My first inclination, when I read Makeda Hannah's article, was to reach for my knobkerrie and go to war. But I think I can see what she is talking about.

However, Ms Hannah has overlooked, or is ignorant of the fact that Africa and the Black Diaspora's problems have little to do with the, um, good white people. They are to do with the bad ones, and not just the bad white people, but the black ones too.

We cannot be asked to forgive people who have not sought our forgiveness. It's absurd.

As for reparations, the real reason there was the Slavery and the colonisation was economic. A real gesture of remorse and contrition would be of an economic one. Today, we have an Italian company blowing up the hills in my ancestral Buja for the Black granite- with the collusion of the Zimbabwe Government which quickly reclassified the granite as a mineral so as to directly benefit from its exploitation- while Buja herself remains underdeveloped. This is a personal example of why reparations have to be in economic terms.

No, watching species-challenged Pope John Paul II weeping at Goree did not quite cut it for me. I hear Condy I-fight-for-whitey Rice also wept at Goree, but we all know what she said about Reparations.

I have many white friends as well, good people who are nothing like the colonialists. I would not be so ungracious as to bully them in to a particular position on issue, but I will have no choice but to reevaluate the relationship if any of them said anything along the lines of Ms Hannah