Imani Tafari-Ama | Promise of reparatory justice

Willem-Alexander, king of the Netherlands, has opened a three-year investigation into the role of The Netherlands in the Maafa, the Holocaust of African enslavement. This project’s terms of reference spans the late 16th century to the present and includes a raft of reparatory justice activities.

The Dutch made this surprising move ahead of the 2023 milestone of the 150-year anniversary of the abolition of slavery. Setting a European precedent, several Dutch cities and institutions have offered apologies for their role in the multiple-centuries profit-making institution, which galvanised the Industrial Revolution on the backs of dehumanised and dominated Africans. To compensate for their role in these atrocities, the Netherlands has indicated that it will establish a €200 million fund for public information and establish a museum to curate this history.

In the heyday of the Maafa, European nations built over 60 forts on the West Coast of Africa as they competed for dominance of the hub of the transatlantic human trafficking industry. While Europeans cite 12 million as the total figure of Africans consumed by the so-called triangular trade, John Henrick Clarke, venerable historian, suggests that this figure was more likely to have been in the hundreds of millions. Dr Clarke has also indicated that since enslavement was an intergenerational institution, this figure was multiplied many times over ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkfU2toufdQ&t=2199s).

For decades, Europeans have frustrated advocacy efforts for reparatory justice with their refusal to acknowledge their crimes against humanity, apologise, and make obligatory transitional-justice amends. The Netherlands’ stepping away from the stoic European silence on the accountability subject suggests that that recalcitrance is about to change. Europeans’ colonial denial has resided in their disclaimer that the Maafa was legal when it was enacted. That has been a disingenuous disclaimer to deny their culpability for the asymmetrical development of the Global North and the Global South.

ENDURING LEGACY

The enduring legacy of the racialisation of African labour for European profit via human oppression, sexual and labour exploitation in the production of commodities like sugar, rum, cotton, and tobacco is evident in the persistence of systemic racism to this day in the countries that profited from the Maafa. Reporting from Amsterdam, Reuters suggests that the globalisation of the Black Lives Matter agenda pricked the slumbering conscience of the Dutch and inspired their reparatory jousting stirrings ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/06/research-into-royal-role-i...).

So far, I have not seen any mention of the status of compensation for the colonies that remain in the Caribbean as remnants of, and nostalgia for, Empire. And although Suriname gained independence in 1975, it is still politically intertwined with its former coloniser. The ABC islands, Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, remain colonised, as is the Dutch half of the twin-island of St Maarten and St Marten, (the latter is still “owned” by the French), Saba, and Sint Eustatius. The Netherlands also brutally occupied the Ivory Coast, Ghana, South Africa, Namibia, Angola, and Senegal for significant periods in their hot pursuit of profits and power.

The apparently decolonial largesse of the Netherlands may be viewed with cynical mistrust by those living in the persistent shadows of the colonial power structures. The optimist may respond to say that the road to cultural change starts with a step, which should be leveraged to encourage the mapping of what the remaking of justice should look like. It is all good and well to curate museum exhibitions about a past, which has been hiding in plain sight. This belated though timely response indicates the urgency to challenge the syndrome of contrived colonial amnesia, which is an obstacle to transformation. The silence and shortfalls on the subject show that there is a political economy of reparatory justice. The progeny of ancestors who suffered in the Maafa need to also be encouraged by this development, which bears out Frederick Douglass’ thesis that power does not give up without a demand.

DEMAND FOR REPARATIONS

Rastafari are responsible for keeping the demand for reparations alive in Jamaica and the Caribbean despite knee-jerk responses of ridicule from the public and repression from the State. They can also take credit for being uncompromising in their stance on repatriation. This energising of the transitional-justice discourse catalysed the formulation of the Caribbean Community’s CARICOM Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice (https://caricom.org/caricom-ten-point-plan-for-reparatory-justice/). Propelled by Pan-African yearning and walking in the philosophical footsteps of Marcus Garvey, Rastafari refused to support the mindset that maintains colonial institutions of governance and socialisation in place. Though not direct beneficiaries of the discourse they spawned, Rastafari are also monumental for inspiring the establishment of the Centre for Reparations at the University of the West Indies and the formulation of the National Council on Reparations, which was established by the Jamaican Government in 2009.

Before the turn to right-wing governments in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, the Dutch prided themselves on being a “liberal” state. This stance inspired the many years of development cooperation that characterised their tenure in countries like Jamaica. I was a direct beneficiary of this alliance as I won successive Fellowships from the Government and People of The Netherlands to pursue my MA and PhD degrees at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. The merger of the ISS with Erasmus University happened after my doctoral defence in 2002.

Although Dutch liberalism was accommodating of difference, it did not level the identity politics playing field. For example, I remember that for years, my good friend, Sister Benji, would take her children out of the country every December so that they would not be exposed to racist practices like the blackface Black Pete who gave out gifts to children as Santa Claus’ “helper.” A controversial practice, blackface reveals how racist representations are used to reinscribe derogatory narratives about Africans in popular culture. White people painting their faces black to represent Africans in ridiculous roles is part and parcel of practices of institutionalised racism. Such forms of violence show how bias can be transported through time and space through the application of apparently “simple” practices, which are in fact harmful psychosocial mechanisms of circulating ideas to cement racist notions about identity. Such practices cut across the grain of the popular profile of tolerance.

What finally resulted in the erosion of Dutch resistance to their accountability obligations, though? How far will the research into culpability go? To what extent will this research and curation of the history result in the provision of the institutional resources to recompense the damage that was done during the Maafa and continues to be done to Africans and their descendants? To what extent do their initial actions address the broad compensation demands for the crimes committed by the agents of the Royal Dutch (colonial) state?

It will also be significant to see how inclusive and futurist the proposed research and exhibition will be.

- Dr Imani Tafari-Ama is a research fellow at The Institute for Gender and Development Studies, Regional Coordinating Office (IGDS-RCO), at The University of the West Indies. Send feedback to imani.tafariama@uwimona.edu.jm.