Afua Hirsch: The case for British slavery reparations can no longer be brushed aside
NB: Who will compute the costs - not only of slavery, but of colonial atrocities spread over centuries? Not only those committed by British imperialism, but by Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Belgian, German and Russian imperialism as well? Who will pay for the millions of lives lost under what one researcher has named late Victorian Holocausts? What price the Arab slave trade? The Inquisition and burning of so-called witches by the Catholic Church? The genocide of Native Americans by European settler regimes in North America and Australia? The mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs in 1948?
How may we assess the cost of Hitler's genocide of European Jewry, not to mention the annihilation of and the ongoing atrocities committed against the Romany people? Who will compute the costs of Japanese crimes in China, Korea, and South East Asia in the second World War? Of ongoing Chinese atrocities upon Tibetans and Uighurs? What reparations can be paid for Hiroshima and Nagasaki? For the destruction of Bikini atoll in American nuclear tests? Will the US pay for the 3 million victims of its war of agression in Vietnam? For CIA instigated coups in Chile and Bangladesh? Will Pakistan pay for the mass deaths in East Pakistan in 1971? Will India pay for the crimes of untouchability?
The obsession with reparations is an endless spiral and the absurd net result of identity politics under capitalism - monetary computation for historical tragedy. Give it up. Let's get the present right, you can't correct the past. Certainly not with cash payments, even if you can figure out whom to pay and how much. DS
I once asked a British
cabinet minister why the country had never apologised for the transatlantic
slave trade. After all, this nation trafficked more enslaved Africans than
almost any other – at least 3
million on British ships – yet it has only ever expressed “regret”. It’s
a strange choice of words for playing a leading role in the greatest atrocity
in human history. The minister explained
to me that the UK cannot apologise, because the case against it – watertight in
moral and ethical terms – might then become legal too. In short, Britain won’t
use the language of apology, out of fear this might pave the way for
reparations.
Book review: Late Victorian Holocausts - the famines that fed the empire
That admission made me sit up and take notice. Because, passionate as I have always been about racial justice, I’m also not immune from the perception of reparations as – in the words of American writer Isabel Wilkerson – especially “radioactive”. Yet I’m now seeing with increasing clarity how this perception only serves to reinforce systems of race and power. The debate about reparations has, conveniently, been branded extreme and unrealistic by those who don’t want to pay them….
