Experts from Africa and its global diasporas gathered in Berlin late last year to call on European governments to address their colonial past and ongoing impact.
Here, human rights lawyer Melissa Hendrickse, journalist Gary Younge and academic Pumla Dineo Gqola talk about the long-lasting legacy of colonialism, how it’s affected them and the importance of reparations…
Melissa Hendrickse
Melissa is Amnesty International’s researcher and advisor on racial justice and international criminal law.
I was born in Cape Town in the early Nineties – in the midst of the negotiations to end apartheid. It was a turbulent time in South Africa’s history. After Chris Hani, an important figure in South Africa’s freedom struggle, was assassinated, it seemed that the political transition teetered on the brink of collapse. But the negotiations continued and, when I was two years old, South Africa held its first democratic elections.
It was a better time to be growing up as a person of colour in South Africa, compared to my parents’ experience. There was a sense of hope and optimism. However, the legacy of apartheid didn’t just vanish – the country remained segregated and the inequality caused by centuries of colonialism, dispossession and exploitation has endured. I grew up in a predominantly white area. Most of my classmates were white and it was difficult navigating my own identity within spaces that were disconnected with the history of the country and the experience of the majority of South Africans.
I went on to study law, inspired by the role that law can play in supporting struggles against racial injustice. After my Masters, I applied for a job at Amnesty, where I am now a researcher and advisor on racial justice and international criminal law. Rather than being an activist in the traditional sense, I see my contribution mostly through law and the legal analysis. Working on Amnesty’s groundbreaking report, which concluded that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians was an honour. The parallels between apartheid South Africa and the racial oppression of Palestinians profoundly resonate with me. As Nelson Mandela, once said: “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
Within the racial justice team, I work on reparations for slavery and colonialism, having recently drafted Amnesty’s policy. European colonialism and slavery built the world that we inhabit today. It is palpable all around us – from the borders that divide us to the languages we speak and the knowledge systems we are taught. The incredible wealth that was made by European states through slavery and colonialism has led to gross inequality that continues to mark the world order.
There cannot be meaningful racial justice today without reckoning with this legacy and re-making the oppressive systems built by colonialism. While European states are starting to issue apologies, there’s still a resistance to take concrete measures and offer reparations. This is why Amnesty’s work on reparations is coming at an important historical moment. Our hope is that, by joining the global reparations movement, Amnesty can contribute to creating pressure on European states to respond with more than just platitudes to the growing calls for reparatory justice.
Gary Younge
Gary is a UK-based award-winning journalist, academic and podcaster.
I grew up in a town called Stevenage (in the UK), during the Seventies, after my family moved from Barbados. There were very few black people.
In the Seventies you got a lot of casual racism from all kinds, teachers as well as people you lived near to. The same people who would be racist could be neighbourly. It wasn’t consistent. I grew up thinking I wasn’t British – and I didn’t want to be. In winter people would say, “I bet it’s not like this where you come from.” There was an assumption that if you were Black, you weren’t British.
It was partly these contradictions that inspired my activism. For me, activism was about being a free person – if you wanted your freedom you had to fight for it and for the freedom of others. For me, there wasn’t any other way to be in the world. My family were very political – my mum, my brothers – and I became obsessed with the notion of freedom and what it means to be free at a very young age.
The history of colonialism and slavery has always interested me. We have grown up in countries in Europe that have decapitated their history in a peculiar way. There’s an aphorism explaining post-colonial immigration that says, “We are here because you were there. If you didn’t know you were there, how do you know why I am here?”
It’s not possible to understand where we are as a country or where I am as a person or why our racial politics are what they are unless there is an engagement with colonialism. None of it makes sense. And it’s far from over yet. We’re still dealing with it.
Britain has only known itself as a non-racial democracy recently. There’s a level of implausible deniability that these European countries can have about where they have been and what they have done – they pose as enlightened liberal democracies and everyone buys into that. However, if you look behind the curtain, you’ll find all the blood sloshing around, along with the occasional kick back such as when Britain gives back the Chagos islands.
Reparations remain important because the impact of slavery and colonialism is still evident. We can see it in trade links, migration patterns, poverty and other inequalities, both globally and nationally. The principal of reparations has already been established. We saw it after the First World War, after the Second World War, after the Holocaust and beyond. So, the question is then why should people of African descent, who were enslaved, and the descendants of the colonised be omitted from that narrative?
Find out more about Gary’s podcast.
Pumla Dineo Gqola
Pumla is a South African academic, award-winning writer and feminist.
I grew up in South Africa, during the Seventies and Eighties, as apartheid was tightening its reign. It was complicated and difficult.
Yet it was a time of diversifying activism. I grew up surrounded by Black academics and I knew I wanted to be an academic myself. My family’s politics were left leaning and my father taught at a historic Black university. It was foundational to who I would become.
I’m now a professor, a feminist writer and I am a post-colonialist by training. We often think about colonialism as something that’s finished, but we are still living in its long aftermath. We live in a world shaped by colonial logic and the systems that organize our world have come from its very powers. For example, where people migrate from and to neatly maps on to histories created under colonial power, while low-income countries are most likely to be former colonies. So, while formal colonialism is over, many of the ideas of how the globe is organized and who can move where, how, why and when map comfortably with those divisions – and that’s why they are so difficult to undo.
I recently attend the event Dekoloniale Berlin alongside a number of racial justice experts. These festivals are important for a variety of reasons. They provide an opportunity to go beyond diplomatic performance, while the conversations around debt, human rights and reparations, even at the level of art and culture, the conversation of coloniality, is one that shows every aspect of how the EU is a power block.
Going forward, I want to see a significant shift in the negotiation of states inside and outside of the EU – and whatever that looks like needs to move beyond diplomacy, while conversations about reparations need to be serious and must move out of the realm of superficiality.