Cameron Duodu
Letter from the North
As could be expected, the claim by the African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission for $777-trillion in respect of the enslavement and colonisation of Africa has produced quite a few titters.
One Nigerian wrote on the Internet: “Is this some kinda joke?” And a Ghanaian wrote: “I am no history buff, but it seems to me that many people would laugh at this bold demand by Africa.”
Well, people may “laugh” as much as they like, but they will soon find that the reparations issue will not be laughed out of court. For a great deal of thought had gone into debating the issue before the $777-trillion claim was made.
In April 1993, the man who won the Nigerian presidential election of that year but who was imprisoned for declaring himself president (after the election was annulled), the late Moshood Abiola, gathered together at Abuja a group of historians, lawyers, political scientists and other intellectuals, to examine the reparations issue. Among them was Lord Anthony Gifford, QC, an eminent British lawyer who currently practises as an attorney-at-law in Jamaica.
It is a tribute to Gifford’s commitment to Africa that he went to the conference at all. For as a white man, he could expect to be treated with suspicion by Africans gathered to discuss such an emotive issue. Was he there to spy on behalf of the ubiquitous white man so that the white man could hear the Africans’ arguments at first hand, the better to puncture them?
In fact, it was Gifford who read the most important paper at the conference. Far from “laughing” at the claim for reparations, Lord Gifford, in a paper entitled The Legal Basis for Reparations, identified some of the absolutely crucial points that establish that the reparations in respect of slavery and colonialism are not only well-founded but justifiable.
Gifford said: “I believe that the cause of reparations to Africa and Africans in the diaspora is rooted in fundamental justice – a justice which overarches every struggle and campaign which African people have waged to assert their human dignity.
“For the iniquities perpetrated against African people today [1993] – whether in South Africa by the apartheid regime, in Mozambique and Angola by terrorist forms of destabilisation, in Britain and the United States by racist attacks and by systems of discrimination – are the continuing consequences, the damages as lawyers would say, flowing from the 400-years-long atrocity of the slave system.
“For me as a lawyer, it is essential to locate the claim for reparations within a framework of law and justice. If this were merely an appeal to the conscience of the white world, it would be misconceived. For while there have been many committed individuals and movements of solidarity in the white world, its political and economic power centres have evidenced a ruthless lack of conscience when it comes to black and African peoples.
“But in my experience progress has been made when the powers that rule in the white world have been compelled to recognise that the rights of non-white peoples are founded in justice. It is then that forms of legal redress, which may not have existed before, have been devised. For example, it used to be perfectly legal in Britain, only 25 years ago, for landlords or employers to put up notices which said `Vacancies – no coloureds’. Today any employer who discriminates on racial grounds can be required by a tribunal to pay compensation.
“At an intentional level, apartheid in South Africa used to be regarded as an internal affair, however regrettable. But over the years apartheid became recognised as a crime against humanity and a threat to peace, so that international sanctions could be imposed.
“This is not to say that the achievement of legal sanctions brings automatic justice. This has not happened either in Britain or South Africa. But these examples show that the demand for justice and legality is an essential element in the struggle for a just cause.
“So it is with the claim for reparations. Once you accept, as I do, the truth of three propositions – that the mass kidnap and enslavement of Africans was the most wicked criminal enterprise in recorded human history; that no compensation was ever paid by any of the perpetrators to any of the sufferers; and that the consequences of the crime continue to be massive (both in terms of the enrichment of the descendants of the perpetrators, and in terms of the impoverishment of Africa and the descendants of Africans) – then the justice of the claim for reparations is proved beyond reasonable doubt.
“[To] those who may say that that is all very true in theory, but that in practice there is no mechanism to enforce the claim, or no willingness of the white world to recognise it, I would answer with a Latin legal maxim: ubi jus, ibi remedium – where there is a right, there must be a remedy. An injustice without a remedy is abhorred by lawyers like a vacuum is abhorred by nature. Once the claim is well-founded in legal principle, and well-recognised by the international community, remedies and mechanisms will be found.”
Gifford recognised that, given the “unique, massive and multi-faceted nature of the claim” for reparations, international jurists would be needed who can show creativity and imagination. International law has never been static; new structures, such as the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, have often been devised to give effect to recognised principles. The International Court of Justice, for instance, was unknown at the start of this century.
The full text of Gifford’s erudite paper can be found on the Web at www.the.arc.co.uk/arm/ legalBasis.html#inde
@x Imagine you were Thabo Mbeki
Howard Barrell
Over a Barrel
Imagine you’re a national leader. Your party has a huge majority in Parliament – the kind of majority that can encourage indiscipline and fractiousness. And within your party is a ginger group, which has never forgiven you for the manner in which you left it several years ago and which could easily become the centre of opposition to your leadership.
