Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March 2015

“To those caught up in only slogan-mongering about the Afrikan Revolution who self-derisively dismiss mass campaigns such as this one of Reparations, refusing to unfold their own blinds to its crucial significance in our Liberation Struggle; we address our paraphrasing of the remark of Amilcar Cabral that, by taking to the revolutionary path of self-determined Struggle for Afrikan Liberation, the masses of our people are not fighting for ideas in anyone’s head; they are fighting  for a true National and Social Emancipation that will guarantee them such concrete benefits as will ensure their material and spiritual prosperity! That is why the AASU-E [All-Afrikan Student’s Union in Europe] sees Reparations from the perspective of Afrikan youth as the actual conscientization of the objectives of our whole people’s Liberation Struggle under the banner of revolutionary Pan-Afrikanism. Therefore the Reparations we the youth of Afrika are demanding must restore to all people of Afrikan origin throughout the World full sovereignty, the absolute ownership of the whole of our Homeland, including all its resources, and the Renaissance of Maat and other value of our classical civilisation, in order to give us the concrete basis for independently achieving our own material and spiritual prosperity.“

Antonieta Carla Santana, ‘Our Struggle for Reparations in Afrikan Youth Perspective’: A Draft Paper for Presentation to the 11th December 1993 Birmingham Working Conference of the African Reparations Movement (ARM-UK)

 

 

First and Foremost on Strategy & Tactics…

Tactics are forms of collective action publicly deployed, whether in-person or via audio, visual, or written media, in service of a sustained campaign of claims making.

We are not just marching for the sake of marching, the 1st August Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March is just one of a number of tactics, in an overall multi-layered strategy to ‘Stop the Maangamizi’ (Afrikan Hellacaust of chattel, colonial and neocolonial enslavement), in order to bring about systemic change and revolutionary social transformation of our condition as Afrikan people, as part of building our people’s power to effect and secure reparatory justice on our own terms.

The Maangamizi will only be stopped by the collective power and might of our people on the continent and the Diaspora of Afrika, by way of completing the Pan-Afrikan Revolution, (with complete steps, too numerous and unnecessary to fully spell out here), which include the social change reparatory justice goals of the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations (ISMAR) and the People’s Reparations International Movement (PRIM).

 

 

There is much dichotomous thinking and many misconceptions among the general public about what tactics Movement’s should utilise to best meet their objectives. Movements often select from a repertoire of possibilities available to them at any given time and place. Nevertheless, it is often assumed that adopting one tactic, at a particular point, in time precludes a Movement from adopting other tactics at a different time or even simultaneously. Multiple tactics must be undertaken by Movements in order to reach and build support among their intended audiences, the multiple publics they are seeking to influence as well as achieve their desired objectives. Nevertheless, there are different tactics that self-reflective Movements will use depending on the campaign objectives and goals that different forces within such a Movement set out to achieve.

It is important to emphasize that the March is not the whole ISMAR, it is simply an aspect of it, otherwise known as a column within it, i.e. the street column. However, it is also the case that many Movements have characteristically relied on demonstrative or even ‘confrontational’ tactics to advance their cause, and this is still the method of choice for street protest actions. Although Movement activists expend a great deal of energy, time, and resources choosing tactics, all tactics are not designed to have the same outcomes or impact, for the tactical choices of a Movement often embody the Movement’s key demands.

There is a difference for example, between political persuasion (lobbying, voting, petitioning), demonstrative (marches, rallies, vigils, acts of civil disobedience) and economic (boycotts and selective buying) tactics. Boycotts, selective buying, buying-Black, setting up ‘Black’ businesses, group economics, or even cooperative group economics, (which do not take into consideration the reparatory justice political economy of glocal Pan-Afrikan community regeneration and development) alone, will not be sufficient to stop the various manifestations of the Maangamizi that people of Afrikan heritage are being subjected to today. In fact, in some instances our people can get inadvertently caught up in the pursuit of ‘big’ anti-people private business models that promote maldevelopment, genocidal, ecocidal and slavery-like working practices which contribute to prolonging the Maangamizi. Neither is it the case that ‘political persuasion’ or demonstrative tactics such as lobbying, marching and petitioning alone are enough to stop the various manifestation of the Maangamizi. However, each of the aforementioned combination of tactics can contribute to this overall objective of the ISMAR in different ways and all together unify the diversity of forces necessary for ultimate victory!!!

