Explaining Reparations and Reparatory Justice in Fifteen Questions
Question 1: What is the difference between a crime against humanity and genocide?
After World War II, two new concepts were introduced into international law: crimes against humanity and genocide. These are distinct legal concepts.
Crimes against humanity refer to ‘specific crimes committed in the context of a large-scale attack targeting civilians, regardless of their nationality. These crimes include murder, torture, sexual violence, enslavement, persecution, enforced disappearance, etc.’
Genocide has a different focus since it targets not the killing of individuals, but the destruction of specific human groups ‘with the intent to destroy the very existence of the group.’
These two concepts have different objectives. ‘One aims at protecting the individual; the other aims at protecting the group’.
Question 2: How are crimes against humanity and genocide linked to reparations and reparatory justice?
Reparations and reparatory justice are often the ‘last-implemented justice measures’; in other words, they result from a process of justice, such as trials at the International Criminal Court or truth commissions, to try to remedy the effects of that crime. The act of defining or recognizing mass killings and other large-scale crimes as either a crime against humanity or a genocide should automatically trigger a reparatory justice process. This is because it is not considered sufficient to recognize a crime and the suffering caused. Additionally, victims need to be recognized as ‘holders of rights’ who are ‘entitled to an effective remedy and adequate reparation’.
Question 3: Put simply, what are reparations or reparatory justice?
There is no single definition or model for reparations and reparatory justice. There is no one size fits all. However, in 2005, the United Nations compiled an international definition as a guide in their ‘Right to a Remedy’. This document covers a range existing and possible approaches to repair, including:
- litigation, legislation and other forms of transitional and social justice, such as affirmative action;
- educational and museal initiatives, or cultural projects in literature, art and music;
- psychological and spiritual forms of internal and community repair;
- environmental efforts to reverse the devastating effects of resource extraction (extractivism) in all its forms;
- and official and political frameworks of recognition, such as commemorative ceremonies, memorialization, the pulling down of statues, public apologies and government-sponsored committees, to name but a few.
The purpose of reparations can be both symbolic and practical. As such, they are (or ought to be) holistic; that is, taking into account social, psychological, spiritual, cultural, environmental etc effects.
Importantly, they must be based on a victim-centred, meaning that they centre on the victims’ reparation needs in response to the harm caused to individuals and groups. They should result from a formal process of discussion and consultation with those who have been adversely affected by a crime against humanity or a genocide.
Ultimately, reparations and reparatory justice seek to improve the lives of the victims of these crimes and their descendants and, ideally, ‘address the root causes of violence, such as structural inequalities based on ethnicity, gender, etc.’ As a holistic process, they seek to heal those within Black, Afrikan, Caribbean, Asian, Latin American, First Nation and other indigenous and minoritized communities, guarantee the equal participation of all members of the human race (for example, through self-determination), eradicate the effects of Afrikan enslavement, neo/colonialism, racial oppression, including its systems, and find ways to rebuild respectful and egalitarian relations between all communities through the recognition of responsibility for the wrong committed and the harm inflicted.
Question 4: Are reparations only due to those who experienced a crime against humanity or genocide, or do their descendants count too?
As Human Rights Watch stated in 2001, ‘we believe that the descendants of a victim of human rights abuse should also be able to pursue claims of reparations. That is, the right to reparations should not be extinguished with the death of the victim but can be pursued by his or her heirs.’ Aware that this could lead to almost anyone making a case for reparations, thereby ‘trivializing the concept,’ they add that ‘For these practical reasons, when addressing relatively old wrongs, we would not base claims of reparations on the past abuse itself but on its contemporary effects. That is, we would focus on people who can reasonably claim that today they personally suffer the effects of past human rights violations through continuing economic or social deprivation.’
One way of defining the continuation of harms that affects the descendants of those who suffered human rights abuses is the term Maangamizi. This is a ‘Kiswahili term for “Afrikan Hellacaust” meaning the crimes of genocide and ecocide in the continuum of chattel, colonial and neocolonial forms of enslavement’. It was popularised in the song ‘Maangamizi’ by British musician, journalist, author, activist and poet Akala.
Question 5: Are reparations the same as a pay cheque?
No, reparations cannot be reduced to a pay cheque to individual claimants. Reparations and reparatory justice are a legal concept supported by the United Nations Framework on the ‘Right to a Remedy’. This Framework outlines the need for holistic repairs and multiple forms of reparatory action.
