Universities that built their financial sustainability from slavery's wealth can't claim to be excellent, says Sir Hilary Beckles
November 16, 2021
Universities were the principal participants in crimes committed against humanity represented by chattel slavery, distinguished academic Sir Hilary Beckles said in a virtual lecture to kick-start the 2023 Universities Studying Slavery (USS) conference.
“They provided the legal concepts and principles that enabled the slave codes to function as legitimate tools of economic governance,” he noted. “They provided the theories that you can convert people into a unit of poverty, you can deny their humanity and that you have arguments to ignore and set aside their claims to be human beings to enable them to function. They provided the political arguments to say that such enslaved, captured and subjugated people should have no human or political rights to participate in any system of governance, and the sociology to define these people as culturally and physically inferior…The university system was sitting on the front bench of all of these crimes that were committed.”
The theme of the November 1 event was ‘Slavery and Reparations: African Nova Scotia, Canada and Beyond’
A leading advocate for reparatory justice, Beckles authored ‘Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide’.
The University of the West Indies (UWI) Vice-Chancellor said no university can claim to be excellent if it’s not ethical.
“All of those universities that have built their financial sustainability and their infrastructures on wealth from the slavery world are now faced with an ethical problem,” the CARICOM Reparations Commission Chair pointed out. “It’s not acceptable to say that my academic research, the quality of my professors, the outputs from my research institutes, the quality of our students and when they graduate how excellent they are, can be packaged into a concept of excellence if, at the same time, you ignore, marginalize or suppress the unethical conduct of your institution to arrive at the stage where it is at.
“You cannot be ethical if you know that your pedagogy has been a critical force in creating and sustaining crimes against humanity. You can’t be ethical if you accept and embrace that the proceeds and crimes against humanity that enabled your institution to thrive if you believe you can ignore all of that into the future because you are producing first-class graduates and your professors are excellent. There’s an immorality that has taken root in the Western academy that we are now trying to address.”
Two decades ago at the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia & Racial Intolerance in Durban, Beckles argued that the reparations movement is going to be the greatest political movement of the 21st century.
“At the time that argument was made, some people thought it was hyperbolic and that I had gone into an extreme view of the future,” he said. “But I have lived to see in the last 20 years the truth of that argument because it was clear that 80 per cent of the world was rising up against the injustices that they have inherited from the last century or two.”
Invited by the United Nations last March to serve as an expert for its ‘Futures of Higher Education Project’, Beckles suggested that African states, which suffered heavily because of the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, can increase the reparations movement momentum.
During last September’s first CARICOM-Africa summit virtually hosted by Kenya, African leaders agreed to begin to work on reparations.
“We have placed before them that they should consider hosting a global reparations summit in 2022,” said Beckles who served as an associate member of the London University Legacies of Slavery Project and the University of Hull’s ‘Wilberforce Institute for Slavery and Emancipation’. “We are hopeful that an African country or a group of them will do that. I think you are looking at about 20,000 people turning up for this. That will be a game-changer.”
Dalhousie and the University of King’s College in partnership with the Black Cultural Centre of Nova Scotia will host the first USS conference outside the United States from October 18-21, 2023.
It will focus on the history of slavery in Nova Scotia and Canada and the experience of African Nova Scotians particularly.
Dalhousie was the first Canadian university to inquire into its relationship to slavery and race. Two years ago, it apologized to Black Nova Scotians for its founder’s racist actions and views following the ‘Scholarly Panel to Examine Lord Dalhousie’s History on Slavery and Race’ chaired by Dr. Afua Cooper who was the report’s lead author.
George Ramsay, who described Black people as ‘idle and pre-disposed for slavery’, used the proceeds of slavery to set up the university in 1818 and actively sought to banish Black refugees from Nova Scotia.
While accepting the academic integrity of the research, Beckles said he isn’t satisfied that the ‘House of Dalhousie’ has been reconstructed.
“I am not sure we have done enough with the ‘House of Dalhousie’ and I am speaking from a Caribbean perspective because it’s through the Caribbean that Lord Dalhousie entered, participated in the military complex of the slave plantation, learning all of that reality and arriving in Canada as the new representative of the Caribbean slave complex which evolved in Nova Scotia,” he said.
A scholarly inquiry into the University of King’s College link to slavery revealed that its founder Rev. Charles Inglis was a slave owner.
Frank Harvey, Dalhousie’s Acting Provost and Vice President Academic, said the university recognizes the importance of reparations and is committed to addressing the issue in the context of African Nova Scotians as a distinct people who have played a critical role in the province’s culture and history since 1605 as well as Caribbean Blacks, Black Canadians and in general descendants of enslaved people of the African Diaspora.
“This commitment includes the continued support to expanding research on the issue as we did with the Lord Dalhousie report and as we are now doing with support from a major grant from Canadian Heritage on Black Peoples History of Canada led by Killam Research Chair and Professor Afua Cooper,” he added.
Prior to Beckles lecture, Cooper, St. Mary’s University PhD. candidate Delvina Bernard, Jefferson School African American Heritage Centre Director Dr. Andrea Douglas and Global African Congress International Working Committee Chair Cikiah Thomas took part in a panel discussion.
USS is a consortium created and led by the University of Virginia examining slavery’s role in higher education and its legacies.
