“AFRICAN RULERS SOLD THEIR OWN PEOPLE INTO SLAVERY!”
This is a common consideration/objection raised concerning the responsibility for reparations and I have previously addressed slavery in the West African context. However, I have a very simple answer to this objection that is being made by some in the reparations movement.
Because NO Africans were trafficked to the Americas BEFORE June 18, 1452, and because the Dum Diversas Apostolic Edict was a declaration of total war issued by the Pope claiming planetary authority, and following the declaration a military invasion was initiated, then all trafficking by all parties are de facto "war time activities".
It doesn't matter who was taking the action of capturing and trafficking, all of it occured by virtue of the war declaration. Here is how Sir Hilary Beckles, Chairman of the CARICOM Reparations Commission, describes it in his speech “The Age of Terror: Europe and the Trade in Africans in West Africa,” given 3-2-2023:
"The chattel slave was not an African product. One of the characteristics of European History has been this notion that slavery existed everywhere and therefore there was nothing new in what they were engaged in and this was one of the first mythology and lies and deception imbedded in European History. The word Slavery was used historically in the most loose and elastic fashion to include all relationships in which individuals experience some reduction in your freedom. Institution of marriage, the female experience some reduction of freedom through resources, control of them, naming and control of children. This is imbedded in most systems of the world historically. This was seen as the shallow end. Then there was a question of What do you do with prisoners of wars, you go to war you have prisoners you have a choice, You can execute them as losers or bring them home and integrate them into your community but now they are now working on behalf of the state, chief or family. But these people had rights. They had rights to live in the community, rights to resources, rights to their own family, to get married, they could become high officers in the families in the royalty. . . . None of that was significant in the context of what the Europeans wanted. The Europeans invented a new category of slavery that had never been seen on planet earth before. No culture of civilization had ever created this thing called chattel slavery. Have never been found before. It was something specifically created to enslave the African and bring him across the Atlantic to slavery in the Americas. That moment in history. How do I establish the authenticity of that statement? What chattel slavery was? This is something that seems to have erupted from the depth of hell. Never seen before. First, A Chattel slave under law is not a human being. In no system of labor,in no system of domestic usage, in no system of family usage, in no system in which the word slavery was used before were those people denied their human identity –all of these people who were classified as slaves loosely were seen as heroic people were people who had status in their families. They performed domestic work, they performed agricultural work, they were married they had their children, many became ambassadors of the kings to go and do things on behalf of the king, they were just servants. In chattel slavery The African was not a human being, the African was property. The so called domestic slave in Africa was not Property, they were human beings whose identity was respected.
We also know that this military engagement in Africa began as a search for gold. And shifting from gold trade to the kidnapping of enchained labor. That was the enormity of this military complex that was unleashed upon the indigenous people of Africa . . . In Europe the royal families were the principle investors in these military operations. . . . The British Royal African Country had the full might of the British army and navy behind them. No West African government had the military capacity to withstand the military onslaught of these companies. These companies built forts along the coast of West Africa from Senne Gambia to Congo. . . . These corporations, and I have to emphasize this for people who have not been effectively exposed, there is a belief which you will find from observing movies and Hollywood type images, that slave traders were just a group of random individuals who took a small ships went out and randomly grabbed people and took them down the river and put them on a boat. You are looking at the most highly organized commercial military complex at this time. These corporations had dozens and dozens of ships, and thousands of soldiers in West africa on the coast to protect the storage and the shipment. They were Highly militarized with the latest military technology with the guns and the cannons and they were able to penetrate deeply into Africa with this military capacity. The Wealth that they accumulated, which was in the first instance the monopoly wealth of the royal families, eventually tricked down to the private sector, when they were given free access and down to the banks. The Bank of England was established in 1694 to help to finance the slave trade. All of the wealth coming back into England, going to the royal family and aristocracies that money had to be converted into investment capital . And so the Bank Of England was created . . . ."
