By Mohammed Elnaiem
In July 2019, thousands
of Americans took to their television sets, phones, and laptops to watch
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Danny Glover, and Cory Booker testify before Congress,
demanding reparations for slavery. There was a time when this debate was on the
fringes; now it was national. Today, close to a dozen presidential candidates
have promised reparations if elected. National opinion on the matter has been
polarised, however. And it isn’t just Americans that are tuning in.
When Danny Glover
was introduced, it was not just as an award-winning actor, but as the chair of
the board of directors for Trans-Africa, an organisation representing Africans
on the continent and in the diaspora. But not much was said about his nod to
the CARICOM Reparations Commission, and its chairman, Hilary Beckles, who was
also present. The Commission was set up by 12 Caribbean states to demand
state-level reparations from countries that benefited from the enslavement of
their ancestors.
In the
Virgin Islands, many probably did notice the lack of emphasis on CARICOM.
Before they were colonised by the U.S., the Virgin Islands were a slave colony
belonging to Denmark. The Danish cultural historian Astrid Anderson has
demonstrated how, under the leadership of the African Caribbean Reparations
& Resettlement Alliance (ACRRA), the people of the Virgin Islands have been
fighting for reparations for decades. This is likely why CARICOM has listed
Denmark, among others, as a country that should pay reparations.
When ACRRA, the
chief organisation set up to demand reparations in the area, was formed, it was
created in the presence of Glover’s predecessor in Trans-Africa, co-founder
Randall Robinson. Also in attendance at the ACRRA inauguration was Queen Mother
Dorothy Lewis, a co-founder of one of the principal organisations that brought
the reparations agenda from the streets into the halls of power: The National
Coalition of Blacks in North America. Why, some may ask, is Dorothy Lewis
referred to as Queen Mother within the grassroots reparations movement? Her
organisation, N’ Cobra, conferred the name on her in recognition of her walking
in the footsteps of her ancestors. The name also acknowledges the work of Queen
Mother Audley Moore, a key civil rights activist and pan-Africanist credited
with founding the Reparations Committee for the Descendants of American Slaves,
in 1963. Lewis’ ancestors include women like the former slave Ms. Callie House
(notably recognised as a pioneer in reparations, due in part to the
ground-breaking research of the historian, Mary Frances Berry). House founded
the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, one of the
first organisations in the U.S. to demand reparations for slaves by those who
had lived through the trauma.
If we can trace this line—from the chair that Danny Glover sat in to the
colonies of the Virgin Islands and other Caribbean states—then we can draw two
startling conclusions: First, contrary to public wisdom, the case for
reparations was not invented by campaign strategists in the Democratic Party in
2016. Nor even in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ famous article for The Atlantic. It was
“invented” by emancipated slaves themselves. No “statute of limitations,” in
other words, can be used to dismiss a moral case that has never been dropped.
The case is not new, and in the United States it started on the day after the
Emancipation Proclamation, when the first slave demanded remuneration for all
of the unpaid work they had done.
Second,
even those skeptical souls who believe reparations to be a campaign ploy must
concede that, before it reached the U.S. Congress, before it was preached by
parliamentarians in the Caribbean, and before it was advocated by Chief Abiola,
a Nigerian politician who would have become president had he not faced a coup,
it was a demand made by ex-slaves. The demand has been kept alive by their
activist descendants, chief among whom were black women. This has been the
precise argument that exciting contemporary historical works, by scholars like
Ana Lucia Araujo and Ashley Farmer, have honed-in on.
There is
little debate among most Americans that taxpayers ought to contribute for the
memorialisation of the past, through cemeteries, statues, museums, and parades.
Who gets to be memorialised most definitely is a trigger for passionate debate,
visible, for instance, in the battle over confederate statues. But memorialisation
itself is not controversial. A group of African American slaves at the Cassina
Point plantation of James Hopkinson on Edisto Island, South Carolina,
1862 via Wikimedia Commons
Restitution, however, is. We can all agree, in other words, that we can reflect
on the past, but not that we can right its wrongs. The lines of the debate have
been predictable. One side passionately makes the moral and legal case. The
other side says that they will not pay for crimes committed by people who are
long dead. One side says reparations are due; the other asks where the
historical line is drawn? Should Rome pay the UK? Should Japan pay Korea?
Should Arab states pay for slavery too?
Occasionally
someone may even remark that they shouldn’t pay reparations because they are
the progeny of unfair circumstances themselves. They too can trace an ancestor
who was wronged. If anybody deserves reparations, it is none other than them.
