A a year ago, Germany agreed to pay Namibia for what the European country admitted was colonial genocide. The amount at stake was pitifully small (€ 1.1 billion, spread over 30 years, to be spent on development projects), and the word “reparations” has been avoided. The result of this compromise was strong opposition within Namibia and a stalled agreement.

Separately, the US city of Evanston, Illinois, last year began paying an eventual total of $10 million in slavery reparations to some of its 12,000 Afro-Americans. -Americans, money that would help with housing in compensation for discriminatory housing policies. the past. Critics say it’s too little. Meanwhile, Joe Biden during his election campaign had supported the creation of a commission on reparations to African Americans. Pressure groups are now calling on him to keep his promises, but legislation on the subject is unlikely to be passed.

Germany’s history in Namibia has been brutal, but not unique. Local tribesmen have been shot, tortured or taken to the Kalahari Desert to die of dehydration. Some of the techniques later used by the Nazis (concentration camps, inmates subjected to heavy labor on starvation diets, medical experiments to prove the superiority of the white race, and ultimately the dehumanization of a people) were experimented with. in what was then called Germany. South West Africa.

Claims for reparations are not new, especially war reparations. The Germans extracted it from the French after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 – the sum equal to what Napoleon had extracted from Prussia at the beginning of this century. In turn, the Allied powers extracted it from Germany after World War I. Germany also paid Israel three billion marks over 14 years to compensate Jews killed or robbed during the Holocaust. But in the context of colonialism and slavery, the bizarre story is that reparations were wrung from slaves, not slavers!

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AAfter the historic slave revolt of 1791 in what is now Haiti (which turned the tide of the slave trade), France, as a colonial power, agreed after decades of fighting to leave the rebels alone s ‘they paid three times the island’s annual production in reparations – to compensate slave owners who had lost their “property”. Payments to France (principal and interest) continued for 75 years, with payments for another two decades ceded to the United States.

The abuses have crushed Haiti’s economy, which is now one of the poorest in the world. As Thomas Piketty asks in his latest book, A brief history of equality, and if France now reimburses this sum to Haiti? The economist calculates that paying three times Haiti’s current GDP translates to € 30 billion (about 1% of French GDP). As books on the subject proliferate, Dr. Piketty argues that the question cannot be evaded.

The idea that slave owners were the victims and not the culprits was well entrenched in the anti-slavery debate. Montesquieu proposed, for example, that freed slaves should work for 10–20 years at low wages to compensate slave owners for the loss of their slaves. Indeed, Britain and other countries paid compensation to slave owners when they abolished slavery in the 19th century. During the American Civil War, emancipated slaves were persuaded to fight for the Union with the promise of 40 acres and a mule at the end of the war – a promise never honored.

Compensation payments are complicated. How are they calculated? Who decides how the money will be spent? If it is to be distributed, who will get how much – and in cash, or in the form of (say) education? Will the end result be as unsatisfactory as with the money paid to the government by Union Carbide for the Bhopal gas tragedy, while many victims continue to suffer?

For big countries like India and China, no amount of reparations can compensate for what has been done to them. Likewise, when every small concession in climate or trade negotiations is given reluctantly, payouts that match justice cannot be expected. It would therefore suffice for the schools and universities of the former colonial powers to recognize in their curricula the reality of how they became rich and at what cost for whom. Today, these questions are erased from their history.

By special arrangement with Business Standard

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