An Unresolved Struggle for Reparations, Redress & Restitution in South Africa

An Unresolved Struggle for
Reparations, Redress & Restitution
INSIGHTS FROM
KHULUMANI SUPPORT GROUP
SOUTH AFRICA

Understanding Resistance to this Struggle in Africa
• Thoughts from Bryan Stevenson:
Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, Legal Representative for
Children in Conflict with the Law in the US and for Persons on
Death Row
• Critical thinking from Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Critical thinking and advocacy from Sir Hillary Beckles
• Critical thinking from Antjie Krog
• Critical thinking from Khulumani Support Group

Bryan Stevenson, the Equal Justice Initiative
• The stunning silence continues.
• We have not understood what
our historical actions have meant
to affected people.
• Black people have lives in a era of
terror for centuries; the threat of
terror has defined their lives.
• British colonialism in South
Africa was shaped by the
philosophy of “instilling a proper
degree of terror.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates
• The Case for Reparations
• Two hundred fifty years of
slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow.
Sixty years of separate but equal.
Thirty-five years of racist
housing policy. Until we reckon
with our compounding moral
debts, America will never be
whole.
• Until South Africans reckon with
their compounding moral debts,
peace will elude us.

Living against the odds: 1755 to the present
• African Americans have lived
under the blind decree of justice,
but (in reality) under the heel of
a regime that elevated armed
robbery to a governing principle.
• A Great Migration, a mass
exodus of 6 million African
Americans that spanned most of
the 20th century, took place with
African Americans journeying
north to seek the protection of
the law.
• From the 1930s through the
1960s, black people across the
country were largely cut out of
the legitimate home-mortgage
market through means both
legal and extra-legal. Chicago
whites employed every measure,
from “restrictive covenants” to
bombings, to keep their
neighbourhoods segregated.

Red-Lining in Chicago & in Khayelitsha
There is no access to
mortgage bonds for
home-owners in
Khayelitsha on
grounds that the
houses have
asbestos roofs. This
racial policy “could
well have been
culled from the
Nuremberg laws.”
Chicago

Black Wealth / White Wealth: A Shared
Experience in Settler Colonies
• Whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate
credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights
of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport.
• “I’d come out of Mississippi where there was one mess, and come up here and
got in another mess. So how dumb am I? I didn’t want anyone to know how
dumb I was. I just left this mess. I just left no laws. And no regard. And then I
come here and get cheated wide open. I would probably want to do some harm
to some people, you know, if I had been violent like some of us.”
• In return for the “deprivations of their rights and privileges under the
Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments,” the Contract Buyers League
demanded “prayers for relief”.

“Prayers for Relief”
• No longer appealing to the
government simply for equality;
no longer fleeing in hopes of a
better deal elsewhere.
• Charging society with a crime
against their community &
demanding the crime publicly be
ruled as such.
• Asserting a claim for restitution
for the great injury brought upon
them by offenders.
A CRITICAL SHIFT
• No longer simply seeking the
protection of the law.
• Seeking reparations.
• Black neighbourhoods are
characterized by high
unemployment and households
headed by single parents. They
are not simply poor; they are
“ecologically distinct.”
• Fault lines remain everywhere.

Long-term impacts
• With segregation, with the
isolation of the injured and the
robbed, comes the concentration
of disadvantage.
• The labelling of this reality as the
result of cultural pathologies
that can be altered through
individual grit and exceptionally
good behaviour, is a convenient
lie.
• The kind of trenchant racism to
which black people have
persistently been subjected can
never be defeated by making its
victims more respectable
• The essence of racism is
disrespect. In the wake of grim
numbers, we see the grim
inheritance.

