MAKORI: Horrors of slave trade demand reparations, beyond Pope's apology

I was taught in primary school that the slave trade was the buying and selling of human beings. 

It didn't make any sense because that was not what happened at the market in Keroka town, where my mother sold vegetables and bananas.

Other traders sold clothes, shoes, music records, sour milk, chickens, goats, cows, building materials, radios and bicycle spares. My teacher of English sent me for his newspaper in the town.

I couldn't relate to stories about the slave trade. I knew a human being could not be bought or sold.

The bare sketches I saw in history textbooks of what the trade may have looked like were as unhelpful as the stories and the teachers in communicating to me in relatable ways.

It's likely millions of people around the world who heard that Pope Leo apologised for the Catholic Church's abetting of the slave trade have no idea of what it entailed.

This is a very complex matter. The Catholic Church provided the ideological justification and proven material architecture for one of the vilest crimes against humanity on record.

The Pope described as a “wound in Christian memory” the Vatican’s record of giving European rulers explicit authority to subjugate and enslave “infidels”.

It's astounding that the church is only now publicly acknowledging its complicity, despite extensive historical evidence and centuries of unrelenting campaigns for truth, restitution and reparations.

Once again, we are confronted with the reality that Black lives still come as an afterthought in the white-supremacist citadels of imperial power. 

The church that claims continued and privileged divine revelation through sacred tradition, says it's always guided by the Holy Spirit across history, proclaims its teaching authority (magisterium) as the only acceptable interpretation of the Bible, declares the Pope as the infallible authority on faith and morality, justified, enabled and benefited from the slave trade.

The Trinidadian historian CLR James brings out the raw barbarism of the trade in his celebrated book, The Black Jacobins.

James writes about the so-called New World after Christopher Columbus "discovered" America, where Christian Europe colonised native lands and established sprawling plantations that funded its economy. 

That created the demand for slave labour and a mad rush to Africa. The slave ship became the epitome of heartless capitalist avarice.

"The slaves were collected in the interior, fastened one to the other in columns, loaded with heavy stones of forty or fifty pounds in weight to prevent attempts at escape, and then marched the long journey to the sea, sometimes hundreds of miles, the weakly and sick dropping to die in the African jungle," James writes.

On the ships, the slaves were packed in the hold in galleries one above the other. Each was given only four or five feet in length and two or three feet in height, so that they could neither lie at full length nor sit upright.

"The close proximity of so many naked human beings, their bruised and festering flesh, the foetid air, the prevailing dysentery, and the accumulation of filth turned these holds into a hell. " Many died.

"Fear of their cargo bred a savage cruelty in the crew. One captain, to strike terror into the rest, killed a slave and dividing heart, liver and entrails into 300 pieces made each of the slaves eat one, threatening those who refused with the same torture."

When the ship reached the harbour, the cargo came up on deck to be bought. The buyers examined them for defects, looked at the teeth, pinched the skin, sometimes tasted the sweat to see if the slave's blood was pure and his health as good as his appearance. Some of the women grabbed the private parts of the slaves for fun.

"Having become the property of his owner, he was branded on both sides of the breast with a hot iron. His duties were explained to him by an interpreter, and a priest instructed him in the first principles of Christianity," James writes.

Acknowledging these crimes is important, but it is not enough. The slave trade built the economies of Europe and America, while eviscerating societies across Africa.

Some of the magnificent Catholic cathedrals and the wealth of the church come directly from the blood, tears and sweat of Black slaves.

The just thing to do is to pay reparations to the African nations that suffered through this unspeakable historical horror.

The writer is a journalist