What form should slavery and colonialism reparations take?

This book opens with Olúfémi Táíwò proclaiming that “Trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism built the world we live in… if we want reparations, we should be thinking more broadly about how to remake the world system.” And what better place to begin this bold articulation of Táíwò’s views on reparations, now released in paperback, than by analysing the sins of his own institution, the Jesuit-founded Georgetown University, where he is an associate professor of philosophy?

Throughout the 18th century, a Catholic population grew in Maryland following the slave revolution in Haiti and the French Revolution. Even though Catholics remained a minority, at just 12% of the local population, they were highly influential, and through a bundle of land grants from the colonial governor of Maryland, the Society of Jesus (the Jesuit order of priests) became a significant landowner.

It took possession of seven plantations spanning thousands of acres of land that had originally been the territory of the indigenous Piscataway and Nacostine peoples. In order to finance the building of an academy that was to become Georgetown University, the Society of Jesus began to exploit the lands it had acquired, using the labour of enslaved Africans.

Táíwò draws on the words of the poet and scholar Mukoma wa Ngugi (son of the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o) who, speaking in 2020 at the Writers Unlimited International Literature Festival, explained: “That Jesuit priests should own slaves should come as no surprise… every slave castle I visited [when travelling to West Africa] had a church in its own compound. In Elmina and Cape Coast [present day Ghana] the church was built directly above slave dungeons. The pious white Christians would pour water through the cracks in the wooden floor to ease the thirst and heat [of the enslaved captives]. If there is one institution in dire need of decolonisation, it is the church.”

Thinking about reparations

Given the global scale of slavery and colonialism, and the number of institutions in which its history is embedded, how can justice begin to be realised, Táíwò asks.

The international pressure for reparations is steadily building. The African Union and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) formed a strategic alliance and a fund to pursue reparations for the historical injustices of slavery and colonialism.

A special UN tribunal has been proposed, which would help establish legal norms for complex international and historical reparations claims, its supporters say.

Most theories about reparations treat it as a social justice project. They are either rooted in reconciliatory justice focused on making amends in the present; or they focus on the past, emphasising restitution for historical wrongs. Táíwò terms these two approaches the “harm repair” approach and the “relationship repair” approach.

Building from the ground up

But Táíwò advances a different case for reparations: one rooted in a hopeful future that tackles the issue of climate change head on, with distributive justice at its core.

“What if the project for reparations was the project for ‘safer neighbourhoods and better schools,’ for a ‘less punitive justice system’? For the ‘right to a decent and dignified livelihood’?” What if building the just world was reparations?

“Indeed… what other form of reparations could even be meaningful in the context of our reality?” Táíwò writes.

This view – that reparation “is a construction project” – argues that reparations should be seen as a future-oriented project engaged in building a better social order, and that the costs of building a more equitable world should be distributed more to those who have inherited the moral liabilities of past injustices.

As Táíwò writes in the book’s preface: “In my view, the project of responding to the impact of yesterday’s injustices on the descendants of the enslaved and colonised requires a project of building a world that ameliorates rather than compounds those injustices.”

Climate justice

The politics of climate justice, Táíwò insists, will contribute to re-balancing the legacy of racism and colonialism, as well as the survivors of genocidal invasions such as the slaughter of American Indians.

To date, this legacy has led to what the author terms “a global, racial empire”, and peoples falling into two groups: the advantaged (owning wealth, power, education and rights) and the disadvantaged (burdened with debt, poverty, disease, pollution and knowledge gaps).

The massive difference between the levels of wealth in the Global North and the Global South is a matter that is clearly at the forefront of Táíwò’s thinking. The development of institutions such as universities and research bodies, and of state capacity, can determine people’s living conditions and life opportunities, he says.

As the Brookings Institute has reported in the study Why we need reparations for Black Americans: “Wealth is positively correlated with better health, educational, and economic outcomes. Furthermore, assets from homes, stocks, bonds, and retirement savings provide a financial safety net for the inevitable shocks to the economy and personal finances that happen throughout a person’s lifespan.”

Táíwò is not trying to design a particular reparations programme. Instead, he says, Reconsidering Reparations is a book “about justice, at a world scale – about the appropriate responses to world-scale problems, past injustice and to future climate crisis”.

Its central argument claims that a just world would be one in which everyone enjoys the capabilities that they need to relate to one another as equals. It maintains that realising this vision would serve as reparation for the injustices of trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism; and warns that this project is threatened by the climate crisis. Táíwò says that “a politically serious project must focus on climate justice.”

Threat of future injustice

But “our political and economic system distributes risk and vulnerability according to the patterns developed by the history of global racial empire.”

This “threatens to not only present a future racial injustice, but also to effectively roll back gains made toward racial injustice in recent decades”.

Táíwò acknowledges that the task is huge – but his stimulating book is an important contribution to kickstarting the conversation.

“It’s going to take deliberate political effort to reverse and stem the political trajectories that are active in the present moment, that would lead us to very bad racial justice outcomes… in the decades to come,” he writes.

Reconsidering Reparations: Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics are needed in the wake of Slavery and Colonialism

By Olúfémi O. Táíwò

£16.99 Haymarket Books

ISBN 9798888903698