Imagine, too, that you and anybody else who has a brain and is not prevented by obstinacy or sentiment from using it identify the same truth. It is that, for your country to prosper in the world as it now is, you must pursue policies that contradict those your party, particularly those in the ginger group, proclaimed when you were in opposition.
What do you do? Do you allow yourself to be held hostage by the awkward squad in your party, allowing yourself to be trapped indefinitely in ill-fitting compromises?
Or do you again read Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince for inspiration? Do you create a pretext to have a few well-selected dissidents kicked out of your party as a salutary example to others? Do you give some of them ambassadorial posts abroad? Do you suggest, with the appropriate inducements or introductions, that they follow careers in business? Do you find a way of turning some of them from poaching to gamekeeping? Or give them so much work that they won’t have time to conspire to swat a fly? Or hug them so close that they understand that, if you go down, you’re taking them with you?
Since you have enough cunning to have made it to the top of the greasy pole, it’s a fair bet you have the instinct to vary your tactics. You know predictability never won any wars, waged with or without weapons.
You also know that the first rule of combat is to maximise your own strength and to minimise your enemies’. Therefore, you don’t make enemies of any on the other side whose will to fight is suspect, or whom you can sensibly hope to win over.
Pause now, and imagine you’re President Thabo Mbeki. You’re trying to steer the African National Congress into a relationship with the world as it now is. The South African Communist Party, of which you were once a senior member, has particular difficulty in coping with this encounter – notwithstanding its elaborate theoretical claims to the contrary.
What do you do? Several things.
You analyse the awkward squad. You identify its intellectual leading lights, its organisers, those with moral force among the public,who leads and who follows. You ask what blandishments each might be most susceptible to. You well know that some people want the sense of self-importance that comes with position; others feel virtuous for as long as they can furrow their brows, ignore their families and work themselves to death; still others became poachers (or communists) only because they never had the chance to be what they really wanted to be – gamekeepers (or capitalists); and so on.
You also create a bit of time and space for yourself. How? One way is by getting your most practiced wordsmith, Joel Netshitenzhe, to oversee the writing of one or two long, most-things-to-most-ANC- members tracts of mumbo-jumbo, which you publish with the uncertain status of “discussion documents”. Rather like the Bible, in these pieces of writing, what the big print giveth, the small print taketh away. But – for now – they keepeth thine flock as one.
And you move on the awkward squad. You recognise very quickly that a considerable number of them have no will to fight you. Moreover, the more senior their positions in the government, the less likely they are to challenge you. Some of them will give you their first loyalty, while remaining in the SACP where they will give significant voice to your perspectives. Minister of Trade and Industry Alec Erwin is one such. Minister of Public Service and Administration Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi is another. So, too, is Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry Ronnie Kasrils. And Minister of Provincial and Local Government Sydney Mufamadi, Minister of Public Enterprises Jeff Radebe and Gauteng Premier Mbhazima Shilowa.
With an acute sense of irony, in some cases you deploy these more compliant or agreeable people to do jobs which evidently conflict directly with the principles they have long professed – such as the primacy of working class interests and preference for collective forms of ownership. Fraser- Moleketi, deputy chair of the SACP, is brought in to hold down public service workers’ pay. Radebe, SACP central committee member, must accelerate the privatisation of state assets. By so doing, you make it very difficult for others in the SACP to take issue with these aspects of policy.
Likewise, you have employed another ally in the SACP, former general secretary Charles Nqakula, as your parliamentary counsellor – as your official eyes and ears in the debating chamber, restaurants and corridors.
In the meantime, you have moved a few of the awkward squad off the board. Cheryl Carolus, senior SACP member – spirited, extroverted, sociable, with serious street cred – becomes ambassador to the Court of St James, London. Raymond Suttner, senior SACP member – intellectually sharp, introverted, with considerable moral force – becomes ambassador to Sweden.
Still others get given workloads that will leave little space for family life, let alone for the politics of conspiracy. Jeremy Cronin, deputy general secretary of the SACP, now chairs Parliament’s transport committee. In his five years as minister of transport, Mac Maharaj managed to carve up, commercialise and privatise enough of the transport portfolio for Cronin to find it very difficult to lead any policy challenge. Instead, he will have his work cut out merely co-ordinating oversight of a restructured set of entities.
Then Phillip Dexter. Usually identified in political circles as a member of the awkward squad, he is one of the few in the SACP with the brainpower and political skills to trouble Mbeki. But this week we heard that Dexter – one-time trade unionist, ANC underground activist, exile, MP and executive head of the empowerment Union Alliance group of business interests – is to become the new head of the National Economic Development and Labour Council. There Dexter, who is someone not given to calling red pink, will have to adopt a posture of magisterial neutrality between capital, labour, the government and community – or risk being seen as a failure in his new job.
Of course, this is all the conspiratorial fantasy of an idle mind.