We are approaching what is often referred to as a ‘revolutionary situation’, the crisis of the European Global Order is worsening more than ever before, their state machineries, political parties and other institutions are crumbling from within, their societies are broken, in some cases beyond repair, and the social forces they command are in disarray. This situation presents us as Afrikan people with great opportunity.There is however, a missing link which is the organised, disciplined political might of the Afrikan masses in concert with the masses of Global Black Humanity, which includes the linking up with and sharing of strategy and tactics among Afrikan Heritage communities of reparatory justice interest and resistance in Europe, Abya Yala, (the so-called Americas), Melanasia, Australasia, Oceania and those on the continent of Afrika.

Accordingly, the 1^st August Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March in partnership with the ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide (SMWeCGE) campaign is engaging in mass work, mass popular education, action, mobilisation and organisation towards that purpose.

First Nation Brother & Sister from Australia and Fiji – Ghillar Michael Anderson, Convenor of the Sovereign Union of Aboriginal Nations and Peoples in Australia and Head of State of Euahlayi Peoples Republic & Fijian Lawyer, Oni Kirwin representing the Fiji Native Government in Exile, domiciled in Australia

Since the inception of the March in 2014, particularly since the introduction of specific March aims in 2015, this is a summary of what has been achieved:

• There is now (since 2015), a consolidated stewardship and facilitation of the organising processes for the annual Afrikan Emancipation Day People’s Reparations March with the formalisation of the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee (AEDRMC), consisting of a diverse array of Afrikan heritage groups, organisatons, movements and individuals. Most of the committee members, both individual and organisational, have been involved with the March from its inception, however, the first March in 2014 was organised under the banner of the Rastafari Movement UK (RMUK) with a number of supporting organisations.

• There is now the emergence of an independent ground-up Pan-Afrikan inspired, and initiated, transnational process of leading, mobilising and organising Afrikan people other than the anti-Pan-Afrikan Liberation statist CARICOM Reparatory Justice Framework and their Ten-Point Plan. Despite the fact that reparatory justice organising goes back centuries, there has been little recognition of this by Afrikan heritage social, political and economic elites who for many decades have chosen, contrary to our indigenous Afrikan traditions of exercising people’s power, not to identify with the ground-up initiated and led ISMAR. For instance, in 2003 the UK based Black Quest for Justice Campaign supported by PARCOE (Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe), the then Black United Front (UK), the then Global Afrikan Congress (UK) and the then International Front for Afrikan Reparations (IFAR) developed a Ten-Point Plan, as part of a legal and extra-legal strategy to effect and secure Pan-Afrikan Reparations, which continues to be championed by PARCOE. Despite this being one of several reparations focused initiatives emanating from Afrikans in the UK ISMAR, the mass media and some newer reparations focused organisations and activists have tended to defer to the CARICOM Ten-Point Plan, or initiatives taking place in so-called North America, as though there has been no history-making on the part of the prior-existing ISMAR in the UK.

 

Afrikans in the UK Developed a Ten-Point Plan in 2003!

According to Professors Adjoa Aiyetoro and Adrienne Davis in their 2010 article ‘Historic and Modern Movements for Reparations: The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America ...”part of the largely untold history of reparations is the struggle not only for reparations itself, but also the struggle between distinct Black classes over strategies for citizenship and the right to envision the racial future”. The ISMAR, just like any other social movement has its contestations, classed, gendered and other internal struggles.

Representative Sample of ISMAR Collective Leadership, Past & Present

 

• There is increased engagement with and implementation of the March aims. We are not just marching aimlessly but with a strategy which is in operation at various levels. This means that March facilitators support the mobilisation and organisation of a core section of the Afrikan Heritage Community of Reparatory Justice Interest who seek to engage in strategic reparations activism and direct their energies to the attainment of specific goals, which are measurable and through which progress can be evaluated. In the process of mobilising and organising together all year-round, the March organising process significantly contributes to transforming activism from being an individualistic approach to a Ujima (collective work and responsibility) approach. Our revolutionary African ideology will ensure that we can consciously construct the society that we want to build.  Although the March aims were in place and operation for the 2015 March, there was not as much take up with implementing the aims as is occurring now.

