Reparations and the slave trade

The responsibilities of a capitalist and imperialist Europe in the reproduction of the circumstances behind sub-Saharan Africa’s extreme vulnerability are well-established. This began with the development of a modern, global system in which the famous triangular trade played a central role through the distortion of local systems of production and the integration of the work of peasants and those ‘deported’ to America within a collective productive surplus value worldwide. From this come calls for reparations from within Africa’s alter-globalism at the turn of the 21st century. These calls demand that the Western powers – who participated in this system – recognise firstly that they committed a crime against humanity, which we stress, and secondly that they accept the principle of reparations, which is somewhat naïve. While this trend is slowing, it is important to appreciate it as a means of demonstrating that vigilance is required in the choices of the themes of alter-global claims.

Up until the 2001 Durban conference on racism, the subject of reparations linked to the Atlantic slave trade had been absent from United Nations and UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) conferences on racism. The claims were in relation to the creation of a new international economic order, founded on the elimination of unequal exchange, the right to industrialise, non-interference within developing countries’ internal affairs and the dismantling of foreign military bases. It is within this context that the South was able to obtain the recovery of the United Nations’ economic role (with the formation of the 1964 Conference on Trade and Development, the United Nations Organisation for Industrial Development in 1967 and the Declaration of the New International Economic Order in 1974), and where for the first time a group of countries decided unilaterally to increase the price of commodities for export (OPEC quadrupled the price of a barrel of oil between 1973 and 1974). In Africa the anti-imperialist offensive continued with analysis and proposals until 1980, as demonstrated by the adoption of the Lagos Action Plan with which African states engaged to implement a plan of industrialisation and accelerated technology.

The emergence of the theme of reparations as a mechanism of support for development policies is one of the consequences of the weakening of the Southern front from the mid-1970s. Faced with a crisis around economic growth, the imperialist powers favoured southern countries’ debt. This, however, was not through their own states but rather their private banks, the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank. As a result the debt seemed depoliticised, while it was really about increasing the political power of transnational corporations (TNCs). This bad debt was in fact devised as a powerful economic means of impeding the crystallisation of socialist and nationalist forces within each country and of breaking the Southern front. It is here that the determination – irrational for the people but rational for imperialism – on the part of the Bretton Woods institutions and the bilateral agencies should be understood as a demand for the unilateral opening of countries’ economies, not only within the public sector but also in relation to education and health services. In order to create a kind of mental confusion, at breakneck pace the system produced development projects inconsistent with reducing poverty, the maximum entry into the system as a factor of economic development etc. The dominant project today aims to render the realisation of the two essential conditions of capitalist development and industrialisation in Africa impossible, by on the one hand blocking the formation of industrial coalitions within each country and on the other by locking states within a logic of sub-regional alliance created not to challenge imperialist pressures but rather to facilitate the penetration of TNCs and often subsidised goods (directly or indirectly). The saying ‘strength in unity’ becomes a simple slogan.

The appearance of the theme of demands for reparations with the African alter-global movement is an indication of the tipping balance of power that was done for the interests of imperialist capitalism in the wake of the South’s maldevelopment, the failure of Soviet socialism and the success of a mixed capitalism in post-Maoist China. The core components of collective imperialism – the TNCs, political leaders and the big social science research institutions – decided to make their victory the end of history. This was an end that would mean the definitive paralysing of the forces of struggle against polarisation, the overexploitation of work and natural resources and the establishing of a genuinely polycentric global system. The period of social-democrat capitalism in the centres and the rising power of the Third World (1950–75) is in this way characterised as an insupportable period of restrictions on the free operation of capital and imperialism. In order to ensure the longevity of this ‘freedom’, it strove to depoliticise and weaken Southern societies by promoting a civil society headed up by organisations with the function of destroying or blocking the creation of political parties or movements organised by the popular classes (from rural and urban areas who could push for socialism or simply a form of economic protectionism as a move away from the capitalist system). Calls for reparations find their place here precisely because they have no chance of actually being taken into consideration. In this vein the second United Nations Conference on Racism (Geneva, 2009) simply ignored it in only discussing the true subject of the day, whether or not to regard Israel as a racist state.[1]

And the Geneva conference had been a great diplomatic success for the European Union, which succeeded in not only passing a statement in which the matter of individual states’ responsibility in the catastrophe of African peoples is not referred to, but also in burying any potential for future debate around reparations. Africans need to ask themselves two crucial questions: Would they have been able to escape the Atlantic slave trade? What lessons should they take from this tragic period of their history in order to understand the present, and which strategies should be used to reduce their vulnerability within the domain of economic rationality and the democratisation of societies in relation to transparency in the distribution of revenue and responsibility?[2]

To sum up, it is time that African NGOs participating in the World Social Forum lose their innocence. Our watchwords should be: reconstruction; solidarity; dignity in social security and equality of opportunity in education and training for all. In the division of work, let’s leave the theme of struggles around reparations to people in the diaspora who are the products of trade and mistreatment during the formative years of the imperialist powers. Let’s support them, but without making this a condition of our own economic and social emancipation.

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* Bernard Founou-Tchuigoua is the [email protected] or
comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES

[1] … which appears in the declaration of the NGOs' general assembly in Durban.
[2] Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the International Federation for Human Rights had officially disowned that statement in which Israel was condemned for its colonialist policy.