House Chairperson, I move without notice:
That the House -
(1) notes that 2 March marks the 208th year since the Congress of the United States of America passed an Act to prohibit the importation of slaves into any place within the jurisdiction of the United States from any foreign kingdom, place, or country;
(2) also notes that Great Britain enacted a law for the abolition of the transatlantic African slave trade in the same year, despite the fact that the trading of Africans into slavery continued in the rest of the Americas until the 1860s, particularly in Cuba and Brazil;
(3) further notes that by 1865 an estimated 12 million Africans had been shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, and more than one million of these individuals died from abuse and at times torture during the voyage;
(4) also notes that, in addition, an unknown number of Africans died in slave wars and forced marches directly resulting from the Western Hemisphere's demand for African slaves;
(5) further notes that despite the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, slavery continued in the Americas until well into the mid 19th century and that the 12 million Africans who settled in that part of the world evolved into generations and generations of slaves who toiled in chains as a hated and despised people, all for the benefit of the rise of the American civilisation and empire;
(6) also notes that these generations of African slaves in the Americas laboured in the coffee, tobacco, cocoa, sugar and cotton plantations, the gold and silver mines, the rice fields, the construction industry, cutting timber for ships and as skilled labour, as well as as domestic servants, and the descendents of these people, who now live as freed peoples, continue to suffer indignity as shack and slum dwellers in the inner cities of New York, Washington, London and other cities and towns, doing menial work as cheap and easily disposable labour;
(7) acknowledges that the colonisation of Africa followed the same pattern of exploitation, extraction and marginalisation which characterised slavery, leaving the continent with centuries of strife, instability, war, genocide and economic degradation;
(8) also acknowledges that the relationship of the West with Africa still remains structured in the image of slavery and colonisation, and that it is about the extraction of African resources, talents and skills in the advancement of the West, to the total detriment of Africa and its people wherever they are; and (9) finally acknowledges that the economic emancipation of the continent of Africa will be incomplete until its diaspora populations are also free from economic bondage and the legacy of slavery in the USA, Haiti, Cuba, Martinique and everywhere else in the world.
Agreed to.