Repatriation in the Context of the Grand Debate

A statement from the Rastafari People at the African Union Grand Debate was issued on July 2, 2007. It states: “The World Conference Against Racism declared the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade as a crime against humanity. This year, Britain and America have celebrated the 200th Anniversary of the end of that wickedness. The Republic of Ghana, for its part, has also seen fit to do something to atone for this crime against humanity and the complicity of some chiefs in the deportation of their own people into what became the MAAFA - an African Holocaust.

If it is morally and spiritually correct to talk about the wrongness of forcibly transporting African people from Africa to the Americas, then it is absolutely correct at this time to talk about the rightness of transporting African people from the land of their captivity to their ancestral homeland which is this continent known today as Africa."