There is, however, a tendency to hear the word ‘reparation’ and think ‘pay cheque’. This is because reparations can include material forms of compensation to individuals or groups. However, money alone is not sufficient. Crimes against humanity and genocides cannot be financially repaid because it is impossible and problematic to quantify suffering in terms of what is owed in hard cash. As such, when reparations include monetary compensation, this amount is only ever symbolic of a broader desire to repair.
Having said that, money is still required to support reparatory initiatives and processes. Setting up an All-Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice, for example, would cost money. However, it is important for private estates and public institutions, such as Britain’s universities, churches, insurance companies and businesses etc., to establish the facts of how they are linked to the profits of enslavement as a starting point. Awareness of that knowledge can be used to begin the essential work of engaging in conversations with communities of reparations interest about how best to address the crimes of the past in a way that places the voices of the descendants of those who were enslaved, colonized and racialized at the centre of the conversation.
Question 6: Can development aid be a form of reparation?
Development aid is not the same as a holistic process of reparative justice. It does not address the historical reasons for today’s economic structural inequalities and is historically associated with conditions that favour the Global North over the Global South. ‘Development aid has nothing to do with restoring justice – it happens top-down and not in a relationship of equal partners’. Development aid remains ‘embedded in asymmetrical power relations between the Global North and the Global South’, creating a relationship between ‘saviours’ and ‘supplicants’. Aid continues to perpetuate and reinforce ‘an economic and political system that relies on colonial hierarchies of submission’. This is the opposition of reparations that ‘imply that the Global North owes the Global south’.
Question 7: Britain including Scots led the movement for the abolition of slavery, so why are reparations needed?
Yes, some people within British society, including Scots, helped to bring about abolition. Yet the prevalence of this narrative obscures two facts: first, that many actively resisted abolition; and second, that the enslavers were financially compensated for their crimes against humanity.
While there is no doubt that certain sectors and individuals within British including Scottish society actively participated in, and helped to bring about, abolition, the prevalence of this historical narrative overlooks the fact many sectors and individuals also actively resisted its definitive end, including Britain’s Prime Minister William Gladstone and Scotland’s Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville. To forget this side of history is forget that Britain is responsible for having participated in the enslavement of African peoples for over 270 years. Moreover, while slavery officially ended with the 1833 Abolition Act, men like Gladstone argued for the need for the enslavers to be financially compensated, leading to the passing of the 1837 Slave Compensation Act, which allowed the enslavers (rather than those who were formerly enslaved) to receive a total of £20 million in compensation. That debt was not fully repaid by British taxpayers until 2015, allowing the bulk of the wealth of the European-led trans-Atlantic trafficking of enslaved Afrikans (TTEA) to remain in the hands of powerful elites and their institutions in both the former colonies and in the UK.
Question 8: Slavery and colonialism happened years ago. Isn’t it time to move on?
Chattel enslavement is a crime against humanity, which along with colonialism and the development of racial thought, has had long-lasting detrimental consequences. To say that we need to ‘move on’ is to ignore the fact that crimes against humanity and other human rights abuses have continued under British rule under different names and guises all the way into the present day, whether through racial discrimination of global majority peoples, resource extraction, environmental degradation, or the imposition of capitalist systems that ensure that the common wealth remains in the hands of the few etc. These crimes have their origins in the transoceanic trafficking of enslaved Afrikans, colonial enslavement and colonialism. The desire to ‘move on’ or ‘turn the page’ is a call to ignore the fact that the capitalist economic structures that in place today are rooted in the crimes of the past and continue to serve today’s economic elite.
Question 9: What have the crimes of past generations got to do with us today?
We all have a shared responsibility for the past, present and future. Broadly speaking, the Global North is more responsible than the Global South for historic forms of oppression that continue to play a foundational role in shaping global relations and geopolitics today. Britain would not be the global power that it has become were it not for the leading role that it played in the transoceanic trafficking and enslavement of Africans and in the colonization of nearly a quarter of the world at its peak. There is a large volume of scholarship and advocacy that details the links between past and present forms of enslavement, colonial and neo-colonial oppression. Examples include the inequities of capitalism on which our current economic system is based, the continuation of climate injustice and ecocide, the existence of different forms of intergenerational trauma, the never-ending cycle of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and Afriphobia, and the processes of land dispossession and theft, notably from indigenous and First Nation peoples. These links between past, present and future are captured by the term Maangamizi. It is only by understanding how these historical roots continue to shape the present that we can build a future in which we are working jointly across communities of reparations interest to repair the psychological, socio-economic, structural and environmental damage caused.
