IT'S not often that I get to debate a white person one-on-one on the question of race and the different perceptions of this issue held by black and white people so this week I will continue the long-distance discourse between myself and correspondent Mr. Bruce Stevens from Reading England.

Mr. Stevens has accused me of overreaching in my discussion of the prospect of reparations being paid for the descendants of the Atlantic slave trade. But my thoughts on the long-lasting legacy of slavery did not focus entirely on the question of reparations, it merely formed a part of the context of the whole historical question of race and how I see it from the point of view of a person with a free black mind.

This concept merits an explanation as to its meaning. It means that as a black person I am not necessarily influenced by the Eurocentric viewpoint or world view that I grew up with in Bermuda. It means that I view this world from an Afrocentric viewpoint.

But when I was growing up here as a school boy I had neither what is today commonly called a developed black consciousness or what I refer to as a free black mind.

For the fact is that I was not taught about the history of my own black people; I was unaware that such an history existed or that it should have been made known to me as a black person.

Mr. Stevens, therefore, need not fear that I was less attentive to my studies when it came to the teaching of British history which, by the way, I got consistently high marks for.

But my reference in a recentto the cannibalistic savages living in ancient Britain was not taught to me in my history class. It was not the sort of thing that the British colonial rulers were about to reveal to a classroom of black Bermudian boys, or white Bermudian boys for that matter.

That sort of thing would have certainly raised questions about the superiority of British society and its right to rule a globe-spanning empire which included little Bermuda. I am going to give Mr. Stevens the benefit of doubt and suggest that he is perhaps unaware of this aspect of his history; it's certainly a fact that I only encountered long after I left the classroom.

So in the interests of enlightenment, I will elaborate on this information. One thing about the British, they record everything that happens in their country. Perhaps Mr. Stevens has heard of the documents called the Welsh Triads.

This lengthy tome specifically accuses the Angle and Saxon invaders of Britain of the practice of cannibalism and it names the court of a particular king, Ethelfrith, as being particularly found of it.

But I want to go further in setting Mr. Stevens on the path enlightenment about certain aspects of the history of the British Isles. I would ask him to look up the meaning in one of the world's most influential dictionaries, , of two words that I used pertaining to the subject of savages and cannibalism ? "woad" and "Picts".

I am touching on this not to score any points but to show once again that the social development of mankind on this earth differs very little from one country or region to another and in this context there is no superiority or inferiority. Cultural and social development is largely a question of the times and circumstance in which we live.

Stevens states that my opinion of all things British is somewhat personalised and jaundiced, a statement I completely reject as false. It is true that as a Bermudian I wish to see the end of British colonial rule in my country.

But let's be realistic here. I speak and write in English, which makes it technically my mother tongue whether I like that or not. Of course, I could learn an African language, but that would not be practicable, would it?

So I will do what humans have always done: take from the prevailing British culture that which I find useful and leave the rest. And I will pick and choose as I see fit, judging what is useful to me from my own perspective.

Now on the question of Bermudian Independence, if I was living in Kenya in the early 1950s then I would almost certainly have joined the Mau Mau uprising and used a gun instead of a pen to fight for Independence.

Then the British were of a mind to resist the quest for Independence throughout its empire using its military might. Today that's no longer the case. Britain no longer has the will to hang on to its remaining handful of colonies of which Bermuda is the largest.

It has stated that if it is the will of the Bermudian people to move to Independence, then the UK will not stand in our way. So the struggle for Independence lies with my own Bermudian people, not the British. For it is Bermudians who, by and large, remain to be convinced that Independence is the way to go. So I will continue to fight the Bermudian War of Independence with a pen.

Mr. Stevens also cited the English anti-slavery crusader William Wilberforce , who helped to end this evil practice. But can Wilberforce in isolation be used to mitigate Britain's centuries-long role in the Atlantic slave trade?

Well, certainly if it took 30 years for Wilberforce's campaign to bring about an end of slavery this speaks to the power of those interests in England who had great economic investments in particular in the slave plantations in the Caribbean. They did not want to see their profits disrupted by abolition.

In the end it began to cost the British Crown too much by way of putting down growing and intense slave revolts in these colonies.

Britain needed markets for its manufactured goods and did not want to be economically dependent on slave populations in its colonies. Besides its overseas rivals still depended on slave labour to make their profits after Britain began to industrialise in the early 19th century.

So why not bring to an end slavery, which increasingly did not serve its interests, and kill many birds with one stone? And we must remember the British paid the slave owners compensation for the loss of their slaves, who they considered to be property, while the freed slave himself got nothing. There was no debate about any supposed bureaucratic nightmares in terms of these reparations.

Mr. Stevens speaks of Christianity and slavery but, again, can religion be used in mitigation? Many slave owners called themselves Christians as they carried out their barbaric treatment of African peoples and some even wrote hymns such as like the Rev. John Newton.

he was an exception to the general rule. Having been a slave himself, it's understandable why he should become sickened by the inhumanity of the slave trade. But witness the hypocrisy of another captain of a slave ship who was pious enough to hold prayer services twice a day on his vessel and who would later write the well-known hymn . Yet he was still able to put to sea with human cargoes aboard his ship.

Yes, to forgive opens the way to reconciliation, but before there can be forgiveness, there must be atonement. One must do penance and make reparations for wrongs done. None of the great nations which describe themselves as Christian have done that for what was done in the Atlantic slave trade.

While Mr. Stevens can dismiss a personal apology from former President Clinton as being suspect, he cannot dismiss the apology of the Pope. The entire world just mourned the passing of John Paul II. And when this Pope also paid a visit to the slave depot on Goree Island in Senegal he offered an apology as he stood in the Door of No Return (where I also stood on my visit) for the role the Catholic Church played during the slave trade.

Even Africans who sold their fellow Africans into slavery have offered apologies for their role in the slave trade. That was my experience when I met an African king in the Ashanti Kingdom in Ghana. He told my travel group of African-Americans and Bermudians that it brought him great sadness to look upon our faces as he could see his own people and is now aware of the great crime that was committed.

a final note, I for one will never make excuses or apologies for the misrule, corruption and the great betrayal of the dream of African self-determination and Independence on the part of some of the leaders of that continent which I am proud to call my ancestral homeland.

I have never been afraid to condemn the Idi Amins or Robert Mugabes. And I continue to feel profound sorrow about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the ongoing ethnic cleansing taking place in the Sudan. I am all too well aware that no white colonial masters can be blamed for any of these tragedies.

But at the same time I will not apologise for feeling emotional on the general issues of race. That is simply a very human response to a very long story of oppression. However, at the same time let me add that bitterness is not one of the emotions that sometimes colours my writing on this subject.