Reparations to Africa (review)

This book begins by questioning under what international laws financial reparations could or should be paid to Africa by the West for the trade in enslaved Africans, which began in the fifteenth century and ended in the late nineteenth century. To whom should compensation be paid? To the peoples of Africa and to those who survived exportation? Who is entitled to receive reparations?

Are Africans concerned about reparations? According to the authors, the "movement for reparations in Africa is small and weak" (22). If that is so (although no evidence is presented), this should not surprise us, as in my admittedly limited experience there is, as yet, little discussion in Africa of the "nefarious trade" or the relationships between the African slave traders and their progeny, who were often the first to have access to Western education and were thus often complicit in colonialism as well. Of course, both the enslaving nations and those they enslaved were herded together by Europeans into one colonial "state" at the Berlin Conference in 1885. Peace was then kept at the point of a gun, as it often still is. To what extent current conflicts may be due to this old history is seldom questioned by anyone. If any of today's national leaders descend from slave traders, they would certainly not want to have these histories explored, debated, or publicized. The authors note that "some members of Sudan's ruling elite were descendants of slave traders" (63), but do not discuss the issue further.

In the first chapter the authors report on the deliberations of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban in 2001, where reparations for the slave trade, for colonialism, and for the postcolonial era were discussed. There the focus of discussion was on the Atlantic slave trade; the Arab trade to the north (which began even earlier than the Atlantic trade) and the trade across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea were neglected. The next chapter is devoted to interviews about the issues raised in Durban with some sixty-four African elites (about one-third of whom were women); these included ambassadors, human rights activists, and academics, mainly living outside of Africa. The rationale advanced for interviewing such a select group is that the authors had no funds to travel to Africa to interview "ordinary people," who, in any case, according to the authors, have no interest in this issue. I cannot fully understand how the authors would know this without actually asking "ordinary people." I also do not understand why we should be interested in the views of these African expatriates.

The next chapter recounts the history of the pressure for reparations, which began when Chief Abiola of Nigeria put the issue before the OAU in 1992. But little more was done until the AU revived the question in 2005: Walter Rodney's argument that African underdevelopment is the result of European exploitation has been accepted, but whether compensation should be sought for slavery only, or also for colonialism and postcolonial-ism, has not been agreed upon. The question is not who is guilty, but who now has responsibility. This issue, then, takes the authors back to further discussion of existing international laws, which, they had concluded previously, are not relevant (just as those used in the successful quest for Holocaust reparations are not applicable). One question that keeps cropping up is whether any of today's international laws can be applied retrospectively to events that happened centuries ago.

The authors present arguments and counterarguments for all these issues, including issues of racism, the effects of colonialism and globalization, and the question of atrocities perpetrated by one ethnic group upon another; they discuss who profited from the slave trade and colonialism, who now profits from globalization, who should therefore pay compensation, and whether any provisions could be put in place to ensure that the recipients would not waste such funds...