Question 10: How long have people been struggling for reparations for African enslavement and colonialism?
The struggle for reparations for African enslavement is as old as the history of African enslavement itself. The contemporary struggle for reparatory justice includes some key international dates. The 1993 Abuja Proclamation, sponsored by the Organization of African Unity (OAU), represents the first transnational effort to call ‘upon the international community to recognize that there is a unique and unprecedented moral debt owed to the Afrikan peoples which has yet to be paid.’ This was followed up by the ‘Truth Commission Conference’ (1999), ‘Second African Reparations Conference’ (2000), and the ‘Create the Future! Transformation, Reparations, Repatriation, and Reconciliation’ conference (2006), all held in Accra. This work has been further consolidated through the preparatory meetings (1998–2001) held prior to the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (UNWCAR, 2001), such as the reports issued by the Regional Conference for Africa and the Africa and African Descendants Caucus that called for reparations. The final Durban Declaration acknowledges, that ‘slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity and should always have been so,” and that “victims of human rights violations […have] the right to seek just and adequate reparation or satisfaction for any damage suffered.’
These international events and key moments have given rise to multiple different reparations movements operating at glocal, national, regional and international levels. Within the UK, groups were formed at a national level, such as the Africa Reparations Movement in the UK (1993), led by the late MP Bernie Grant, whose early day motion called attention to the Abuja Proclamation and was signed by 46 Labour MPs. This then lay the groundwork for organizations such as the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe (PARCOE) and the creation of the Stop the Maangamizi Campaign: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide, among others, who are leading the struggle for reparatory justice in the UK today.
Beyond African enslavement, there have also been many other reparatory justice movements linked to colonialism. In the UK, the most well-known case, in recent times, is that of the Mau Mau where ‘thousands of Kenyan nationals were subject to torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the British colonial administration during the Kenya Emergency in the 1950s’. In 2012, the won a landmark case by obtaining an apology from the British government and £19.9 million in compensation to be divided between 5000 survivors.
There are also movements to return cultural and spiritual heirlooms that were stolen and looted from indigenous communities during British colonialism. Their return falls under the legal concept of restitution, which is also part of reparation and reparatory justice. For example, the University of Aberdeen recently returned a bronze ancestral heirloom representing an Beninese Oba (king) to the current Oba of Benin in Nigeria, Omo N’Oba N’Edo Uku Akpolokpolo Ewuare II. There are still thousands of ancestral heirlooms of great spiritual and cultural significance behind withheld by British institutions, such as the British Museum, along with movements to have them returned to their original communities. Likewise, there are also body parts being detained in anatomical museums and other archives, such as the ‘Skull Room’ at the University of Edinburgh, which also need to be returned to the communities from which they were taken. There are movements to ensure that this happens, such as the return of the nine skulls to the Vedda people of Sri Lanka via Chief Wanniya Uruwarige.
Question 11: What is the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations (ISMAR) and the Peoples Reparations International Movement (PRIM)?
The International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations (ISMAR) refers to ‘the collectivity of a broad alliance of social forces within Afrikan heritage communities all over the world, consisting of a broad array of constituencies, with a range of ideological orientations, working in diverse ways, and acting with some degree of organisation and continuity to obtain redress for historical atrocities and injustices which have contemporary consequences, repair the harms inflicted, and to rehabilitate their victims in the process of effecting and securing the anti-systemic objectives of effecting and securing reparations.
Activists and scholars debate whether it constitutes a single distinct social movement or represents a collection of allied groups, interests and causes, i.e. a “movement of movements”. Nonetheless, the literature leans towards supporting the perspective advanced by reparations activists; that the ISMAR is not an entirely different movement from the wider Afrikan Liberation Movement, but is distinguished by special features, such as, continuity of systemic anti-imperialist efforts to seek redress; as well as secure and effect various forms of self-repairs arising from the historical and contemporary injustices rooted in the African holocaust of chattel, colonial and neocolonial forms of enslavement, otherwise known as the Maangamizi.’
