Damages of slavery in Afro-descendant family structure is a subject in seminar on reparations
On the fourth day of its fifth module, the Seminar on Reparations of Slavery and Colonization addressed on Thursday the historical-sociological aspects related to family structure and women in Africa, and in the diaspora, based on forced deportation proceedings which the Africans were victims by the western colonizers, and what elements should be considered in a policy of reparations of the crimes committed.
From the Sucre room of Casa Amarilla, in Caracas, the historian and general secretary of the Umoja Pan-African League, Amzat Boukari-Yabara, a native of the Republic of Benin, explained that repairing everything that centuries of slavery and colonization destroyed goes through understanding that the victims were violently separated from their families, without even being able to say goodbye, and that in the colonies, complex processes that affected their identity were generated because European settlers began to build races, according to the type of activity they imposed on their slaves, such as working in rice plantations or gold mines.
The historian also pointed out that in the African family, which follows a matrilineal model, women occupy a central place, she is the pillar that holds the family together, contrary to the patriarchal model of the Western European family.
Amzat Boukari-Yabara pointed out that as a form of reparation, slavery and trafficking in Africans during the colony should be mandatory signature in schools.
Likewise, he proposed, within the establishment of a reparations policy, the implementation of a national research program on this matter, which will deepen each year in a specific way, in order to enrich the existing data, update the needs, determine within the basis of a solid study, what should be repaired to the victims of slavery, because otherwise it could destroy advances that are not sufficiently documented or investigated.
The Seminar on Reparations of Slavery and Colonization is organized by the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry together with the People’s Power Ministry for Culture, through the International Center for Decolonization Studies “Luis Antonio Bigott”, and it’s part of the Decade of Afro-descendant Peoples (2015-2025).