THE UK reparations conference offered food for thought pertaining towards African liberation.
‘Stop the Maangamizi’ was plastered on the large poster behind the conference speakers – stemming from the Swahili dialect referring to the chattel slavery of Africans, the colonialism of Africa and the Caribbean, and the continued neocolonial dominance of European powers and companies.
At the epicentre of reparations is education.
As Jamaica’s first national hero Marcus Garvey said “, A people without knowledge of their history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots”.
Education is a weaponising component towards the fight for reparations.
Since the inception of large pockets of Black communities in Britain post-war, education and the school system were a hostile breeding ground for British imperialism and common-sense racism.
The ESN scandal pushed academically capable Black kids into special education schools, with ‘culture’ as a precipitation for intelligence.
The Rampton Report 1981 highlighted the fallacies of the education system, reporting how, in several London local educational authorities, 98 percent of Black Caribbean students were leaving with no qualifications.
The Swann Report 1985 concluded that low teacher expectations and racial prejudice were prominent among white teachers and British society.
In this domain of education, Black people have purposely been miseducated – a tradition stemming from the colonies and indoctrinated with ideologies proclaiming their cultural, intellectual, and historical inferiority in contrast to Europeans.
Still, no change has occurred. And what remains problematic is the current school system.
The English education system continues to push Black kids to the Alternative provision/PRU and, unfortunately, at times, to prison, alluding to this school-to-prison pipeline.
But more so, it continues to perpetuate the idea of second-class citizenship for those of African descent.
The continued neoliberal assault and academisation of the education system in this era of globalisation of league tables emphasises grades rather than students’ intellectual facilitation.
And it is within this assault Black children face the effects of mass exclusion and social marginalisation.
The past can serve as inspiration for the future. Black parents’ activism from the 1970s to the 1990s, with the supplementary school movement, helped combat the racist assaults of the school system that pushed out Black kids with little to no qualifications.
Above all, the supplementary school movement gave hope. Specifically, those who had no hope with their lived experience.
It is difficult to pinpoint what reparations will look like, but for certain Britain and the West as we know it could not exist without our subjugation.
Education is needed to better us and to organise us for this fight for reparations.