Comment by Henry Wambuii
Howard-Hassmann and Lombardo's article "Framing Reparations Claims: Differences between the African and Jewish Social Movements for Reparations" raises some very significant issues on the topic of reparations. To begin with, though the two authors are overly careful, and in my opinion unnecessarily so, not to be seen as advocating for any form of reparations for Africa, one is left with very little doubt of the fact that Africa is indeed owed something and that Europe and the United States of America have a case to answer.
It is clear to the reader that the issue is not really whether Africans should file for reparations; the question is how. The authors make a good case for the lack of a formidable social movement to spearhead the fight for reparations. One cannot help wondering, though, what the actual problem is. Is it really the lack of a social movement among the Africans or is it the lack of accountability on the part of Western countries whose citizens so blatantly abused Africans in the past that is at issue here?
Take for instance one of the cases that the two authors document as the "illegal use of forced labor to cultivate cotton in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique prior to 1961." We may even extend the analysis to others they do not mention, like the systematic detention and massacre of hundreds of Africans in different resistance movements across Africa. Here one is reminded of such cases as the British inhumanities in quelling the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya and the French atrocities in confronting the Algerian resistance. Shouldn't the mere undisputable record of these events suffice to warrant unsolicited reparations from the colonial masters who today are acclaimed custodians of modern democracy and enforcers of universal human rights?
It is true that some claims for reparations may be seen as ambiguous or even frivolous at best. Further, it is also true, as the two authors rightly point out, that some Africans may be implicated in some of the atrocious events that took place across the continent. Yet, as the often repeated American political adage goes, the buck has to stop somewhere. In this case, the question of where the buck stops need not arise. We must not let these outlying claims be used to poison the well and to discredit the quest for a very necessary process of addressing the undisputable atrocities committed against Africans with full knowledge and support from European countries.
Reparations must represent a genuine process of healing some festering wounds that still linger from the past. For as much as many will argue that time is a healer and that events from the past will only create unnecessary hiccups for the present, one only needs to scratch slightly beneath the surface to unearth glaring hostilities that relate directly to events from the past. Take colonialism for example. While some may see it as long dead [End Page 52] and buried, the land issues in Zimbabwe or that arise in anti-French sentiments in Côte d'Ivoire attest otherwise.
To give due acknowledgement to actual injustices from the past and put them to rest amicably, claims for reparations need to be taken far more seriously by lawmakers and academic researchers in the West. Continued indifference to the issue of African reparations—well illustrated, for example, in the two authors' equating of reparations to political tokenism, or as they put it, "a kind of symbolic politics"—does not do justice to the very real atrocities visited on Africa, now seen as the developing world, by those today famously referred to as the developed world.
As Rodney Coates, writing on the case of reparations for slavery in America in Social Forces concisely states, reparations should "be a social response to a social problem created by a social problem."1 For the European countries that continue to chide African states for various misgovernance and human rights issues, they should clearly...
