It speaks volumes that Europeans are ascribing no blame for this Lampedusa tragedy to the African governments that have failed their people so abysmally. This failure, after all, is the only reason why so many Africans, utterly bereft of hope at home, are fleeing to Europe in desperate pursuit of peace, prosperity, and happiness.
But I suppose this self-recrimination among European governments demonstrates how difficult it is for them to sever that umbilical cord of colonial obligation…
I just hope the damning irony is not lost on any proud African that, 50 years after decolonization, hundreds of Africans (men, women, and children) are risking their lives, practically every day, to subjugate themselves to the paternal mercies of their former colonial masters in Europe.
(“Lampedusa Tragedy Highlights Europe’s ‘Haitian’ Problem,” The iPINIONS Journal, October 7, 2013)
It should have come as no surprise when Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, the contentious prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, used his few minutes on the world stage at the 68th United Nations General Assembly in New York City last September to make his and CARICOM’s case for reparations for “the atrocities of slavery.” After all, Gonsalves and CARICOM have been more dogmatic in trying to force former European colonizers to pay for slavery than Senator Ted Cruz and the Tea Party have been in trying to force President Obama to repeal Obamacare.
Indeed, like Cruz and the Tea Party, Gonsalves and CARICOM are banking on public shaming and political pressure to compensate for shortcomings in their legal case. Their mercurial strategy assumes that, just as corporations often settle cases (even frivolous ones) to avoid bad publicity, European governments will settle out of court instead of forcing them to prove their case in court. Which, of course, would constitute a triumph of European paternalism and self-recrimination over Caribbean pride and self-responsibility – the “damning irony” in our case be damned.
What was surprising, however, was the deluge of commentaries his UN address inspired. After all, Gonsalves did little more than repeat his mantra about making Europeans pay today for the sins their forefathers committed 150 years ago.
I, on the other hand, have been writing commentaries on this controversial subject for years, trying to disabuse Gonsalves and CARICOM of their antic mission. Not least because extorting a quarter-trillion dollars from European governments for “the developmental benefit of our Caribbean societies and all our peoples” makes a mockery of CARICOM’s stated mission:
To provide dynamic leadership and service, in partnership with Community institutions and Groups, toward the attainment of a viable, internationally competitive and sustainable Community, with improved quality of life for all.
In any event, here is what I wrote in “The Fatally Flawed Demand for Reparations for African Slavery,” Caribbean Net News, February 16, 2007:
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In this the year of the 200th anniversary of the Abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, we in CARICOM must pursue coherently and in a focused, not episodic, way the legitimate demand for a full apology and reparations from the Europeans for African slavery… The dignity of both the Caribbean and Europe justly summons this cleansing of the spirit and of the historical decks.
This is the clarion call chairman of the Caribbean Commonwealth (CARICOM), Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves of St Vincent and Grenadines, made as host of its 18th Intersessional Heads of Government Conference on Tuesday.
As political rhetoric goes, it is sympathetic, morally compelling and quite appealing. As a demand for actual compensation for African slavery, however, it is indulgent, politically specious, and wholly infeasible (i.e. too remote in time).
Moreover, with all due respect to Gonsalves, the record of futility in making such demands should be instructive. After all, far more influential and credible claimants than CARICOM heads of government have demanded reparations to no avail. What’s more, they demanded it from what were generally recognized as governments more disposed than any others in history to offering them, namely the UK government of Prime Minister Tony Blair and the US government of President Bill Clinton.
[Note: Even President Barack Obama is on record declaring his belief that there is no legal merit in demanding reparations for slavery. Here, for example, is how the Huffington Post quoted him on the subject in an August 2, 2008 report under the headline, “Obama Opposes Slavery Reparations:”
I have said in the past – and I’ll repeat again – that the best reparations we can provide are good schools in the inner city and jobs for people who are unemployed.]
Claimants for reparations for slavery invariably cite two very cogent precedents:
- The Reparations Agreement of 1952 between Israel and West Germany, pursuant to which the Germans compensated Israel for slave labor and persecution of Jews during the Holocaust, and for Jewish property the Nazis confiscated. (Holocaust survivors have also filed successful claims against German banks and other corporations for compensation for forced labor.); and
- The Civil Liberties Act of 1986, pursuant to which the U.S. government paid $1.65 billion in reparations to “82,000 of Japanese ancestry who had been subjected to evacuation, relocation and internment during World War II.”
Except that these were successful primarily because claimants could show direct links between the perpetrators of the harm alleged and surviving victims of that harm. By contrast, no such links exist between the institution of slavery and modern-day claimants for reparations.
And, to disabuse blacks of any feelings of racial discrimination in this respect, it would be helpful to know that the US government paid reparations to blacks who suffered from the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment precisely because they could show this direct link.
