In modern history, which for black people begins in 1441, we lost 100 million lives through violence inflicted by the slave trade. Thousands more were taken from their homes to enslavement in the western hemisphere, where they and succeeding generations worked their entire lives without payment for that work. What would be owed to us, using the true capitalist principle of the right of inheritance?

The value of the accrued wages of Africans enslaved in the United States, plus interest, has been estimated at anywhere from $5 trillion to $10 trillion US. This debt does not count the other billions of dollars that may have been lost to blacks in the last 130 years through segregation and reduced job opportunities due to racial discrimination. Nor does it count the additional debts owed to the descendants of slavery in other countries - the West Indies, for example, where thousands were enslaved.

One example of the impact of racial discrimination lies in the 10-to-one ratio between the home ownership assets of whites and blacks in the United States. The average equity in home real estate is $42,000 for whites and just over $4,000 for blacks. A contributing factor to this discrimination was the U.S. government's post-war policy that offered low-cost mortgages to whites to enable them to move from the inner cities to the suburbs, while those mortgages were denied blacks. Yet black people in the United States helped pay for those government subsidies through their taxes. We helped pay for the better schools built in the suburbs and the better teaching and resources enjoyed by white children.

We feel the only way to acquire entrance to the future and build a social foundation that will enable us to enjoy the political and legal rights we have won is to initiate some form of reparations. It's time for western governments to ante up.

We promote a massive fund for black education that will raise the educational level of black children to that of the white middle class.

Since the Depression, black unemployment has averaged two to 2½ times the unemployment rate among whites. Reparations will help equalize employment opportunities through education and black ownership of meaningful black assets. "Part of the dream is access to credit to encourage black ownership of business ventures. We want 15 to 20 per cent of the black labour force to be able to find a job and build a career in a black-owned business. Currently, less than one per cent of the black labour force in the United States works for black-owned firms.

Supporters of the reparations movement do not expect overnight success - Bill HR 40 has been voted down each year for nearly a decade - but we see this as a crisis that western civilization must address.

Reparations would not be paid by individual white people, but by western governments, which have already set a precedent of using reparations to achieve some atonement for the atrocities of past governments. Some European countries have made reparations to the survivors of the five-year Jewish Holocaust. Both the United States and Canada have given an apology and payments to Japanese citizens who were interned during the Second World War, and both countries have provided compensation to native populations who were robbed of their land and their culture. But African-Americans have a 500-year-old debt that remains unpaid.

The reparations movement is a worldwide movement. There is a reparations office in Nigeria, and the Organization of African Unity has gone on record as supporting reparation. There is a Pan-African movement, and voices are chiming in from Brazil. In Canada, there is growing interest among the country's predominantly African-Caribbean black community.

The discussion surrounding reparations is different in every country where the black descendants of slaves live. The issue is far too complicated for an adequate representation here, but at its core is the belief among black people that our ancestors' debts are yet to be collected. And that payment of those debts would provide the resources needed to prepare African-Americans today for the demands of the future."

 DR. Clarence J. Munford is Professor Emeritus of Black Studies and History at the University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, near Toronto. He was born in Massillon, Ohio on November 18, 1935. C.J. Munford, an African American with dual Canadian-U.S. citizenship, has taught in universities in Nigeria, Europe and U.S., in a college teaching career that began in 1959.

He introduced the first courses in Black history in an Ontario university in 1969. He is the recipient of the 1997 African Heritage Studies Association Book Award for Race and Reparations: A Black Perspective for the 21^st Century. Munford is active in the N’COBRA campaign for reparations for African Americans.

He is a scholar and activist who has authored numerous articles, addresses and essays, and a three-volume autopsy of early Black enslavement in the West Indies, entitled Black Ordeal (1991). He has focused on the theory and practice of revolutionary nationalism from a Pan-Africanist slant.

Munford is the lead discoverer of civilizational historicism, the theory of human history from a Black vantage point. His newest work, a volume entitled Race and Civilization: The Rebirth of Black Centrality, elaborates and substantiates empirical discoveries presented in earlier works. Race and Civilization was awarded the 2002 AHSA Edward Blyden Book Award. This treatise offers civilizational historicism as the theory and practice of World Black struggle against global white supremacy in the 21st century.