WEEKEND REFLECTIONS
I am giving free course to my imagination here, so that our leaders reflect seriously on what they mean by REPARATION, and how a proper reparation would look like and how would it be managed. The old slave practitioner would be just happy to give the money and would interpret the gesture to mean that their conscience will be clear and that reparation is complete and completed. They would then unleash their resourceful media to do the job of reminding us that reparations were already paid and therefore we should shut our mouths from then on, stop harping on slavery and move on!
I ask myself: we talk much of reparation but we do not seem to know how we will manage it. At the country level, we do not have a script through which to look at this issue as a nation, do we? Reparation is supposed to be an expression of regret AND behavioural change, whose first expression could be a financial compensation of sorts for centuries of slavery to which we were subjected. How is the apology translated? Just “I am sorry” with the mouth, or would it be accompanied by material and attitudinal expressions?
Africans believe that you are sorry, not by your words but by your deeds. So, money yes, but money alone disappears and the next generation will again claim reparations if that is the only way. If all you offer is “sorry” one would say, “keep your sorry to yourself, I can’t give it to my future children”.
Most people expect money. Germany proposed money in Namibia. And they further proposed some development funding (again money) over a specified period. Of course, the amount raised more questions and objections than actually served to improve relations between peoples. Add to that the fact that a German politician visited President Hague and asked him to "be careful with the Chinese", you can see how the timing could not be more awkward. The entire exercise is still carried out from a position of superiority of the white skin over us, perennial African children, who need to constantly be told what is and what is not good for us.
1. Content
The scope of the reparation: Let me take the German initiative: the issues that arise from this event are a source of lessons for us who wish to pursue reparations. Germany proposed a reparation of Euro12 million for the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples. Then, when objections were raised, Germany pushed the offer to Euro one billion over a period of 30 years. One would not know why and what designs are behind the 30 years. The money: never mind that the money was small, the question is: who determines the amount: the aggrieved or the old slave master? The mechanics of determining the amount remains an issue. I would go further: is money the only material expression of a converted slave master? What about George Floyd[1]?
2. Beneficiaries
Where the money goes is also an important question. Let me take the example of Mozambique. In my mind, that money should go to the peoples who mostly suffered from the colonial slavery project, and that is quite definable: coastal populations where slaves were sourced from earlier than 1720, when the capture and export of people became a dominant phenomenon of Northern and Central Mozambique to Brazil by the Portuguese through the ports of Quelimane, Angoche, Ilha de Mocambique, Ibo, Tungue, Inhambane. Colonatos (European colonial settlements in Mozambique, with the purposeful importation of Portuguese from Portugal to come and populate Mozambique) and the ensuing indentured African labour. Those colonatos were established in many [places, the most infamous being in Limpopo and Niassa, etc. Or the Provinces of Southern Mozambique (mainly Gaza and Inhambane) where thousands of people lost husbands or fathers because thousands of male labourers were regimented into the mines of South Africa under the WENELA[2] contract system, designed to finance the cash-poor Portuguese colonial project in Mozambique. How repatriation would be distributed is a community project to be managed locally for and by the community. For other African countries, mutatis mutandis. It is not like the history is not known. How these communities would benefit, governments should/shall define.
But we all know that this is dreaming. Governments give money to Governments. Once in MAPUTO, you can forget the rest of this romance. Money becomes a political power tool, the people would never see it but inexplicably, a group of persons would magically turn out rich, modern buildings would appear from nowhere, expensive cars driven by unruly and tough big young guys would be the new sight to behold, of course only in Maputo, where the roads are worthy of such cars. When reading Maputo, read Monrovia, Abidjan or Nairobi.
3. End State: Where am I going with this?
Would we have resolved the issue of reparations? As it stands and only looking at money as the sole expression of reparation, NEVER. The white man will always feel entitled to a pedestal above other colors, let us call them all black, although other hues of black still discriminate against us of the darker (richer I dare say) melanin. Racism is ingrained, transmitted, repeated, reconfirmed and exercised. Unfortunately, as we can see from how the Niger issue is being handled, African leaders continue to run to Paris to discuss Niger and get instructions. Still, Niger is their neighbour. No wonder Europe takes the cue and feels entitled to ask Burkina Faso to explain the killing of 100 people in a security operation, instead of that demand originating from the Burkinabe parliament. Or more regionally, ECOWAS or the AU, both of which unfortunately painted themselves out into an undiplomatic, awkward corner and now they cannot sustain a dialogue with brothers.
Solving the mentality of entitlement, superiority and inferiority are part of the reparation solution.
I am going to the same conclusion as my earlier article on Africa claiming a seat at the UN Security Council[3]. Is it for individual country interest and self-realization or for the Continent? We know that countries conduct business for individual interests but Africa could impose a different example of collective diplomacy based on the Ubuntu philosophy: I am because we are. My being is dependent on those who came before me, on those who surround me today and on those that will come after me. Uhutu.
So, reparations yes, but they need to go beyond money. Neither us, the descendants of slaves, nor the reformed slave master who still thinks he is superior and for whom, money talks, are ready for a true reparation.
