All too happy to ignore Africa's `double holocaust'

By Nitzan Horowitz



The colorful island of Goree is half an hour by ferry away from Dakar, the
capital of Senegal. On the west coast of the island there's a modest
two-story building with an inner courtyard surrounded by some small cells.
In the center of one of the walls is a narrow passageway leading to the
ocean, and the dock where the boats waited. Those who passed through that
opening never saw Africa again. It was La porte de non retour - the gate of
no return.

The "slave house" on Goree was one of several "terminals of departure" from
Africa to the new world. Millions passed through here, shackled at the
wrists, ankles and necks in iron chains. Less than half reached Haiti, New
Orleans and Rio de Janeiro. The rest died on the way, many already at the
terminals.

Goree - "our Auschwitz," as the museum's charismatic curator, Joe Ndiaye,
said a few years ago - is a place of pilgrimage. It's a mecca for blacks
worldwide, but especially Afro-Americans. There are autographed photographs
on the wall. Jesse Jackson, Nelson Mandela, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover.

A group of Afro-Americans from New York are weeping before our eyes. An
elderly man bangs his head against a wall where a set of shackles hang in
exhibit. "Enough, please don't do that, sir," says Ndiaye, putting a hand on
his shoulder and leading the group toward the opening to the ocean. They
stand at a distance and take pictures. None dare actually enter. The pope
has been here. He stood in front of the opening and begged forgiveness from
Africa.

Apologies are not enough
But Africa won't make do with apologies. Former Nigerian President Moshood
Abiola left a personal letter: "If the Marshall Plan changed the face of
Europe, the compensation and reparations will change the face of Africa."

Hundreds of organizations have prepared for years for the great moment: an
international conference that will grant Africa compensation for 300 years
of systematic slave trading. The model is the compensation and reparations
to the victims of the Nazi Holocaust. They call their tragedy the "double
holocaust" - millions of slaves brought to America and their relatives left
behind to be exploited.

Durban was to be the jumping-off point. At the World Conference Against
Racism, which opened on Friday, the organizations planned to demand an
apology with an emphasis on payment, here and now. Their reasoning: The
Africans in Africa and the blacks in America are still suffering to this day
from the effects of slavery and the West is still enjoying the benefits.
It's an incredibly complex issue. Who's supposed to pay? Only Europe and the
American countries, or should the Arab and African nations involved in the
trans-Atlantic slave trade also pay? How will it be calculated? And who will
get the money?

The former colonial powers and slave-trading nations are vigorously opposed
to an apology. They fear it could open a Pandora's box of demands for huge
sums. The argument preceding Durban was over the final declaration calling
for an apology as the first step toward compensation for the victims and
donations to a special development fund to be established and funded by
those countries, companies and individuals "who benefited materially from
slavery."

Nobody expects Durban to provide the precise formula but there's hope that
the conference will spark a public discussion of the issue, putting it on
the international agenda. In recent weeks, however, it's clear that's not
going to happen. Israel stole the show. The argument over Zionism and the
use of the term Holocaust to describe the Palestinian conflict completely
overshadowed a whole range of other issues, no less fascinating, that were
to be put center stage at Durban.

There, for the first time in the international arena and at such a high
level, the U.S. would be asked to explain slavery and the ongoing racial
discrimination in the "land of the free." Colin Powell, the first black
Secretary of State, would have found himself in an interesting position. His
colleague from India would have been asked to respond to charges that in his
country there are still "untouchables" - the lowest of all the castes. The
Muslim countries and China would be asked to explain what does the
persecution of homosexuals have to do with "defense from the incursion of
Western culture." And the representatives from Slovakia and the Czech
Republic would be asked about grave reports on the unceasing persecution of
the most persecuted of all, the Gypsy Roma people.

Powell didn't go to Durban. He wanted to go, but President Bush decided to
leave him at home. The Islamic-Arab bloc managed to prevent the
participation of the International Lesbian and Gay Association. The
Australian Aborigines and the Natives of Canada once again missed an
opportunity to present their suffering in the presence of the embarrassed
representatives of their countries.

If Durban, for Jewish organizations and official Israel, is a classic symbol
of how the whole world is against the Jews, looking at the world from
outside of the narrow blinders of the Middle East reveals a pretty
depressing sight: blatant racism; persecution on racial, religious, ethnic,
caste, and sexual grounds; the complete absence of social justice in many
regions of the world.

It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that the huge effort made by certain
international groups against Israeli policy, which was at least partly
justified, was used by those same groups and others that have nothing to do
with the Middle East as a way to distract attention from the harsh reality
elsewhere.

And on the other hand, the vast energy spent by Israel and Jews,
energetically backed by the U.S., to boycott Durban while avoiding direct
discussions of the Palestinian complaints, played into the hands of a long
list of countries saved from the first public discussion of its sort about
what happened in their own backyards.

