In 1834 Britain paid out £20 million worth of compensation to slave owners for freeing their slaves. Should European and American countries now be paying money to the slaves’ descendants?
Since Ta-Nehisi Coates’s powerful argument for reparations for slavery, in his 2014 essay in the Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” the idea has not slipped from political view. And the case for reparations is seemingly gathering political momentum. Philosophers, economists, and historians have all added their weight to the argument. But there are others, like the black Marxist Prof. Adolph Reed, who argue against them.
In 2014, the public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates made the point that colonialism and slavery were not simply about oppression, they were about theft. South African lawyer and historian Tembeka Ngcukaitobi agrees with this, saying ‘the continued poverty of Africans is directly and indirectly attributable to the policies of the British empire: slavery, taking of the land, cattle theft, mineral extraction, forced labour.’ As Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò, a philosophy professor at Georgetown University, argues, colonial conquests and practices ‘literally built the world and the planet-sized social, economic and political system that we have.’
Coates argues that a commission should be set up to uncover the crimes and identify who did what. As he says, ‘I think it’s crucial to tie reparations to specific acts.’ The French economist Thomas Piketty says government officials generally argue that ‘this history is too distant to be indemnified.’ Neither he nor Coates nor Ngcukaitobi find this a convincing argument. Ngcukaitobi says, ‘payment by a specific person to a specific individual’ should be what happens. In South Africa, for example, the issue is not historically complicated. Companies and mines have, within living memory, exploited and dispossessed people of colour in South Africa. Companies such as Nasionale Pers (Naspers) and De Beers Mining Company have well-known links to colonial oppression and apartheid.
Naspers, one of the wealthiest companies in South Africa, famously refused even to offer a submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. For over twenty years, Naspers declined to apologise for their very active role in producing apartheid’s propaganda. In 2015 an apology was made at the firm’s hundred-year celebrations, and black singers were invited to perform an anti-apartheid song.
I think it’s crucial to tie reparations to specific acts. – Ta-Nehisi Coates
But as the prominent black Marxist, and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, Adolph Reed protests, the politics of reparations creates exactly these kinds of, largely meaningless, public apologies … What he calls ‘maudlin psychobabble.’ Apologies, he claims, distract people from the urgent necessity to act against poverty and to uplift those excluded from decent healthcare and education. Germany, Britain and Belgium have all apologised for their colonial practices. But as the ex-minister of Human Rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo says, during colonialism ‘we were destroyed. Apologies are easy, but when you do something, you have to take responsibility for it.’
So should countries pay? Ngcukaitobi says: ‘yes, they should.’ Colonialism he goes on, ‘created a life of affluence for British citizens and massive wealth for British corporations at the expense of Africans.’ He also adds that the Dutch, who were the first colonial power in South Africa, should also pay up for their genocidal practices against the Khoikhoi inhabitants of the Cape. As the black poet Robert Grendon wrote of the Dutch in 1902, only a few years before his own people, the Herero, faced acts of genocide at the hands of the Germans:
Thy race, great pioneer has hunted men—
The Bushman small—with horses and with dogs;
Destroyed the bonds of love ‘twixt man and wife;
And those ‘twixt parents and their little ones;
Have flayed alive without compassion both the frames
And limbs of those weak slaves; and then—alas—
Surpassing tigers in their cruelty
As Ngcukaitobi argues: ‘holding the Dutch society responsible today for what their ancestors did 300 years ago is not a churlish thing, but an act of justice.’ Interestingly, many Dutch people, until recently, seemed to agree with the idea of paying reparations. A 2021 study showed that the Dutch people ‘were more supportive of instrumental reparations than of political apology.’
Coates has pointed out that paying reparations for doing wrong is nothing new. Following the Holocaust, West Germany paid Israel 3 million marks. As Piketty points out, the heirs of the Hohenzollern (the Prussian royal family, which fell from power in 1918) ‘are currently suing the German state for residences and works of art for which they claim they were insufficiently indemnified.’ And then there is the case of the United States Civil Liberties Act of 1988 where $20,000 was paid out to each of the Japanese Americans interned during World War II. As Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò points out, there are also well-established legal frameworks in personal injury litigation. However, Táíwò worries that these kinds of debates have the potential to ‘view Black suffering in accounting terms’ and will not redress issues to do with suffering and trauma.
Certainly, the idea of paying compensation in the context of slavery is far from unprecedented. The British, after abolishing slavery in their empire in 1834, paid an incredible £20 million worth of compensation. However, this money was paid to the slave owners rather than the slaves. Most of the money, in fact, never left Britain. Much of it was paid to the stay-at-home Caribbean plantation owners, who had been active participants in some of the most heinous crimes against humanity the world has ever witnessed. According to Piketty, the £20 million was about 5 percent of the United Kingdom’s national income at the time. As he says, ‘if a government decided to devote to such a policy the same proportion of the British national income, it would have to pay approximately 120 billion euros.’ The question remains: if the British could do it then for the slaveowners, why not now for the victims’ descendants?
Prof. Reed, however, has famously argued against the politics of reparations. He does not deny ‘that blacks have been systematically disadvantaged as a result of slavery and its aftermath.’ But Reed believes that reparations for racial groups go some way to suggesting that ‘the inequality produced by capitalism is legitimate.’ That is, it suggests that poverty and inequality has simply been created by racism and not the capitalist system. Reed fears that ‘racial interest-group politics’ is displacing social-democratic beliefs for a fair and equitable distribution of resources. What is needed, Reed argues, is to build ‘broad solidarity across race, gender, and other identities.’ Clearly defined racial reparations, Reed says, ‘cut precisely against building such solidarity.’