In other words, there are three lines of rebuttal: (1) I wasn’t there when the
crime happened. (2) I shouldn’t pay for decisions made by others in the past.
(3) I myself am a descendant of the oppressed. It is unclear whether the
boundaries of the debates will ever expand further than this.
Ultimately, however, reparations advocates have pointed to judicial
precedents. When reparations have been paid, even those who took a moral stand
against the injustice contributed. At some point, the Germans who resisted
fascism contributed with their taxpayer money to German reparation payments for
the victims of the Holocaust (and to the cash stimulus that played an important
role in establishing Israel). Japan was also made to pay reparations, for war
crimes committed in World War II, even those who found those crimes morally
repugnant and did not commit any themselves. The U.S., in turn, paid
reparations to the families of Japanese people it incarcerated in internment
camps, even though many protested the existence of these concentration camps.
Even direct collaborators with “the other side,” such as the secret British
accomplice who may have provided donations and arms to the anti-colonial Mau
Mau uprising, during the Kenyan war of Independence, contributed to the
reparations that the United Kingdom paid to atone for the war crimes it
committed against the Mau Mau.
While all
of these cases of successful reparation payments happened within the lifetimes
of those who footed the bill, citizens have also had to pay for decisions made
before they were even born. Unfortunately, this has been true for both the
oppressor and the oppressed. Debts from the past, both moral and monetary, cannot
be so easily wished away. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, many
people have used their taxes to pay for debts incurred for payments awarded,
not to the descendants of slaves, but to slave owners themselves. Two key
moments, both of which happened in the Caribbean, and under the administration
of David Cameron in the UK, underscore the entanglements within this debate.
The same year that Cameron visited Jamaica and told politicians demanding
reparations to “move on” was the year that British taxpayers finished paying
off the debt incurred from the abolition of slavery. This news was clumsily
revealed—and subsequently deleted—in a tweet made by the Treasury in 2018.
Forty percent of the national budget was used to pay “reparations” in 1833: not
to the newly emancipated slaves, but to slave-owners (including David Cameron’s
direct ancestors). Only in 2015 did Britain pay that money back. When this news
was brought out to the open, belatedly, it wasn’t received very well, neither
in the Caribbean nor at home. The chairman of the Reparations Commission,
Hilary Beckles, was probably the most straightforward in his indignation: “we
consider this to be a duplicity and public dishonesty.”
The
story wasn’t unfamiliar to the people of Haiti, the first republic to be born
out of a successful slave revolt. This origin was not without consequence:
under Napoleon, France failed to re-establish slavery on the island. In the
1815 Congress of Vienna, undeterred, France negotiated a secret deal to secure
“whatever means possible, including that of arms, to regain Saint-Domingue.”
Finally, in 1825, the French diplomat Baron de Mackau came to Haiti with an
ultimatum: either it would pay reparations for international recognition as an
independent nation, or it would have to face the wrath of fourteen war ships
that had 528 cannons in their arsenal. Haiti, of course, paid its former slave
owners, and could add to its reputation: it was now also the first country to
incur Third World debt.
Haiti had little choice but to encourage a new form of patriotism. A proud
Haitian citizen was one who contributed to paying off the debt incurred after
the country was forced, by threat of war, to pay reparations to France. “In
1915,” writes the sociologist Jose Atiles-Osaria, “80% of the country’s budget
was designated to repay the U.S. and French banks.” Haiti didn’t end up paying
that debt until 1947, and according to Beckles, became bankrupt as a result.
Sojourner Truth, a former slave herself, once said, “America owes to my
people some of the dividends. She can afford to pay and she must pay.” She
spoke these words when she led a petition drive. She was ignored. “Somebody has
to pay” was also the battle cry of Queen Mother Moore and Dara Abubakari, two
key women who played central roles in bringing reparations to the agenda of
black liberation activists in the mid-twentieth century.
Today, women like Professor Verene Shepherd at the University of the West
Indies, demonstrate just how far this struggle has gone. She directs the Centre
for Reparations Research in the University of the West Indies, and is a member
of the UN working group on the matter. She is also the leading historian at the
forefront of building the case for reparations. In women like her, Sojourner
Truth’s legacy lives on. What is for certain is that the twenty-first century
has provided momentum to the global reparations movement, a movement that is
neither new nor solely American. (The
author is with Columbia University’s School of Journalism)