 

To reiterate, the aims of the 1^st August Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March are:

1. To draw attention to Afrikan peoples’ global determination to not let the British State and other perpetrators get away with the crimes of the Maangamizi (Afrikan hellacaust of chattel, colonial and neo-colonial enslavement).
2. To raise consciousness about the fact that all the attacks on us, in both individual and collective instances, amount to Genocide/Ecocide in Maangamizi continuity necessitating reparations.
3. To increase awareness of the necessity to ‘Stop the Maangamizi’ and its current manifestations such as austerity, attempts to recolonise Afrika, mentacide and deaths in police, psychiatric and prison custody.
4. To demonstrate Afrikan peoples’ strength, capacity and determination to speak to and challenge establishment power with our growing grassroots power to effect and secure reparations (reparatory justice) on our own terms.
5. To showcase Afrikan people’s grassroots initiatives for reparations.

 

 

• Since 2015, a partnership, operational unity and  working relationship between the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee (AEDRMC) and the ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide‘ (SMWeCGE) campaign has been established. In recognition of the fact that the March is not the whole Reparations Movement, the AEDRMC has also embraced the complimentary SMWCGE campaign goals contained in the SMWeCGE Petition, both the 2014 and 2015 versions. So whilst the AEDRMC, the March Aims and the SMWeCGE campaigning aims and goals remain distinct, the fulfillment of both the aims of the March and the SMWeCGE campaigning aims and goals are mutually constitutive.

 

The complimentary aims of the ‘Stop the Maangamizi’ campaign as a positive action step of reparatory justice campaigning are to:

1. Increase recognition of and educate people about the Maangamizi, its causes, contemporary manifestations and consequences.
2. Gather evidence of the continuing impact of the Maangamizi as part of the process towards establishing the All Party-Parliamentary Commissions of Inquiry for Truth & Reparatory Justice at the levels of the Westminster Houses of Parliament and the European Parliament as well as the Ubuntukgotla Peoples International Tribunal for Global Justice.
3. Mobilise petition signers/supporters to organise as a community of advocates for ‘Stopping the Maangamizi’ as a force within the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations, (ISMAR).
4. Catalyse the development of such a force into an integral part of the Peoples Reparations International Movement  (PRIM) to ‘Stop the Maangamizi’, prevent its recurrence as well as effect and secure measures of reparatory justice from the ground-up.
5. Utilise the process of mobilising towards the 1^st August Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March to amplify the voices of communities of reparatory justice interest who are engaged in resistance to the various manifestations of the Maangamizi today.

The key point to highlight here is that the aims of the 1^st August  Afrikan Emancipation Day Peoples Reparations March and the SMWCGE campaign promote social movement-building, which is part of a people power-building process to be able to effect our people’s reparatory justice will.

Social movements are a type of group action. They are large, sometimes informal, groupings of individuals, organisations and other relevant interest groups which focus on specific political or social issues; and who are organised and organising to promote, carry out, resist or undo social, cultural or political change.

Social movement-building is the long-term, coordinated effort of individuals and organized groups of people to intentionally spark and sustain a social movement, it entails:

“the creation of movement infrastructures required for sustained organising and mobilisation, including social relationships, organisational networks and capacity, affective solidarity, as well as movement-related identities, frames, strategies, skills, and leadership.”

Social Movement forces constantly engage with multiple publics, core constituencies in addition to allies and seek to harness people’s collective power to address systemic problems, redress enduring injustice and promote alternative visions or solutions. It follows that reparations which will meaningfully work for ALL of US as Afrikan People, will only be effected and secured as a result of a MASS MOVEMENT that we continue to build. Whilst it is recognised that Movements always use a mixture of tactics, generally have multiple leaders, groups and agendas, ultimately, such reparatory justice will only be effected and secured when we have built and harnessed the POWER to effect our National will and strategic geopolitical interests as people of Afrikan ancestry and heritage.

 

“It will be gross self-delusive wishful thinking to believe that those wielding the reins of White racist supremacy are going to pay any serious heed to the Afrikan demand for Reparations, unless their hold on the machinery of global power is effectively challenged by the well-organised, upsurgent and self-empowering masses of Afrikan people, and their allied progressive forces throughout the World.”

 Kofi Mawuli Klu ‘Charting an Afrikan Self-Determined Path of Legal Struggle for Reparations’: A Draft Paper for Presentation to the 11th December 1993 Birmingham Working Conference of the African Reparations Movement, UK, 1993.

• Since the 2015 March, the AEDRMC has introduced 9 organising blocs relating to specific constituencies as part of the process of reparations social movement-building and maintaining organising processes toward effecting and securing reparatory justice including various processes, programmes and initiatives of self-repair all year round.