Reparations Movement in the 20th Century
• The movement coalesced in 1987
under an umbrella organization
called the National Coalition of
Blacks for Reparations in America
(N’COBRA). The NAACP endorsed
reparations in 1993.
• Broach the topic of reparations
today and a barrage of questions
inevitably follows: Who will be
paid? How much will they be paid?
Who will pay?
• If the practicalities, not the justice,
of reparations are the true sticking
point, there has for some time been
the beginnings of a solution.
• Having been enslaved for 250 years,
black people were not left to their
own devices. They were terrorized.
• HR 40, the Commission to Study
Reparation Proposals for African
Americans Act, the Conyer’s Bill,
has never—under either Democrats
or Republicans—made it to the
House floor.
• We inherit our ample patrimony
with all its incumbrances; and are
bound to pay the debts of our
ancestors. (Yale President Timothy
Dwight said in 1810)

Sir Hillary Beckles, Vice Chancellor, University of the
West Indies, a Barbadian Historian
Reparatory justice is not a backward
call for handouts as many believe. On
the contrary, it is a call for
development cooperation.
The 10-point action plan: An apology,
repatriation, an indigenous people’s
programme, cultural institutions,
programmes designed to improve
public health, promotion of literacy
and African knowledge; psychological
rehabilitation and technology
upgrading programmes and debt
cancellation.

Today in a South Africa Resisting
Reparations, there is agony
Agon – a contest (usually sport) but
then also in literature (thus giving us
the protagonist and antagonist as
characters).
Agonism – a contestatory way of
presenting ideas in the public sphere
or in intellectual sparring.
Agonist – a person engaged in a
contest, conflict, struggle, etc (or
agonists are drugs that mimic
neurotransmitters and make the
neuron fire!).
Agony – a display or outburst of
intense mental or emotional
excitement. A struggle within the
soul, a contest leading to death.

Lessons from the Life of Antjie Krog:
Journalist & Author Anthea Garman
Speaking (and being listened to)
demands capital and authority –
and these are invisible, intangible
things.
A public sphere is not an empty
open space into which anyone can
step and then speak (this is one of
democracy’s illusions).
We have a very necessary loud and
busy public sphere full of
agonising!

Black Plunder, White Democracy: Settler Colonialism
• In the US, black people are
rendered a class of untouchables,
while white men are raised to the
level of citizens.
• The parting of black families is a
kind of murder.
• So too in South Africa

So too in SOUTH AFRICA
A STORY OF THE PLATINUM BELT
• The miners who extract these
minerals live in very poor
conditions, often in informal
settlements near the mine, without
running water or electricity. In 2012,
around 3,000 miners struck for
higher wages and better living
conditions. 34 miners were shot
dead by the South African police.
The Government Commission of
Inquiry reported that the mine
owner, the British company
Lonmin, was responsible for the
massacre, along with the South
African government.

Unresolved Missing Persons, Victims of Enforced
Disappearances

Implications of Impunity for the Crimes of the Past

From ASIKAQEDI to THELA MANJE
President Mandela said on 29 October 1998,
“The challenge is for all of us to
protect our democratic gains like the
apple of our eye. It is for those who
have the means, to contribute to the
efforts to repair the damage wrought
by the past. It is for those who have
suffered losses of different kinds and
magnitudes to be afforded
reparation, proceeding from the
premise that freedom and dignity are
the real prize that our sacrifices were
meant to attain. Free at last, we are
all masters of our destiny. A better
future depends on all of us lending a
hand - your hand, my hand.”

A DREAM DEFERRED BUT A DREAM INSISTENT
ON REALISATION
• WE CANNOT AFFORD TO FAIL
OUR PEOPLE IN THIS
• Archbishop Tutu said earlier this
year:
• “Healing is a process. How we deal
with the truth after its telling defines
the success of the process. And this
is where we have fallen tragically
short. By choosing not to follow
through on the commission’s
recommendations, government not
only compromised the commission’s
contribution to the process, but the
very process itself.”
“To be truly radical is to make
hope possible, rather than
despair convincing.”(Raymond
Williams)

AN AGENDA FOR REPARATIONS IN SOUTH
AFRICA: THE DREAM FULFILLED
• Communication as the process of creating shared meaning and
understanding
• Conversation as the process of developing interventions together
• Conservation as the preservation and use of the best from our legacy
• Community as the importance of facilitating coherence around a
shared vision; and
• Connection as the pursuit together of transformative goals.
• Concluding the Unfinished Business
THANK YOU

An Unresolved Struggle for Reparations, Redress & Restitution in South Africa

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An Unresolved Struggle for Reparations, Redress & Restitution in South Africa