Meanwhile, I have previously discussed The Correctness of Shifting from the European "Slave Trade" to the African "War Crimes" Narrative: Notes on José Lingna Nafafé's New Book on the 1684 Mendonça (Kongo) Reparations Case at the Vatican. My friend, Jose Lingna Nafafe, makes the point in his new book, Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century:
"To fully comprehend Mendonça’s work, it is crucial that we understand from the outset that the enslavement of Africans was part of the Portuguese conquest of West Central Africa, and the enslavement of Angolans was inseparable from Portuguese military aggression in the region. From the beginning of Portuguese settlement there in the mid-sixteenth century, war was waged against the West Central African people. This was the catalyst for the enslavement of ordinary civilians. . . If we are to grasp the rationale behind the capture of enslaved people, in the region and understand how they were obtained, it is crucial to recognise the role played by the Municipal City Council of Luanda, which regulated the shipment of the enslaved Angolans sent to Brazil. Indeed, it is impossible to understand the significance of Mendonça’s court case without taking account of the involvement of the Municipal City Council of Luanda in the slave trade. Central to the argument of this book, then, is the story of the destruction of Pungo-Andongo and the death of its last king, Joao (John) Hari II, who was Mendonça’s uncle. . . Crucially, to fully understand the involvement of sobas (Angolan local rulers) in the slave trade in Angola and perhaps eslewhere in Africa, I contend that it is necessary to take into account the introduction in 1626 by Fernao de Sousa, the Portuguese governor in Angola, of baculamento, a tax payment of enslaved people in place of encombros, a tax payment in produce. This is a piece of new data that has not been used by historians of West Central Africa, Africanists and Atlanticists. I argue that it had far-reaching consequences for the historiography of the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unaware of this legislation, West Central African historiography on ‘taxation’, ‘wars’, ‘debt’ and ‘legal practices’ has unwittingly been prevented from truly understanding the reasons for and methods of enslavement. These historians of West Central Africa have remained ignorant of Sousa’s introduction of the baculamento. Subsequent governors and their captains in the presidio (Portuguese outpost) in Angola used the baculamento for centuries to naturalise the Atlantic slave trade. And the baculamento has remained obscure until now; most West Central African historians have taken it as accepted wisdom that slavery was an African practice, and the idea that Africans colluded in Atlantic slavery has never been challenged. Generations of scholars have studied systems of ‘taxation’, ‘wars’, ‘debt’ and ‘legal practices’ without interrogating the Portuguese institution of baculamento, which overrode local practices; instead, blame has been placed on the Angolan institutions. All Angolan soba allies of the Portuguese conquest were obliged to make a payment of 100 enslaved people annually to Portugal. This Portuguese taxation, which was named after the local baculamento practice - a tribute system- profoundly disrupted the Angolan socio-political and legal system and resulted in social upheaval. Communities and their rulers were turned against each other, a new local judicial procedure was imposed that served the interests of the Atlantic slave trade, putting judicial officers in local courts in Angola to adjudicate local cases in their own interest - what Kimbwandende K.B. Fu-Kiau called a turning point in African governance and leadership in West Central Africa.
Conquered, and subjected to Portuguese rule, Angolan kings and sobas loyal to the king of Portugal were made subject to annual tax payment in human beings in 1626, thus turning people into a currency. This was particularly the case for Angolan kings, because ‘native’ soldiers were recruited directly from the region where the Portuguese had established control and maintained fairs (markets). The Municipal Council of Luanda was charged with dividing land already conquered from the Angolans between the Portuguese and African war captains, so-called guerra preta. . . . Guerra preta was a term used to refer to Angolan soldiers who were recruited by force from the Portuguese-controlled or -conquered region of Angola. All loyal sobas in both Angola and Kongo were conquered by the Portuguese and forced to give obedience to the Portuguese Crown in five areas: (1) pay annual tax in enslaved people to the Crown; (2) allow recruitment of soldiers for war to fight alongside the Portuguese contingent of soldiers stationed in Angola or Kongo against fellow Angolans or Kongolese; (3) open local and regional markets for the Portuguese to freely trade and impose their rule; (4) allow Portuguese priests to build churches and carry out Christian mission activities in the area; (5) allow land to be alienated for the Portuguese use. In return, sobas were granted protection from their Angolan enemies, and their children offered Portuguese education. . . .