• The AEDRMC in association with the SMWCGE campaign has developed a ‘Education is Part of the Preparation for Reparations‘ curriculum and programme which has consisted of the roll out of educational workshops across London and in other cities to raise reparations related legal and political consciousness.

• There is increased popular reparations consciousness-raising, education and participatory learning processes through action-learning which facilitate popular sensitisation and communication strategies on getting information out to the the general public about the rationale behind taking particular forms of action and how people can participate in and shape the the various reparations processes unfolding from the ground-up. Community organisers, activists, organisations and radio stations such as Galaxy Radio, Majestic Radio, Conscious Radio, Lightening Radio, The Rock, and Citylock have been instrumental to mass dissemination of information and programming pertaining to the March. It is greatly acknowledged that Galaxy Radio have been consistently broadcasting programmes, reparations content and debate promoting the March and the SMWCGE Campaign. Whilst it is also acknowledged that there were many community videographers who have popularised reporting on the various Marches, a special mention goes out to the following who worked with the AEDRMC and the SMWeCGE campaign to promote relevant reparations social movement-building media content in furtherance of the aims of the March and the SMWeCGE campaign: GotKush TV (GKTV) for their numerous March and SMWCGE campaign focused exclusive video programming in 2015-2016;  Mwangole TV for offcial 2015 March video; and Rayy of Ibuka TV for 2016 March promotional video.

• This year (2016) has seen the development of the London and Bristol Street Outreach Teams, coordinated by the Working Action Group and John Lynch Afrikan Education Programme respectively; which engage in weekly outreach on high streets and at community events to promote the March, the SMWeCGE campaign and obtain signatures for the SMWeCGE petition.

 

 

• The March in London has also inspired, engendered, galvanised related marches, campaigning efforts and other pertinent activities, in various parts of the world including Ghana, Jamaica and St Vincent & the Grenadines, such as the SANKOFAAPAE (Pan-Afrikan Reparatory Justice International Libation Ceremony) taking place in Accra, Ghana.The significance of this includes the replay of the process whereby the ripples of the 1945 5th Pan-African Congress in Manchester, Britain took Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah and its other co-organisers including George Padmore, Ras Makonnen, Amy Ashwood Garvey and WEB Du Bois to galvanise the Independence Struggle in Ghana for her to become one of the early nation-states to break open the pathway to reclaiming Afrikan Sovereignty and sounding the clarion for reparations towards securing the total emancipation and unification of Afrikan people on the Continent and in the Diaspora of Afrika as the basis for effecting and securing holistic Pan-Afrikan Reparations for Global Justice.

 

 

• In between the 2015 March and now, there has been a concerted effort to reach out to, learn from and incorporate the demands and aspirations of communities of reparatory justice interest in Afrika who are still quite marginalised within the programmes and actions of regional reparations movements. For example, in the 2015 March there was participation of Dali Mpofu from the Economic Freedom Fighters of Azania, (so-called South Africa), engagement with those leading the struggle for the restoration of Biafra and Biafran nationhood, as well as continuing links previously established with representatives of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni Peoples (MOSOP) and the Mau Mau Community of Reparatory Justice Interest. This is part of the Pan-Afrikanist tradition of organising in the UK in general and  builds on previous organising efforts such as those of Pan-Afrikanist and Rastafari organisations within the UK and the African Reparations Movement. On the 2015 March there were also activists from Cote D’Ivoire who came along to highlight the need for raising as a matter of reparatory justice concern fighting to release Afrikan Liberation political prisoners such as  Laurent Gbagbo and Omah Simone Gbagbo. Freedom-Fighter and West Papua Independence Leader Benny Wenda and the Free West Papua campaign were also on the March representing West Papuans and other Black Communities of Reparatory Justice Interest in Melanasia, Australasia, and Oceania. The SMWCGE campaign continues to work with such diverse communities of Afrikan reparatory justice interest from the Continent and Diaspora of Afrika who are represented in Britain to amplify by intensifying and widening their more visible participation in the March.

• Our emphasis has been on relating to reparations, not just as a legal case or claim and political struggle, but also as an international social movement. This speaks to the issue of mobilising and building our individual and collective people based power, knowledge and influence through community organising and social movement-building to bring about the reparations objectives we desire by resisting, challenging, and transforming the power against us that denies us reparatory justice. In terms of what can be considered success from the perspective of those of us who see ourselves as part of the ISMAR, this is not only being measured against the aims of the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March and those of the SMWeCGE campaign, but also in relation to the fact that more and more people are identifying as being part of the ISMAR and are organising and mobilising accordingly. By this we mean, being social movement adherents who are developing ground-up leadership, learning by participation in reparations social-movement-building actions and engaging in all year-round activism. In effect, more and more people are taking leadership, becoming activists as well as rank-and-file participants in the ISMAR, identify as being part of this ‘Movement’ and relate their own activist and organising endeavours to movement-building.

