Reparations

Written By Katherine Wall

This is part of the ‘key terms’ series. Pieces to explain how I am using certain terms. As my understanding changes, I may revisit and re-write these pieces.

Reparations as a concept has its roots in the English term ‘repair’. Repair involves restoring something to good condition, putting right something that was wrong, making good something that was damaged. Reparations is a contested term with multiple lineages.

According to the UN, reparations requires the following:

  1. The cessation/stopping of violations

  2. Restitution restoring person(s) back to the situation before the violations took place

  3. Compensation for any ‘economically assessable damage’ including physical and mental harm, lost opportunities, material damage and moral damage

  4. Satisfaction - which means the public acknowledgement of what happened and public apologies

  5. Guarantees of non-repetition

Stopping the harm and guarantees of non-repetition seem quite uncontroversial in this outline from the UN, as well as significant because for many colonialism and harm caused through racial capitalism are not over - they are ongoing.

Restitution, compensation and satisfaction, however, have all received their share of critique. I will go through these in turn now.

Let’s start with restitution.

In his book, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Cedric Robinson argues that there was no time before. He argues that the social and cultural structures that first produced and continue to help reproduce racism and relations of oppression were already found in the fabric of European feudal society.

Whilst there are moments that it might be possible to reset the clock to - the beginning of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade for example - the social and cultural conditions that lead to its creation would not be altered by such restoration. And therefor some other project of reparation is required.

In his book, Reconsidering Reparations, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò argues that the work of reparations is a future-oriented project. He describes the constructive view of reparations as

‘a historically informed view of distributive justice, serving a larger and broader worldmaking project. Reparation, like the broader struggle for social justice, is concerned with building the just world to come.’

It’s not only about the money

When most people think about reparations, we think about money - financial compensation for harms that have happened in the past that continue to have impacts in the present. Thinking about material distribution and how it is connected to repairing these harms is important but there are a couple of things to also consider here.

Reparations campaigners today in the form of International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations, name three main areas for reparation. Cognitive justice, reparatory justice and environmental justice, collectively referred to as planet repairs.

In an article for The Independent, reparations scholar, activist and campaigner Esther Stanford Xosei explains more about planet repairs. She says:

‘Planet repairs are necessary because the harms of African enslavement and colonisation include not only the land dispossessions and extractivist plunder of our planet, but also the marginalisation and killing of indigenous knowledge systems. This resulted in the dehumanisation of both the “plunderers” and the “plundered”…’

  • Reparations then are about recognising and restoring knowledge systems of language, spirituality, music, art, science that were taken away - cognitive justice.

  • Reparations are about the acknowledgement that wealthy industrialised nations and corporations must pay their dues for the harms they have caused peoples and planet - drawing on Keston K. Perry’s definition of reparatory justice.

  • And reparations are about repairing the land and the non-human world that have been extracted from and violated as part of the colonial project - environmental justice.

Satisfying whom?

Even when reparations are engaged with by states or corporations, even individuals and families, a question of ‘who for’ emerges. The principle of satisfaction - a demand for truth telling and public apology - has been subject of critique in work on reparations. Whilst it does seem important to tell the truth of what happened and for those responsible if they can be named to offer a public apology, there can be a risk that these efforts serve the one offering the apology more than the one demanding apology.

In his article, A reconciliation most desirable: Shame, narcissism, justice and apology, on the reparative work of the Australian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Paul Muldoon argues that

‘The real target of the reparative efforts undertaken under the auspices of reconciliation is the healing of the ‘narcissistic injury’.’

Somehow, reparations becomes about healing the ‘ego-ideal’ of one who committed harm - be that nation-state, corporation, individual or other - more so than about repairing / transforming the status quo of those harmed.

An aside here is to trouble the binary of those who cause harm and those who have been harmed. Obviously in many cases it is clear that some have been harmed by others. And often those who have done the harming have themselves been harmed. And those who have been harmed have harmed others.

The critique offered by Muldoon - that in some cases reparative efforts, when they seem to have been engaged with, have existed to serve the ego-ideal of the nation (insert other where appropriate) - has in turn been unsettled.

In her book, Potential History:Unlearning Imperialism, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay argues that part of the work of repair is for the oppressor in order that we may no longer be so. She says

‘The challenge is to make the case for reparations a priority for descendants of the perpetrators too, as well as to all those who inherit and are trained to operate imperial technologies. This effort should be undertaken based on the conviction that descendants of perpetrators have the right not to forever perpetrators, and hence the right to stop reproducing imperial violence and partaking in the destruction of our shared world’

So whilst a reparations project that only serves to make the perpetrator ‘feel better’ is not the desired goal, acknowledging that the descendants of perpetrators have a stake in the reparations project in order to no longer be perpetrators is a part of the work.

Reparations for who?

A lot of the work on reparations that has reached mainstream discourse has been focused on reparations for the enslavement of African peoples during the era of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. And whilst this is a key pillar of work, reparations calls have also come from other places and peoples.

Peoples from places that were formerly colonised by Britain have called for reparations. Demands came afresh when King Charles III was crowned. A jointly signed statement demanded the King

‘acknowledge the horrific impacts on and legacy of genocide and colonisation of the Indigenous and enslaved peoples of Antigua and Barbuda, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, The Bahamas, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.’

Other requests included an apology, the return of the remains and cultural artefacts of Indigenous peoples, financial reparations, and support to recover from centuries of racism and oppression.

In a talk on Land as Reparations, Esther Stanford Xosei also speaks to the need to consider including people racialised as white in England / Wales / Scotland and Ireland as potential recipients of reparations as well. Given that the colonial project began in the heart of Empire through processes of internal colonisation including the dispossession of land, knowledge systems and livelihood.

Movements for reparations

A lot of the work on reparations that has reached mainstream discourse has been focused on reparations for the enslavement of African peoples during the era of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. And a lot of the movement generating these calls have been coming out of the United States and the Caribbean.

The work of Ta-Nehisi Coates, especially his piece in The Atlantic, The Case for Considering Reparations, in which he calls for “a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history” as well as job training programmes and public works.

The CARICOM (Caribbean Community) Reparations Commission offers a 10 point plan for reparations call for apology, debt cancellation and for former colonial powers to invest in health and education programmes across the Caribbean.

Social movements based in Britain that have been demanding reparations for centuries. As Esther Stanford Xosei tells in this interview, Afrika and reparations activism in the UK,

The history of reparations organising in the UK goes back to the eighteenth century. Some of the earliest documentation of calls for reparations that influenced organising in Britain go back to a letter written by Fiaga Agaja Trudo Audati in 1726, addressed to King George of England …This intervention by Agaja has increased awareness about indigenous Afrikan abolitionists in Afrika and their influence on the Slavery Abolitionist Movement within and beyond the UK.

Throughout the first half of the 20th Century, Pan-African Congresses met in London and later in Manchester, consolidating a growing Pan-Afrikan Movement, ‘out of which’, Xosei argues, ‘contemporary movements for reparations both globally and in the UK would form.’

Today, a number of groups and organisations continue to build the power of reparations movements in Britain and around the world. Here are some links if you’d like to find out more:

Katherine Wall
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