Brixton will once again be the starting point for the annual march organised by the Stop The Maangamizi Campaign and the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee to demand reparations as a start to the process of repairing the vast damage to humans and the ecology by the enslavement of Africans over centuries,
The event is backed by Extinction Rebellion (XR) supporters who joined an online conference today (21 July) to discuss and explain the campaign, which recently received the backing of Lambeth council.
The seventh march is due to assemble in Brixton at 9am on 1 August/Mosiah and organisers say this one will involve “locking down” Brixton to enforce a traffic-free zone on Brixton Road “in a little contribution to lowering pollution levels in the area”.
Esther Stanford-Xosei, spokesperson for the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee, and coordinator-general of the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide Campaign, said the theme of this year’s march was uniting for survival as the Maangamizi – the continuing mass destruction caused by the enslavement of African people – represents ecocide.
“Our people have been prevented from breathing for centuries,” she said.
One of the speakers at the conference was Lambeth Green party councillor Scott Ainslie, who instigated the full-council resolution that commits it to back the campaign.
He said that he supported the movement because it is the right thing to do, and the time is right. Social justice and environmental justice were two sides of the same coin, he said.
He said he had approached Labour councillor Sonia Winifred, cabinet member for equalities and culture, and a member of the Windrush generation, and asked: “can we work on this together?”
She, and the Labour whips, had agreed. The Greens had a draft motion ready to go, which thy worked on. It was passed by the full council with only the single Conservative member voting against.
Lambeth council is, so far, the only local authority to back unequivocally the demands of the campaign, including a call for an all-party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice to study the impact of the United Kingdom’s transatlantic traffic in enslaved Africans on social, political and economic life within the UK and the rest of the world, and reparations taking into consideration proposals in accordance with the United Nations Framework on Reparations.
How can Lambeth Council be “so far, the only (UK) local authority” to pass such a resolution when Islington Council passed a similar resolution prepared by the same group of activists the week before Lambeth did?
Islington’s resolution contains certain caveats that Lambeth’s does not