But precedents aside, it would be politically prohibitive for any British government to even countenance such a demand for reparations; not least because you’d be hard-pressed to find any Englishman feels as guilty about slavery as every Germans felt (and still feels) about the Holocaust.
Even if this demand were not rendered infeasible by the passage of 150 years, most Englishmen would probably still take umbrage. The could fairly argue that, while seafaring merchants and New-World colonizers were exploiting African slaves for unjust enrichment, their ancestors were themselves being exploited. And they could cite the horrors Charles Dickens chronicled in Oliver Twist.
It is also important to bear in mind that not all blacks were victims of slavery. Claimants would be obliged to determine what portion of their claim, if any, to charge against the African kings and merchants who profited from selling fellow Africans into slavery. Because, in far too many cases, Europeans could claim Africans as property they bought, fair and square, from other Africans.
Meanwhile, CARICOM leaders would do well to focus on healing the political, economic, and psychological wounds we’ve inflicted upon ourselves. These range from fostering rampant social maladies to perpetuating artificial differences that make it impossible to integrate our regional economies. This, instead of picking at the scab of old wounds that will do nothing to enhance our dignity or redress our regional plight.
Incidentally, although politically incorrect to say, the vast majority of us in the Caribbean must look at the life of the average African, whose ancestors were not “harmed” by the European slave trade, and thank God that we are here, and not there.
That said, if our leaders wish to pursue a more sustainable and constructive cause of action on behalf of descendants of African slavery throughout the Caribbean, I would be honored to help them present a claim to the British government. Instead of reparations for slavery, however, I would base it on the equitable principle of quantum meruit to demand compensation for exploitative labor and other civil rights abuses suffered during colonialism. After all, not only the perpetrators of the harm, but also the victims in this case could be readily identified.
Finally, the “full apology” prong of CARICOM’s demand is so inherently fatuous, it’s not even worthy of comment. Nothing illustrates this quite like former president Bill Clinton traveling all the way to Uganda in 1998 to apologized for the slave trade. This, after he dutifully ignored all congressional bills for actual reparations.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni felt obliged to explain that, if any place in Africa were appropriate for Clinton to make such an apology, it would have been in West Africa. He noted further that, if an apology for slavery were even warranted, Africans whose ancestors collaborated with the Europeans traders or enslaved their own people all over the continent should be first in line to offer it.
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To be fair, Gonsalves and CARICOM are now predicating their claim on the precedent the UK government set in June (2013) by granting reparations to victims of the Mau Mau rebellion. They have even retained the same UK firm, Leigh Day, which waged that successful case.
Unsurprisingly, the UK government – perhaps duly recognizing that England did more than any other European country (most notably France and the Netherlands) to facilitate and maintain slavery in the Caribbean – took the lead in rejecting CARICOM’s amended demand:
The UK Government is blocking attempts to force it to pay reparations for slavery.
Reparations ‘are not the answer’ it said and governments ‘cannot take responsibility for what happened over 200 years ago.’
(Nassau Tribune, November 1, 2013)
I agree.
As it happens, though, here’s how I juxtaposed, in “Reparations from Britain for Colonialism,” July 18, 2012, the flaws in suing for reparations with the merits in suing for compensation — not for slavery, but for legitimate complaints of cruel and inhuman punishment the British meted out during their colonial rule (i.e., the Mau Mau precedent):
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To listen to some critics of British colonialism, you’d think it was utterly devoid of any redeeming value. But as one who was subjected to it throughout much of his youth, I can attest that this is not so.
Indeed, all one has to do is juxtapose the way education and civil service have floundered in post-colonial countries in Africa with the way they thrived in those countries during colonialism to counter unqualified criticism in this respect.
Having said that, let me hasten to assert that nothing, not even a good education and a competent civil service, can possibly justify the dominion British colonialists exercised over native people from India to the Caribbean. Especially because British mercantilism meant raping and pillaging local resources for the benefit of Mother England. Not to mention the practice of racial segregation (i.e. de facto apartheid), which reinforced the dehumanizing nature of colonialism.
More to the point, as British journalist and historian Richard Gott notes in Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (2011), no less a person than British Prime Minister David Lloyd George telegraphed how colonial officers intended to deal with natives who resisted this dominion when he proudly recalled how, at the 1932 World Disarmament Conference, he:
[D]emanded the right to bomb for police purposes in outlying places [and] insisted on the right to bomb niggers.
Which brings me to the cruel and inhuman punishment colonial officers meted out to natives whose natural pride and human dignity compelled them to resist. Nowhere was this demonstrated in more poignant and persistent fashion than in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
For, according to the Kenya Human Rights Commission, 90,000 Kenyans were executed, tortured, or maimed. What’s more, 160,000 were detained in conditions that rivaled those their forefathers were subjected to as captured slaves during the “Middle Passage.”
