Reparations must come with responsibility and reform

EDITOR: Reparative justice for the transatlantic slave trade and the centuries of oppression, exploitation, and violence it has enabled is both morally appropriate and historically imperative. For hundreds of years, millions of African lives were lost, families destroyed, cultures interrupted, and nations robbed of their precious resources. Without question, the transatlantic slave trade facilitated one of the most egregious moral catastrophes known to humankind. Its legacy of oppression is instantiated by the institutionalised racism, persistent inter-generational poverty and economic inequities that continue to disproportionately affect African and African-descended peoples worldwide. Given this enduring impact, the necessity of reparative justice for the transatlantic slave trade and the systematised carnage it occasioned for over four hundred years cannot be overstated.

In his groundbreaking treatise ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’, published by Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, the Guyanese scholar-activist Walter Rodney, underscored the outsized role of European colonial regimes in effectively under developing Africa whilst simultaneously developing Europe. As a consequence, he challenged the conventional wisdom which favoured Eurocentric and historically revisionist narratives regarding the root causes of Africa’s enduring developmental challenges.

Balancing reparations with responsibility and reform is an ethical imperative. While Rodney’s work offers valuable moral and historical grounding for reparative justice, we should be careful to avoid over-centralizing it as the sole moral anchor of the reparative justice advocacy movement. To be sure, reparative justice advocacy must also include an honest self-assessment by Africa and the African diaspora about their role in perpetuating continued underdevelopment. That process would entail seriously confronting well-documented issues—such as corruption, nepotism, and political maladministration— that continue to subvert their attempts at achieving sustainable economic development. This difficult but indispensable introspection must then be supported by reform aimed at addressing those longstanding issues effectively. Such an approach is not only morally upright but practically necessary to ensure that any reparations received are applied transparently, justly, and equitably for the holistic betterment of African and African-descended peoples globally. Programmes intended to promote educational advancement, social welfare, infrastructural development, and job creation would certainly benefit from the application of reparations.

Still, reparations should not be reduced to a mere financial settlement since this narrow conception obscures its potential as a site of reimagining what empowerment can look like for Africa and the African diaspora. Instead, reparations should be understood as an important avenue through which the predatory underdevelopment of Africa by Europe can be incrementally redressed. Given its symbolic and practical significance, the pursuit of reparations, as a central pillar of reparative justice, must centre responsibility and reform as an ethical imperative. Only through responsibility and reform can we ensure that reparations advance, rather than undermine, the project of healing, empowering and unifying African and African- descended peoples.

Amanda Janell DeAmor Quest (Attorney-at-Law)