By Sifelani Tsiko
Harare, Zimbabwe (Sept 04 2006)

JAMES Baldwin once said, "History is not about the past. Its about the present. We take it with us, we cannot escape our history…It is through this prism of our history that we see the world. What was done in the past and the present affects us now whether directly or indirectly."

His message resonated powerfully recently when a visiting European delegation of Christian leaders formally apologised to Africa for crimes committed during the slave trade and the colonial era.

It was a rare occasion on Zimbabwean soil to have a group of Europeans attempting to walk the journey of friendship and reconciliation to try and bring healing and reconciliation between Africans and Europeans.

The apology made by Chris Seaton, the chairperson of the European African Reconciliation Process was made before hundreds of delegates who included former Mozambican president Joachim Chissano, Science and Technology Development Minister Dr Olivia Muchena and the president of the Council of Chiefs (Zimbabwe) Chief Fortune Charumbira.

A total of 24 other representatives from other African countries were present at this event which was held at a city hotel.

The European Christian leaders were drawn from countries that include Britain, Germany, France, Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands and the United States.

Seaton confessed on behalf of Britain and asked for pardon for the sins committed by Britain against Zimbabwe during the colonial era.

In Zimbabwe, he said, Britons cheated King Lobengula into signing the Rudd Concession in 1888 which saw white settlers occupying vast swathes of prime land while the majority of blacks were forced to live on poor, marginal soil.

"We repent for taking rather than giving. Taking the riches an the lands of Africa. We repent for dehumanising Africans, treating them as goods, calling them black ivory.

"We repent for robbing Africans of their history and identity. Today we ask for forgiveness in Jesus' name before you and God," he said.

In his response, Mr Chissano said it was a pity that most Europeans were defensive when confronted about the damaging effects of colonialism saying that colonialism had gone and the reasons for African backwardness lay in "bad governance and corruption."

Critics in Africa contend that these are direct legacies of imperialism.
The European delegation provided a rare spectacle. They knelt before Mr Chissano, asked for forgiveness for the sins committed against Africa. Some even wept.

Fr Frederick Chiromba, the executive secretary of the Heads of Christian Denominations hailed the European delegation for their apologies and said it "is a good beginning for the creation of a better understanding among people of different races and nations."

However, he said, he was 'not privy to the context from which the initiative was coming from."
Despite this, he said, it was encouraging that this was coming at a time when churches in the country were also looking at ways of ending the country's problems.

"If the move is meant to build bridges, I see no problems with it," said Rev Simon Madhiba of the Methodist Church in Zimbabwe.

"It is important to understand the motive and goals of the initiative as well as the target group. This is important before Africans acknowledge and accept the apologies."

Africans can forgive but not forget. Africans are the only race that has not received reparations. The Jews have received reparations. The Korean comfort women and a few other cases have received reparations.

According to historian Basil Davidson, more than 12 million people were taken as slaves, 2 million died in transit and 7 million were killed before embarkation bringing the total to 21 million from 1650 to 1850.

He says this was a devastating loss and that there was evidence that depopulation had a lasting impact.
African countries were exploited economically and abused, something which scholars such as Walter Rodney and many other Third World historians say is major contributing factor to Africa's underdevelopment.

Slave trade and colonialism jeopardised Africa's own pace of development as shown in the field of medicine, mathematics, complex social organisation and engineering which some western researchers are now poaching for their own use and patenting without benefiting Africans.

The apologies, is it a question of: "When a thief kisses you, count your teeth," or something that Africa has to take in good faith?

Since 2001, when Britain blocked the European Union from issuing a straightforward apology for the transatlantic trade in slavery and instead pushed for a 'more modest expression of regret' there has been moves by European Christian leaders to make formal apologies.

But Africans should know that the US and Britain even up to now are still resisting demands for a frank admission of guilty. The two powerful countries are not yet prepared to offer an outright apology for slavery.

The two remain the 'stickiest' and prepared only to express
'regret' about the slave trade without any specific recognition of responsibility.
Britain and the US have persistently reject demands to call slavery a crime against humanity because it could have legal implications and force them to pay reparations.

They cannot as critics say, 'stomach the most dishonourable and abhorrent chapters of human history."
The apology by the European delegation visiting Zimbabwe follow similar apologies by the late Pope John Paul II for the 'historic transgression of the Roman Church, its anti-semitism and the Inquisition,' and more recently the Church of England.

In February this year, the Church of England said sorry for the role it played in the 18^th century inn benefiting from the transatlantic slave trade.

The Archbishop of Canterbury issued an apology for the church's complicity in 'sustaining and profiting hugely' from the trade. But Africans must remember that no endorsement for financial and other reparations were made.

When the British parliament voted for compensation in 1833 - to former slave owners rather than the slaves themselves - the church received £8,823 8s 9d, about £500,000 in today's money, for the loss of slave labour on its Codrington plantation in Barbados.

The bishops and other executives at the time received even more while the victims –the slaves never got a penny out of this.

Rowan Williams, the archbishop, is said to have told the synod that the church ought to acknowledge its corporate and ancestral guilt: "The Body of Christ is not just a body that exists at any one time; it exists across history and we therefore share the shame and the sinfulness of our predecessors, and part of what we can do, with them and for them in the Body of Christ, is prayerful acknowledgment of the failure that is part of us, not just of some distant 'them'.

"To speak here of repentance and apology is not words alone; it is part of our witness to the Gospel, to a world that needs to hear that the past must be faced and healed and cannot be ignored ... by doing so we are actually discharging our responsibility to preach good news, not simply to look backwards in awkwardness and embarrassment, but to speak of the freedom we are given to face ourselves, including the unacceptable regions of ... our history."

 The Rt Rev Tom Butler, Bishop of Southwark is said to have told the synod: "The profits from the slave trade were part of the bedrock of our country's industrial development. No one who was involved in running the business, financing it or benefiting from its products can say they had clean hands.

"We know that bishops in the House of Lords with biblical authority voted against the abolition of the slave trade. We know that the church owned sugar plantations on the Codrington estates."

The reparations movement is growing and participants of the African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission who met in Accra, Ghana in 1999, asked the West to pay US$777 thousand billion within five years in reparations for enslaving Africans while colonising the continent.

They called for the international debt owed by Africa to be "unconditionally cancelled" from all the western countries which participated and benefited from the slave trade and colonialism.

Opponents of the reparations movement in the West often ask: "How can you possibly measure and pay for millions and millions of shattered lives over centuries? When the figure is settled on and paid is it all over?

"Can there be adequate compensation for centuries of slavery, colonialism and destruction? Can one group of people be held accountable for what their ancestors did?

They then say the crimes are too big, committed by too many people and over a long period.
If Jews have received their reparations and Korean comfort women theirs, why not to Africans, one may ask.
"When we speak of reparations we speak of mere repair. We wish to repair the damage to us psychologically, economically, historically and financially," says Linda Bellos, a Africa reparations activist.

"We demand the creation of a continent fit for African people in which we can discover and develop skills and resources that are sustainable and in keeping with our best African traditions."

Seaton and his people must go beyond simply making apologies. Africa does not eat apologies. This is the message they must take home.

There is a whole range of demands –fair international trade, the lifting of sanctions on Zimbabwe, respect and recognition of African people in addition to the cancellation of Africa's debts.

Supporting African initiatives in the field of sciences, agriculture, conflict resolution, mining, education and health, infrastructural development and other key areas, the West can make a much more meaningful contribution to a continent that has been exploited and left underdeveloped.

"History does not disappear by not dealing with it, it remains there and it remains a wound," one German bishop said calling on her country to apologise on the Herero massacres of the 1900s.