• Greater amounts of people are taking action on the SMWeCGE petition and its campaign aims and goals including lobbying MP’s and other elected officials to support the demands contained on the ‘Stop the Maangamizi’ Postcard and adhering to the SMWeCGE Guidance on Proposals for Parliamentary Action.

 

• The March organising process, accompanied by the SMWeCGE campaign is now being studied and analysed in terms of their contribution to activist led knowledge-production and co-production on reparatory justice as part of action-research that is led by Afrikan heritage community based scholar-activists, primarily organising under the banner of the Afrikan Reparations Transnational Community of Practice (ARTCoP), but who have also engaged with establishment academia and contributed to the 2015 ‘Repairing the Past, Imagining the Future: Reparations and Beyond‘ International Interdisciplinary Event at the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with Wheelock College (Boston US).  In addition, members of the SMWCGE campaign and the AEDRMC contributed to shaping the recent ‘From the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Engaging the Maangamizi ‘conference which took place at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

How does the SMWCGE Campaign Enhances the Purposefulness of the March?

The March is a mass mobilisational and organisational vehicle for delivery of the SMWeCGE petition. Some have likened the petition and its campaign goals of establishing All-Party Parliamentary Commissions of Inquiry for Truth & Reparatory Justice (APPCITRJs) at the levels of the Westminster and European Parliaments, to ‘begging’ those most responsible for causing our Maangamizi, to repair us or that it is futile because the British Establishment will never meet this demand. This is simply not the case. In the SMWeCGE petition, we say :“We affirm” that WE, as members of the Afrikan Heritage Community are charging the British state with acts of Genocide/Ecocide against people of Afrikan heritage, within and beyond the UK. In reality we are affirming this rather than begging the State.

It is our firm view that the demand for such a APPCITRJ is very possible to be realised if we mount our people’s and political pressure at every level. The process of establishing such an APPCITRJ will itself raise awareness on the part of Afrikan people, of our right to holistic reparations and is part of a legal, extra-legal, parliamentary  and extra-parliamentary strategy, which enables and supports the development of mass popular legal consciousness-raising about the legitimacy of our Reparations case and the necessity to stop current manifestations of the Maangamizi harms that we continue to suffer. Given that the established legal disorder of unjust law , which has violated Afrikan people’s legal rights for over 500 years, has worked hard to deny the legitimacy of our people’s reparations claims, under the guise that slavery was legalised by Europeans, the assertion by Afrikan people of our right to reparations is fundamental to reparatory justice social change-making. Such social change being necessary to transform the old global order, which denies responsibility for the Maangamizi, as well as the legitimacy of our people’s global case for reparatory justice, and the Post-Reparations World Order, where such Maangamizi denial is criminalised and the consequences of the Maangamizi are redressed and holistically repaired.

This is an aspect of charting an Afrikan self-determined path of legal struggle for reparations (i.e. struggle by use of the law as a form of resistance) which is advocated by Kofi Mawuli Klu, co-founder member of the ‘Stop the Maangamizi’ campaign in his 1993 Paper ‘Charting an Afrikan Self-Determined Path of Legal Struggle for Reparations’. The key components to such a self-determined legal path of struggle include:

1. Demystification of the law.
2. Legal creativity.
3. Afrikan popular democratic involvement in the law-making process.
4. Recognition of the criminal injustice of enslavement, colonisation and neo-colonisation from the perspective of the legal consciousness of Afrikan people.
5. Judging the crimes and wrongs of enslavement in accordance with Afrikan law
6. Promoting mass adjudication of the Afrikan and other indigenous Peoples cases for reparations through grassroots benches of the Ubuntukgotla Peoples International Tribunal for Global Justice.
7. International legal strategies on the formulation and prosecution of the Afrikan case for reparations.

