On Saturday 17 March, we hold our second event at Birmingham City University (BCU), entitled ‘Reparation for Afrikan Enslavement: Beyond National Boundaries, Toward International Solidarities’. The decision to host this event in Birmingham relates back to the Abuja proclamation, since this led to the foundation of the Africa Reparations Movement UK in Birmingham in December 1993, under the late Labour MP Bernie Grant, and resulted in the publication of the ‘Birmingham Declaration’.
BCU has also become the first UK university to offer an undergraduate degree in Black Studies. This second meeting was attended by around 40 participants, including UK-based activists and scholars, as well as international participation by CARICOM Reparations Commission (the Guyana Reparations Committee) and N’Cobra (the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America), and solidarity messages sent from Ghana.
Like the London meeting, it included an exhibition of activists’ work, entitled the Sankofasafarinta exhibition, but was this time preceded (on Friday 16 March) by a meeting of RepAfrika, the youth-led auxiliary fellowship of the INOSAAR. After opening addresses by Eric Phillips (Guyana Reparations Committee), Yvette Modestin (N’Cobra), Esther Stanford-Xosei (Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe) and INOSAAR and RepAfrika representatives, three parallel workshops were held to discuss different themes relating to internationalization:
- Workshop 1: Working across National Boundaries
- Workshop 2: Creating Global Legitimacy: Winning Hearts and Minds
- Workshop 3: Connecting International Reparations Movements and Pan-Africanism