http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5293
Lansana Fofana
Freetown
The first West African conference of the African Socialist International has ended in Freetown, with delegates calling for http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3967 to be paid to Africans for 400 years of slavery.
A presentation by http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5548 for the “heinous crimes committed against Africans for our enslavement and dehumanisation.”
“Asking for reparations is no http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4376 our labour, dignity and resources.”
The meeting brought together African socialists against the background of the current financial crisis facing western economies.”Reparations may come in the form of technology transfer and financial resources because slavery destroyed Africa’s early potential for growth and industrial advancement,” Rashid added.
The issue of reparations has long been a subject of debate in intellectual circles around the continent and participants at the Freetown meeting agreed that the effects still hamper Africa’s growth.
“Western Europe enslaved Africans for 400 years, shipping out our people as human commodities to work on plantations in the west and help develop Europe. The trend continues even after independence, with the West propping up surrogate regimes which seek to promote their interests,” Luwezi Kinshasha, a Congolese delegate at the conference, says.
He adds that only socialism will unite the mass of African people to take control of their destinies and move forward. According to him, African workers and masses should take power because this is the only way the continent’s resources will be properly utilised for the benefit of the African people.
As general secretary of the African Socialist International, an outgrowth of the African Peoples Socialist Party founded in the United States in the 1970s during the struggle for http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3838, Kinshasha told IPS the conference aimed at uniting and mobilising Africans to step up the campaign for reparations.
“This conference is a starting point. We must organize and unite the African people so that our call for reparations will be heeded by the West,” the Congolese activist laments.
“There’s been more talking in the past. We need to move a step forward and really engage the West in our quest for reparations,” he says, adding: “Even before that, we must demand that the West first openly accept guilt for slavery by apologizing to Africans and then move on to settle for reparations.”
A local pressure group, the Pan African Union (PANAFU) which also took part in the conference, says it has been exploring the subject of reparations and has a working committee charged with the responsibility of coordinating with similar organisations on the continent to push forward the fight for reparations.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200810250020.html