[PEN-L:7352] Re: Re: Re: Liquidated damages for slavery

[Thomas Kruse <tkruse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Compensate the living for wrongs but
>dragging out every historical exploitation and compensating the descendants
>is not possible or a reasonable political goal.

OK.  But I had a conversation with a black Ghanaian poet friend not long
ago; we were picking apart Amistad, the movie.  One point he made along the
way is that while there is an outstanding museum/reflection space on the
Holocuast, there's nothing similar for slavery.

BTW, his poetry is great.  In a slim volume on Coast Castle, the
"processing center" for humans about to shipped out in bondage depicted in
Amistad, he notes:

[...]

Behind the dawn, nothing
Save the bones of sad stories:
History does not repeat itself
It merely quotes us
When we have not been to wise

Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang in _Cape Coast Castle: A Collection of Poems_ (Accra,
1996)

Tom Kruse
Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia
Tel/Fax: (591-4) 248242, 500849
Email: tkruse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx