Dr. Pius Adesanmi responds to Ochonu's, saying that the logistics of reparations are no obstacles:
One of the major problems of Professor Ochonu's submissions lies in an unproblematized subscription to the notion of blanket Black diasporic victimhood versus a generalized continental participatory villainy, although he leaves some room for Africans who might not have
participated. This raises the question of where he places the well-known phenomenon of Black slave ownership in the morality of exclusive diasporic right to reparations. Of the vast literature on the subject, the one that immediately comes to mind is Larry Koger's *Black Slave Owners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860*. Now slightly dated, it is a thoroughly researched book on the subject. And there is, of course, Edward P Jones's Pulitzer winning novel, *The Known World*, which fictionalizes the same subject. If I am not mistaken, the Federal census of 1830 insists that Free Blacks owned more than 10,000 slaves from Louisiana to Virginia. It is thus not an isolated phenomenon. Surely, it is going to be a very tedious task
determining which African American has one drop of blood from a Black slave master with a view to disqualifying him/her from receiving reparations.
If modalities and logistics are properly thought out as I submitted earlier, if we are able to answer Soyinka's question, the morality of reparations for the continent becomes self-evident.
This litigation country has supplied us all the legalese we need: its courts routinely award mouth-watering sums to victims of crimes whose suffering and loss are beyond empirical valuation: pain and suffering! the arguments about Africa participation often tend to water down the coercive instrumentality of the White slaver. He did not always wait quietly in his ship, drinking rum, smoking his pipe while waiting for evil Africans to raid neighbouring villages and ensure his supplies. He often organized and supervised those raids. And the punitive expeditions, the divide and rule strategies, and yes, the tricks, so powerfully captured by Prosper Merimee in his short story, "Tamango", all combined to rob the continent of what the French call its "forces vives" at that historical juncture: pain and suffering!
--