4. Subversive reparations
Three feeble attempts at reparation:
(a) The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, chaired by the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, with a mandate to review national events between 1960 (Sharpville massacre) and 1994 (Mandela becomes president). A seriously crippled mandate to discuss two factors that continue to constitute the root of the systemic problem of South Africa:
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission missed the whole period since the arrival of the Dutch colonists in South Africa, dispossessing the population of their land, back in the 17th century (1652 to be exact), followed by the British. Reconciliation by omitting a significant formative period, in fact the entire history, is, first, hardly reconciliatory, and secondly, it has not created the basis for reparations.
Corollary and derivative to this, the origins of the current situation in South Africa, where 72% of the fertile land is in the hands of the 9% white population, while the black majority (79%) hold only 1% of it. Postponement of a political problem that awaits a day of reckoning.
(b) My second example was the British response to the claim for reparations by Jamaica: the UK promised to offer reparation money to allow Jamaica to build more prisons. Decongest, as David Cameron said. In other words, reparation money to put more Jamaicans in prison! How insensitive can one be?
(c) My third event is the King of England in Kenya just last month, recognizing the terrible things done to the Mau Mau fighters, without qualifying the colonial behaviour as criminal. He avoided saying sorry. Maybe there was an unwitting message to the King that he need not apologize. Somebody explain this to us outside observers! Is there fire and brimstone in the public discourses of our leaders, or is it just hot air that cools at the overwhelming presence of British royalty? No wonder our Presidents were served a school bus last year to bury the queen. After all these sixty years of waiting to be king he said he had come to understand the extent of the suffering of Kenyans under colonial rule? Sixty years not enough to learn and understand? Why then all the High Commissioners since?
Anyway, I digress, just to show that the dialogue is far from coming together, if there is one. We are talking past each other and we, the most interested, are not clear what kind of reparations we want, or what outcome to expect to be delivered by these reparations. Give us a leader, somebody, AU!
5. Conclusion
Will there be an end to the talk of reparations? That would be the desired end state of relations between countries with a difficult, humiliating common past. We should at one time be able to confine the talk to the archives of history so that while forgiving, no generation forgets. That will require a quality of reparations that fundamentally will change relations between the global North and the global South. It requires foresight and management, to repair relations, change attitudes, and still keep a win-win relationship.
So, money is a concrete form of apology. Just not the way it is decided only between elites of both sides, without input from the descendants of the slaves. Money is fungible. So, not enough, unless it binds all interested.
Reparations need to be about:
Bringing an end to the subordinate role of Africa, as a pool of natural resources and natural parks for whoever has the money to come and dig or hunt. And ship out. Why can't we produce the electric battery here? Why we should buy beautiful furnishings from Ali Baba with quality wood that recognizably comes from Tete or Niassa or Cabo Delgado or Zambézia in Mozambique? Because our finishing is poor and unskilleds (read, ugly) and because there is no small manufacture industry. Some actor(s) killed it, Mozambique used to manufacture clothes and vehicle tires.
completely changing the terms of trade between both parties.
demonstrating the courage and foresight to teach colonial history to the students in the global North. Work on a curriculum with input from ex-colonies, so that history stops being the narrative of the powerful and becomes a catharsis jointly created and delivered to our children. The Belgian child should know what Leopold the King did in Congo. Children in Europe should know that it was not so long ago that on their land there were zoos displaying African people. The Swiss child eating and taking for granted the famous Swiss chocolate should be taught the unequal terms of trade by which chocolate arrives in his country, French children should know that France demanded a colonial fee from Haiti[4] which took that country one hundred years to pay only because they dared assert independence and extract themselves from slavery. They should be confronted with the truth of their current history in West Africa, the crushing reality of the CFA Franc and how their wellbeing is sustained at the expense of starving Africans.
More than just material, to become educational, attitudinal, and about getting out of the limiting mental slavery of feeling inferior and the equally limiting mental slavery of feeling superior.
Recognizing that we are one humanity. And that it makes sense to seek more positive ways of looking at, and managing the unstoppable human migration (in itself a vast topic).
Recognising that all descendants of African slaves, in the Caribbean, in Asia and elsewhere outside of the Continent are Africans and deserve an observer seat at the AU, way before the US and the EU, or Israel.
In summary, reparations as a working concept requires a more serious definition and internal debate before we weaponize it in international meetings. Before our leaders stand at the United Nations and other gatherings to shout REPARATIONS, someone lead us into having a credible compendium of what that means in practice. Let me conclude my essay with bits of our own wisdom in Kiswahili, French and Chinyanja:
Usitongoze mwanamke mzima wa watoto wake wawili kama hauko tayari kupokea watu watatu na kuwalisha wote nyumbani kwako!
Avant d’employer le gros Français, le gros Anglais, ou encore le gros Portugais, mesurez un peu la profondeur de ce que vous proposez ou de ce que vous incitez vos dirigeants à dire haut et fort en public. En tout cas, réparations n’est pas une affaire à régler avec le quartier d’a coté.
Kupha mbewa n’kufatsa.
Cheers
Jose,
Dar-es-Salaam, November 2023
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