In the eyes of the black activists, Durban may turn out to be a missed, rare
opportunity to win at least an initial budget that would enable
documentation of the scope of the slavery and its damage. Without such
documentation, it will be very difficult to approach the issue of
compensation. "There's a huge problem with documentation," says Joe Ndiaye
on Goree Island. "We need resources to finally do some serious research."
The money isn't at hand, and it's hard to believe it will be forthcoming
soon.



Holocaust to Holocaust

The Detroit tourists look at the tiny cells, a meter by a meter and a half,
in which 15-20 men were packed with their backs to the walls, waiting for
the ships. Women and children were held in separate cells. Once a day they
were allowed out to defecate. Plague and disease struck them down.

The "weighing room" was the first selection stage. The minimal weight for
transport was 60 kilograms for a man. Thinner subjects were "fattened up
like geese" to reach the right weight. Women were selected by their
potential for fertility. The children were sorted by the quality of their
teeth. After the selection, they passed through the short tunnel to the
docks. It would be the last time they saw Africa.

Danielle Mitterrand, the widow of the former French president, initiated the
renovation of the slave house. The association with the Holocaust is not
only Joe Ndiaye's. "Goree, Dachau, how much longer do we have to go before
we are human beings?" she wrote in a dedication on the wall. "Here, like in
Vichy, there's only one thing to say, `Never again.'"

From 1536 to the middle of the 19th century, more than 300 years, Africa
suffered a strange epidemic. Unlike normal epidemics, which hurt the
weakest, this one carried off the healthiest and strongest.

"The conventional wisdom about slavery is about the suffering of the slaves
brought to the Americas. Not many consider what happened to Africa after the
systematic slave trade," says Ndiaye. He speaks passionately on the subject.
"They took Africa's most beautiful races, and it's no accident that the
world's greatest athletes are black Americans. In the eyes of the traders,
each African nation, like cattle, had its advantages and disadvantages. The
most popular were the Yoruba tribes of Nigeria and Benin today. They were
considered real workhorses of the best kind, and were sent to the Caribbean
plantations, where they developed voodoo in Haiti."

The numbers Ndiaye presents come from French archives, and say that 15-20
million Africans were taken into slavery. According to the estimates most
accepted by historians, based on figures that appear in documents that were
used to prepare for Durban, between 12-15 million Africans were captured for
slavery. "Obviously it's difficult for us to come up with precise figures,"
he says in response to complaints of exaggerated numbers. "Even today, only
50 years after the Holocaust, there are those who say the camps didn't
exist, that the 6 million is a myth, a lie. So what can be said about slave
trade 300 years ago?"

The Bush Administration has led Western opposition to any apology or
compensation for the slavery. But some African leaders, including those
whose countries have expressed support for the compensation, also have
remained surprisingly quiet. One of the few to raise his voice on the issue
is Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, who came out strongly against the
notion. "We are still suffering from the influence of slavery and
colonialism, and that cannot be measured in money," he declared. "What does
compensation mean? Does it mean that a certain amount of dollars will be
paid and then slavery will cease to have existed, and here's a receipt
proving it. That's not only absurd, it's insulting."

Many disagree with him and use the same arguments as those in Israel in the
1950 who supported German reparations. "Your Ben-Gurion was right and did
the right thing," says Ndiaye. "But in America, they didn't even pay what
they promised the freed slaves - 40 acres and a mule. We can start there and
move forward."

The final goal of the campaign is still cloudy, but the first demand is
clear: The flow of money in the world has to be reversed. The external debt
of the African countries should be wiped out, and instead money should flow
into the continent for education and health programs.

The African organizations want to organize into something familiar from the
Jewish world's demands for reparations - reparations committees. But it's
difficult to ignore the impression that they are trying to avoid the
question of Africa's own involvement in the slave trade and that slavery
still exists on the continent to this day. The excuses are weak. They say
that the current forms of slavery are "household slavery, like in the days
of the Greeks," as Ahmed Ben Bella, the Algerian independence leader,
explained last week.

In Africa, they prefer to examine the trans-Atlantic trade. And the lack of
self-criticism about current norms of government on the continent, as well
as the past, provides a host of arguments for those opposed to reparations.
One possible compromise solution may yet turn out to be no apology in
exchange for more aid to Africa.

But the issue won't go away. The flow of visitors to Goree is growing. Joe
Ndiaye is well known to black communities worldwide. He has disciples from
Jamaica to Los Angeles. His office is full of certificates of appreciation
and thank you letters. "Would America be America without the Black nation,"
wrote a Vietnam vet. Ndiaye also fought in Vietnam, as a French paratrooper.
He was born on Goree to a Catholic mother and a Muslim father. He was weaned
on the stories of the slave trade.

The few Israelis who arrive get his special attention. When he's asked why,
he points to a framed portrait of Leopold Senegor, the first president of
Senegal and a member of the French Academy. Ndiaye was appointed the curator
of the Slave House in 1960, when Senegal achieved independence, and he
received the president's blessing. "Those who try to make people forget the
holocaust of the blacks," Senegor told Ndiaye, "will also make people forget
the Jewish Holocaust."

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