But where seeking reparations for slavery that ended 150 years ago has always been fraught with obvious (legal) problems, seeking reparations for colonialism that ended just 50 years ago is much less so.
This is why the British government finds itself in the untenable position of having to defend against claims by Kenyans – who say they themselves suffered all manner of human rights abuses while being held in detention camps by the British colonial Administration during the Mau Mau rebellion.
Lawyers for several victims filed what they clearly hope will be a class-action suit on behalf of all victims demanding an official apology and compensation for pain and suffering.
The claimants’ lawyers allege that Mr. Nzili was castrated, Mr. Nyingi severely beaten, and Mrs. Mara subjected to appalling sexual abuse in detention camps during the rebellion…
In his statement Mr Nyingi, 84, a father of 16 who still works as a casual labourer, said he was arrested on Christmas Eve 1952 and held for some nine years. During his detention, in 1959, he says he was beaten unconscious during an incident at Hola camp in which 11 other prisoners were clubbed to death. He says he has scars from leg manacles, whipping and caning.
(BBC, July 17, 2012)
It is noteworthy that the British government admitted this week – for the first time and in a court of law no less – that Kenyans were tortured and ill-treated as alleged. Never mind that it was obliged to do so because the High Court ordered the release of 300 boxes of secret documents recently that not only chronicle the systematic torture and ill-treatment colonial officers meted out, but also expose a conspiracy among British officials to cover up these human rights abuses.
Yet, despite all this, the government is attempting to avoid compensating the direct victims of the Mau Mau rebellion by using the same argument governments have used to avoid compensating the descendants of the victims of slavery; namely, that:
…too much time has passed for a fair trial to be conducted.
(BBC, July 17, 2012)
To be sure, lawyers can raise all kinds of issues as to why, ironically enough, the British government cannot get a fair trial: Not least among them is the likelihood of assigning collective guilt to all colonial officers because victims, many of whom are now in their 70s and 80s, would be hard-pressed to identify the offending one(s) in each case. Lawyers can even question whether detention during the Mau Mau rebellion was in fact the proximate cause of their injuries.
But if it has any regard for what little redeeming value its legacy of colonialism retains, the British government would consider it a moral imperative to move post-haste to negotiate a victims’ fund with the Kenyan government from which all victims can seek relatively fair compensation … in Kenya.
Incidentally, this would (and should) not absolve the government of the categorical imperative to pursue and prosecute every British official implicated in these human rights abuses: from the Secretary of State in London to the camp guard in Kenya, and not just those who executed them but those who conspired to cover-up these abuses as well. Indeed, these British officials should be pursued and prosecuted with the same dogged zeal with which officials who collaborated with the Nazis in the torture and ill-treatment of the Jews are still being pursed and prosecuted to this day.
Of course, colonial rebellions were not nearly as persistent, and were not put down with nearly as much brutality in other colonies, as was the case in Kenya (the American rebellion excepted). But if the High Court were to establish the precedent that victims of colonial-era abuses could seek damages in British courts, I have no doubt that thousands of claimants would show up in London to seek redress from every place on earth that was subjected to British dominion.
This is why the British government would be well-advised to initiate government-to-government settlements of all such cases instead of allowing any of them to proceed to trial – especially with all of the opening of old wounds (on both sides) that would entail.
Mind you, even if the High Court were to rule that victims of colonial abuse have no recourse in British courts, the reputational damage to Britain of such an inequitable ruling would far outweigh any amount the Kenyan and other post-colonial governments could reasonably demand be placed in compensation funds for colonial abuses.
Accordingly, I fully expect Britain, at long last, to do the right thing: apologize and pay, pursue, and prosecute!
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Of course, we now know that, a year after I advised the British to establish a victims’ fund for tortured survivors of the Mau Mau rebellion, they did just that:
Britain is to pay out £19.9m in costs and compensation to more than 5,000 elderly Kenyans who suffered torture and abuse during the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s, the foreign secretary, William Hague, has said.
Hague told the House of Commons that the payment was being made in ‘full and final settlement’ of a high court action brought by five of the victims who suffered under the British colonial administration…
The British government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place … torture and ill-treatment are abhorrent violations of human dignity which we unreservedly condemn.
(The London Guardian, June 6, 2013)
Again, there’s dignity and honor in Gonsalves and CARICOM prevailing upon former European colonizers to negotiate a victims’ fund for elderly Caribbean natives who suffered torture and abuse during colonialism. But there’s only shame and dishonor in them using slavery to guilt Europeans into providing funds for Caribbean development.
With that, I rest my case against reparations for African slavery.
Related commentaries:
U.S. finally apologizes for slavery…
Kenya … war crimes