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  • Preface:Debt, Redress
  • David Scott

The death of Nelson Mandela on Thursday, 5 December 2013, will undoubtedly invite, provoke, many different sorts of discussion about his legacy, in particular the meaning of his political life for the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, but also his significance for the contemporary world at large. Certainly one of the issues that his passing will call into renewed critical debate is that of the unresolved ambiguities surrounding the ethics and politics of redress and reconciliation. By the time of his death, it is generally agreed, Mandela had become a universal symbol of forgiveness for historical injustice. Because here was a man whose people had been dispossessed and brutalized, and who personally had suffered cruelly for his commitment to fighting his oppressors, and who was able and willing, nevertheless, to extend forgiveness to those who had trespassed against him and against his people. Mandela appeared to embody in his person and personality the sublime spirit of the new age of reconciliation. He redeemed the racial sins of white South Africans; and he solicited from blacks a willingness to forsake revenge, to relinquish political violence, and to look beyond the ugly, divisive past toward the prospect of equal citizenship in a free and democratic South Africa. It is an unequaled achievement. And yet, of course, there were always those—and not only people who spoke angrily of his betrayal, who raised against him the haunting figures of Robert Sobukwe or Stephen Biko, but many less ideologically motivated people with an equal share in the suffering and sacrifice of the Struggle era—who had a doubt, who wondered poignantly, sometimes aloud, whether there was not some sleight-of-hand at work in the poetics and politics of reconciliation, whether in the settlement shaped by Mandela, in admittedly constrained circumstances, something had not been yielded by the enemies of justice in order that even more could be [End Page vii] retained by them, whether something precious had not been lost even as so much of value was gained. Redress, here, in the very exemplary instance of it, seems mired in paradox.

For us Caribbeans, I believe, there is an important cautionary lesson to be extracted from the trying conundrums of the ongoing search for reparatory justice for the apartheid past. In recent years in the Caribbean there has been a growing intellectual and political momentum around the question of repair for the historical injustice of the slave trade and the institution of slavery itself, signaled by the recent announcement that the regional organization CARICOM will be seeking reparations from Britain, France, and the Netherlands through the International Court of Justice in The Hague.1 I believe this is an issue of enormous moral, legal, and political importance, one that intellectuals and artists as well as the wider public should be engaged in debating—not only as an instrumental matter of how best to win the legal battle for compensation but also as a matter of thinking through the question of the moral grounds and justifications for slave redress.2 In his recent book Britain’s Black Debt, Hilary Beckles, one of the leading figures in what is being called the Caribbean reparations movement, offers the first comprehensive account of the argument for the just repair both of the genocide of the native population of the region, the first casualties of the catastrophe of European colonization, as well as of the transatlantic trade in Africans and their enslavement in the Caribbean.3 The first part of the book is a summary of various aspects of the British colonial project in the Caribbean, delineating in turn the deliberate extermination of the indigenous population; the scale and character of the enslavement of Africans; the direct and deep involvement of the British royal family and the British state in slave trading and slave owning; the spectacular enrichment of not only generations of British individuals but also the civic, religious, and educational institutions and built environment of modern British society as a whole; and, finally, the disbursement of the 20 million pounds the British state made available in compensation to the slave owners for their loss of property at the time of...

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