On 19 November 1664, members of the Municipal Council of Luanda showed their power by lodging a complaint with the Crown that was adjudicated by the Portuguese Overseas Council, which dealth with all overseas affairs:
‘That the trade of the same Kingdom [Angola] consists only in the enslaved that is carried out in the lands of Soba’s vassals of His Majesty, that is, from presidios such as Lobolo, Dembos, Benguella, and from those that are mostly conquered by that government . . . that the most important thing that there is in that kingdom, which is in need of maintaining, is the Royal standard tax duty in slaves that they dispatch from the factory of Your Majesty. It is not that its profit is great, but also for being used for sustaining the Infantry, and to pay governors’ salaries of five presidios of hinterland, of secular priests in Kongo, and of other clergy of that kingdom, and other salaries, and budgets.’
This clearly demonstrates that the City Council’s budget depended entirely on revenues from enslavement. The slave trade in Angola was the lifeblood of the council and maintained the Portuguese project of conquest; without it, there was no Portuguese Empire. . . .
Mendonça represented those constituencies from his own family - his grandfather, Philipe Hari I, and father, Ignacio da Silva - who were coerced into the slave trade by the Portuguese regime in Angola. . . . When it comes to historical sources, in 1682 the Jesuit missionaries Francisco Jose de Jaca and Epifanio de Moirans, who knew and supported Mendonça’s court case, completed their work Servi Liberi Seu Naturalis Mancipiorum Libertatis Iusta Defensio ( Freed Slaves or the Just Defence of the Natural Freedom of the Emancipated). Both also offered a critique of the capture of Africans in Africa who were then taken to the Americas as enslaved people. While renowned Spanish Jesuit Barolome De las Casas (1484-1566) defended the Indigenous Americans against slavery, the lesser-known Jaca and Moirans also spoke out against the enslavement of Africans using the legal arguments of the time. Their work, however, did not come to the fore in the debate on the Atlantic slave trade until the beginning of the 1980s, when their defence was translated from Latin to Spanish by Jose Tomas Lopez Garcia as Dos Defensores de los Esclavos Negros en el Siglo XVII (Two Defenders of the Black Slaves in the Seventeenth Century). Neither Jaca nor Moirans went to Africa as missionaries, but they both worked as Jesuit priests in Venezuela and Cuba, where they met. Their defense is a major work on the injustice of African enslavement in the Americas, and on the abolition of slavery in the Atlantic yet it is almost unknown. They analyzed in great depth the same legal terms that were used by Mendonça in the Vatican, such as ‘natural’, ‘human’, ‘divine’, ‘civil’, and ‘canon law (jus canonico)’, challenging why Atlantic slavery was being practiced against these laws. They argued that the Atlantic slave trade was illegal, stating that ‘when we begin with natural law, all men are born free’. They contended that the responsibility for those enslaved Africans in the Americas law with the pope, because ‘the lords of blind slaves with their ambition to impress the Governor (the governors in the Indies are subject to the Catholic King and the kings are subject to the Pope). This chain of responsibility made it necessary for the pope to punish the guilty parties committing such crimes, particularly the Portuguese governing authorities in Africa, Brazil and the Americas. And this obligation also implicated the pope in a crime against humanity: the Atlantic slave trade.”
When so-called "complicit African kings and queens" raided and attacked each other and trafficked African people, it was done so to fulfill the war tribute/tax imposed by the Dum Diversas principals subject to the Pope . . . .
This is just a small sample of the research which informs my work and the reason for the questions in the Request for the ICJ opinion. Again, it doesn't matter who it was doing the capturing, buying and selling, all of it was initiated and exacerbated by the Dum Diversas and succeeding Asiento monopoly war contracts.
REPARATIONS FOR THE DUM DIVERSAS WAR IS THE UNIFYING GLOBAL AFRIKAN REPARATIONS CLAIM that the Resolution on Africa’s Reparations Agenda and The Human Rights of Africans In the Diaspora and People of African Descent Worldwide - ACHPR/Res.543 (LXXIII) 2022 - Dec 12, 2022 calls for:
"2. Calls upon member states to: . . . take measures to eliminate barriers to acquisition of citizenship and identity documentation by Africans in the diaspora; to establish a committee to consult, seek the truth, and conceptualize reparations from Africa’s perspective, describe the harm occasioned by the tragedies of the past, establish a case for reparations (or Africa’s claim), and pursue justice for the trade and trafficking in enslaved Africans, colonialism and colonial crimes, and racial segregation and contribute to non-recurrence and reconciliation of the past;, . . . 4. Encourages civil society and academia in Africa, to embrace and pursue the task of conceptualizing Africa’s reparations agenda with urgency and determination.”