 

In light of the history of Afrikan people’s experience of violence from systems of hegemony imposed by European elites, for the purposes of defending an imperialistic White supremacy racist system of wealth, privilege and power, we are not advocating the unnecessary spilling of our blood and loss of life of our people by taking actions which we are not yet adequately prepared for, as a group within the UK and Europe, i.e. politically, organisationally, militarily or otherwise. Rather, we see the SMWeCGE campaign advocating a process of non-violent direct action, in the first instance, which calls upon the UK Government and the European Parliament to:

“…live up to its declarations of commitment to global respect for universal human rights, good governance and democracy in acknowledging and addressing the social and economic legacies of enslavement on contemporary generations of Afrikans and people of Afrikan heritage. We believe that establishing the All-Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth & Reparatory Justice will go a long way towards institutionalising a reparative truth-seeking process that will contribute to healing and restoring the descendants of the enslaved and facilitating racial justice and equity between the descendants of the enslaved and the enslavers as well as in the wider society. However, such “repair” of the relationship between people of Afrikan heritage and the rest of society cannot take place without public acknowledgement of the crimes against Afrikan people and their descendants over five centuries and counting, and without UK governmental action to enable redress and reparation for the brutal injustices committed in the past which still continues into the present. We call upon the British state to honour the need and right of the descendants of the enslaved to speak in a public forum, provide testimony and evidence of how the legacies of enslavement are resulting in continued human and peoples’ rights violations, impaired quality of life and the ensuing destruction of the essential foundations of life for Afrikan people today.”

The petition will also galvanise grassroots work towards establishing glocal sittings of the Ubunukgotla Peoples International Tribunal for Global Justice (PITGJ) as part of a series of actions which will put a full stop, by way of holistic and transformative reparations, to all acts of Genocide/Ecocide against Afrikan people.

It is important to note that the APPCITRJs, combined with the establishment of glocal sittings of the PITGJ are essential to legitimize other forms of direct action, which will need to be resorted to, if the demands contained within the  SMWeCGE campaign are not met by non-violent means.The SMWeCGE campaign therefore acts as an important catalyser to continue the process of Afrikan People’s self-liberation to victory and in the process to take Reparations by our own efforts.

 

Reparations By Our Own People’s Power

Adapted version of Jean-Jacques Dessalines Original Haitian Flag

Our history shows us that the greatest examples of us effecting and securing reparatory justice is by our own people’s efforts, such as in the case of the Haitian Revolution.

Drawing from and reformulating the notion of reparations enforcement, the SMWeCGE campaign also advocates a form of reparations enforcement. Reparations enforcement is the 21st century reparations activism paradigm. Armed with the various programmes and declarations that have sought to address our people’s condition, wedded to our definition of reparations, we have moved from the position of simply advocating for reparations to that of enforcing our human, people’s and Mother Earth rights to be repaired.

A reparations enforcer is a person, organisation, or state who has an understanding, and acts upon that understanding, that reparations for people of Afrikan heritage is a vital matter of asserting human, peoples and Mother Earth rights.

The reparations enforcer effectively identifies and uses their internal resources to move the injuring parties – governments, corporations, institutions, or individuals – to stop manifestations of the Maangamizi, first and foremost; contribute to building healthy alternatives to the harmful manifestations of the Maangamizi, including such alternatives that will ensure the healing, repair, restoration, nation-building and sovereignty of Afrikan heritage communities.

“Reparations is like freedom, nobody gives you reparations, reparations is something you have to take”

Prophet Kwaku 2014, Co-Chair, Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee

With

Sister Jendayi Serwah, Co-Chair of the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee & Co-Vice Chair of the Stop the Maangamizi Campaign Team

“I believe that there are now two reasons why people have not embraced this cause as their own. One is skepticism, and the other is racism, one doubts whether we can succeed, the other hopes that we do not. I do not have much to say to the racist, the one who wishes to deny us our rights only because of our colour. But I do have a few words for the [person] who though [he/she] wished us well, believes that we  have taken on more than we can accomplish. I remind him that Samuel Johnson said that ‘nothing will be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.’ And finally, I refer him to James Baldwin, who said, I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand. And one is after all emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and [Afrikan Diaspora] history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible“

(bracketed text changes to reflect contemporary usage of terms).

Bashorun M.K.O Abiola, Extracts from an address on ‘Reparation: Progress Report and Future Prospects’ – delivered in London on 3 May, 1992

Please note, this update has been written by the SMWeCGE Campaign Team although some of the members of the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee are also members of the SMWeCGE Campaign Team. That being said, the SMWeCGE Campaign Team takes full responsibility for the views and information presented expressed above.

12/07/2016