The People’s Reparations International Movement (PRIM) refers to the ‘collectivity of a broad alliance of social forces among peoples all over the world, consisting of a broad array of constituencies, with a range of ideological orientations, working in diverse ways, and acting with some degree of organization and continuity to: obtain redress for historical atrocities and injustices, which have contemporary consequences; repair the harms inflicted; and rehabilitate the victims in the process of effecting and securing the anti-systemic objectives of reparations’.
Question 12: What does it mean to self-repair?
Professor Chinweizu outlines the need for self-repair as a starting point when dealing with the legacies of African enslavement. He argues that ‘we who are campaigning for reparations cannot hope to change the world without changing ourselves. We cannot hope to change the world without changing our ways of seeing the world, our ways of thinking about the world, our ways of organizing our world, our ways of working and dreaming in our world’. He suggests four main measures, including the creation of memorial sites to what he terms the African or Black Holocaust, the institution of a Holocaust Memorial Day, the ‘creation of a Black Heritage Education Curriculum, to teach us our true history, and thereby restore our self-worth as descendants of the pioneers of world civilization’, and the ‘creation of a Black World League of Nations, with its complex of institutions, to take care of our collective security, to foster solidarity and prosperity among us, and to prevent the infliction of any future damage on any part of the Black World’. Similar ideas linked to the need for self-determination and cultural revalorization can be found in many areas of the world among peoples who have suffered from, and resisted against, colonial oppression in all its forms. For example, the Zapatista movement in Mexico, which represents a longstanding ‘social movement that struggles to promote basic human rights and a level of political and cultural autonomy’. Their work has been instrumental in developing ‘a discourse that addresses the major critical problems that affect not only indigenous peoples, but all those who suffer repression, poverty, discrimination, and political and economic marginalization’.
Question 13: What are the links between reparations for African enslavement and colonialism, and contemporary forms of slavery and neo-colonialism?
The same systems that permitted the perpetration of chattel enslavement exist today. This can be seen in the fact that over 40 million people are estimated to be living in some form of slavery, be it through human trafficking, forced labour, bonded labour, child slavery, forced marriage, descent-based slavery, domestic slavery or slavery in supply chains. This situation is partly captured by the term Maangamizi, which describes the continuum of harms linked to chattel, colonial and neo-colonial forms of enslavement, including harms against our planet and forms of extrativist labour exploitation. In the UK, we have specific laws relating to slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour (notably the Modern Slavery Act, 2015), which need to be enforced at national and international levels.
Question 14: What sort of structural changes are required, especially from institutions that have gained from colonial and neo-colonial plunder and African enslavement?
From National Trust properties all the way through to some of the world’s largest institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, we are witnessing a lot of questioning about the need for decolonization and reparatory justice. To do justice to such a broad and complex question, a proper study or inquiry is urgently needed through which to identify fully the impacts of this plunder on peoples, nations and the environment. Only then can we start finding ways to put an end to the harm committed in the past and address its consequences for the present.
One promising example has been the establishment of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for African Reparations in October 2021, an initiative driven by the Stop the Maangamizi Campaign in collaboration with Bell Riberio-Addy, MP. The aim of the APPGAR is to prepare the way for an All-Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice. This Commission will call for submissions from all those with knowledge of the nature and impacts of enslavement and colonialism to provide testimony and will act as the basis for affected communities and individuals to voice their own self-determined solutions in effecting reparatory justice.
Question 15: Who can be an ally in this struggle for reparations? What can they do to help?
There are many allies and groups in the UK who are supporting and advocating for reparations, such as the Bristol Radical History Group, the International Network of Scholars and Activists for Afrikan Reparations (INOSAAR) and Extinction Rebellion and its Internationalist Solidarity Network. These groups are actively involved in processes to decolonize the communities, institutions and organizations in which they operate.
There are also many more potential allies, including those who identify as working class and are linked to the poorest sectors of society. A key part of ‘helping’ is about education, starting with the self, and linking into existing advocacy networks. There are multiple books that help to explain, for example, the concept of white privilege and white fragility, or the workings of systemic racism today and its links to slavery and colonialism. Developing literacy on these issues is key. It is also important to find out what is being done, what can be done and who you can connect to at a local level within your immediate communities.
Useful resources for reparations and reparatory justice
