IN response to the letter writer Bruce Stevens, who hails from Reading in the UK (, March 24), I have this to say: If indeed I have a chip on my shoulder, then I am forced to ask: "Who put it there?"

After all this question of race should have been solved long before my generation was born, right after slavery was officially abolished by the British in 1834. But such was not the case. For my people were to endure a further 100 years or more of racial segregation and discrimination before we forced an end to it by our own struggle.

Mr. Stevens questions the possibility of reparations for slavery and asks where is one to begin? I submit that you begin by recognising that the Atlantic slave trade was a monstrous crime against humanity committed against African peoples.

It's a crime which has few parallels in recorded history. For hundreds of years millions of people were taken from their natural homeland and transported across an ocean to new lands and there worked to death for the economic benefit of others.

This may not be recognised as a crime in the eyes of people like Mr. Stevens. But it's certainly a crime in the eyes of God.

I have written about the question of reparations for slavery in the past and will admit that it is problematic matter, not least because of the massive scale of this injustice.

That is why it is difficult for those nations which benefited from slavery and the slave trade to even officially offer an apology.

When I went over to Senegal, West Africa and visited the slave depot of Goree Island, the chief curator, Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye, told us that when President Bill Clinton visited the island he offered an apology but stressed that he did so on his own behalf and was not speaking on behalf of the United States.

When the question of reparations was the subject of a special international meeting held in South Africa two years ago, Colin Powell, then the US Secretary of State, was forbidden by Washington to attend. There would appear to be a mindset on the part of some nations that, except perhaps when faced with the threat of either war or economic brinkmanship, they will not recognise calls for justice on the part of black peoples.

Last year a judge in Britain disallowed precisely such a call from the people of Diego Garcia, who were expelled from their island home in the Indian Ocean by the British to make way for a Cold War American base because the US did not want civilians to live on that archipelago, known to the Ilois people as the Chagos Islands. The judge stated that he did not have to give a reason for his judgment when he ruled against the former inhabitants of that island.

This fact would seem to be in variance with the claim of Mr. Stevens that colonialism was good in certain circumstances; for Britain's colonial control of the Chagos Islands allowed them to expel the people from their homeland ? a ruthless and high-handed move which, in this supposedly modern age, parallels certain British actions during the slave trade.

As to Mr. Stevens' argument that opening the door to reparation claims would allow, for instance, Britain to demand compensation from Italy for being enslaved by the Roman Empire, well as I recall the Romans did not have such a high opinion of the inhabitants of the British Isles; with the Roman General Julius Caesar remarking that he did not think that they would even make good slaves for Rome.

Rome withdrew from Britain, Mr. Stevens, leaving you to conduct your tribal wars against yourselves and later against the Welsh, Scots and the Irish until you created the British nation which today you call the United Kingdom.

And that is the point. Even though the inhabitants of the British Isles suffered Roman rule, you were later left alone to impose your peace on the British Isles ? a bloody peace but a peace on your own terms.

The peoples of Africa have suffered slavery and colonialism and were never left alone to impose their own peace until relatively recently. Sadly and to our great regret we, the African peoples, are taking the same path that many took before us ? conducting our affairs with warfare and the threats of brute force, regardless of the costs and the suffering being imposed on innocent people. Of course, I have stated before that the wealth of many Western nations was built on the backs of African people. While many Western scientific, economic and cultural developments and advances are due in part to individual initiative, the development of the West took place against a backdrop of slavery, wars of aggression, the imposing of colonial rule and the seizure of the natural resources of other peoples as well as the exploitation of their labour.

powerful Western countries grew more powerful still by imposing such conditions on the subjugated ones; the victims grew poorer still. Hence the great divide between the Developed and the Developing countries that we see in the world today.

Mr. Stevens' comment on the current African political scene, while very much true, would seem to me to express more than a hint of arrogance about the inherent superiority of the West as opposed to Africa.

But I submit to you that the conditions we are seeing in large parts of Africa today are common to the historical experiences of all mankind at some time in their development. For what is the real differences between political and economic corruption and exploitation in Africa today and that which existed in early Victorian England during the period Charles Dickens wrote so stirringly about?

what would have been the fate of England if it had not able to export its poor ? and thus its social problems ? to its overseas colonies? Could it be speculated that England would have collapsed in upon itself under the weight of its social situation?

On a debate on the nature of civilisation and the advancement of man, can it be stated that some peoples are more superior than others in terms of their race or ethnicity? Again let us refer to the time of Roman rule and I quote from the book by J.A. Rogers, who spent more than 30 years involved in anthropological and historical research on the black man in all ages and in all lands. He concluded the status of a race at any particular point in history offers no long-term clues to its inherent capacities. How true has this been of Britons, Picts and Scots and Huns. Nineteen hundred years ago England was inhabited by savages, who stained themselves with woad, offered human sacrifices and even practised cannibalism.

Nor is culture a guarantee against decay or Greece would not have decayed.

You may be sure the Roman had the same contempt for the savages of the North who finally conquered him and almost obliterated his civilisation, as have self-styled superior peoples of today for the less developed ones.

these underdeveloped peoples should not be despised. Nature, it certainly appears, does not intend to have the whole world civilised at the same time. Even as a thrifty housewife retains a balance in the bank to meet emergencies, so nature retains these underdeveloped varieties as a reserve fund to pay the toll which civilisation always exacts.

If you are interested in further pursuing this subject, go down to my friends at True Reflections Book Store in Chancery Lane, Hamilton, where you can pick up a copy (if none are currently in stock I am sure they would order it for you).

The book concludes by pointing out the culture which carries the light of civilisation to the world is subject to cycles. Today the West is on top, tomorrow another people or culture will be in the lead.