
The British are coming. Specifically, Col. Richard Nicolls — fought in France, jailed by Cromwell, partied with the Duke of York — is sailing in to take New Amsterdam from the Dutch. Rushing around the southern tip of Manhattan, scrambling to save his village, is Peter Stuyvesant, a Dutch West India Company company man whose employment history includes getting a leg sawed off after a Caribbean battle and heading north to run the trading post at the mouth of the Hudson. We know who is going to wind up with the island in 1664 — we're not sitting around eating stroopwafels here — but in 'Taking Manhattan,' Russell Short tells the story beautifully, and makes a compelling case for its enduring importance. There were two takings, really, and they came one right after the other: The Dutch took Manhattan from the Indigenous Lenape in 1626, then the British took it from the Dutch 38 years later. The second taking is the heart of this book. The British, rebounding from decades of infighting (the beheading of Charles I, Cromwell's rule, the Restoration), wanted to extend their North American land grab. The Dutch had claimed territory from present-day Albany to Delaware, and the center of the action, then as now, was Manhattan. The Dutch West India Company had set up shop on the island to ship beaver pelts across the Atlantic, and the village that sprang up was, in Shorto's telling, fundamentally Dutch — wildly capitalistic and also, in a circumscribed, relative way, unusually tolerant for its time. In an age of monarchies, the Dutch had formed a new republic in Europe. The agreement that unified the country in 1579 had specified that 'no one shall be investigated or persecuted because of his religion,' a radical position that other countries thought was a terrible idea. This freedom extended to New Amsterdam, and it drew hustlers from all over Europe — immigrants who transformed the colony from a regional office of the West India Company into a cosmopolitan village that seeded the modern metropolis. As Shorto puts it, 'New York was New York even before it was New York.' This was, more or less, the argument Shorto made 21 years ago in 'The Island at the Center of the World,' his book about Dutch Manhattan that became a minor classic among popular New York histories and a perennial player in stoop giveaway piles. The new book is more reboot than sequel; it covers similar literal and figurative ground. But in 'Taking Manhattan,' Shorto draws on recent scholarship to describe the lives of ordinary people largely left out of the earlier book, reminding us that a city built on commerce led to freedom for some and horrifying exploitation of others. Dorothea Angola, Shorto tells us, arrived in New Amsterdam enslaved, possibly in 1627. She married and had children, and in 1644, her husband petitioned the Dutch West India Company for the couple's freedom, which was granted. Soon after, they were given a six-acre tract to farm in what would become Greenwich Village. But their children were not freed. There's no evidence that they were pressed into forced labor, but Shorto writes that 'this unbelievably cruel caveat would certainly have ensured that the parents would do whatever the company asked of them.' (Later, Angola petitioned for and was granted freedom for their adopted son.) The story of Native people is full of death and dispossession, but the 17th-century power dynamics were complex. At one key moment, Shorto writes, a Montaukett leader named Quashawam, facing encroaching British settlers on Long Island, wanted to ally with the Dutch. It seems she tried to warn Stuyvesant that British ships were coming to take Manhattan, but he ignored the message. Quashawam wound up joining forces with the British and the Shinnecock instead. This is why, when Nicolls and the British sailed in, it was a surprise to the Dutch. Nicolls gave Stuyvesant two days to surrender or be attacked. Meanwhile, the Dutch fought among themselves. The British sent Stuyvesant a note, and he tore it up before the city council could read it. But at the moment of peak danger, Shorto argues, Stuyvesant redeemed himself. He recognized a duty not just to his bosses at the West India Company, but to this new, weird city that was becoming its own thing. An hour before Nicolls's ultimatum expired, Stuyvesant wrote back. He was willing to negotiate to save the city. Nicolls wanted New Amsterdam not just for its strategic location, but for its open, commercial culture. So, Shorto writes, he agreed to a deal that 'reads more like a corporate merger than a treaty of surrender.' The deal guaranteed that Dutch people could continue to come to New Amsterdam and enjoy freedom of religion. Dutch ships could still come and go freely and the local government could continue to function largely as before. Nicolls changed the name to New York because he liked it better that way; it honored his buddy the Duke of York, who would eventually become King James II. The name was new, but the city — on the make, polyglot, racist in some ways and tolerant in others — would endure. It is hard to love the city and to recognize its horrors. But it is possible; there is proof; Russell Shorto has done it.
