Abstract: This study employs a narrative, reflective, qualitative research methodology to examine the feasibility of achieving self- and collective reparations among the descendants of enslaved Africans, independent of support and intervention from national governments or Europe, a concept proposed by the novelist and thinker Earl Lovelace. The researcher's insights and personal experiences as a participant in a community intervention program initiated by ASCRIA (African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa) during the 1960s and 1970s provide an analytical framework for assessing the program's impact. The significance of this study is twofold. It addresses a critical aspect of reparation methodology, emphasizing the psychological and psychoanalytic techniques needed to address issues of inferiority and superiority complexes that obstruct individual and collective reparations within Black communities. It further scrutinizes the "organic activism" method as a potential avenue for psychological restitution. The researcher primarily structures the analysis around the psychoanalytic theories of Frantz Fanon, whose works Black Skin, White Masks , and The Wretched of the Earth are among the most perceptive analyses of the operations of imperialism, its detrimental effects on the psyche, and strategies for decolonization and rehumanization of the African subject. While the study is set in Guyana in the latter part of the 20th century, it draws universal inferences that may be helpful to the global quest for reparations within displaced Black communities worldwide.
Dennis Gill (Sun,) studied this question.