[WA-News] Intersections - Covering Gender & the WCAR NGO Forum

[jradloff at iafrica.com]

Intersections – Covering Gender @ the WCAR NGO Forum, Durban 2001
Issue 1 – Part 1
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Items in Issue 1 – Part 1

* I have a dream of reparations and more by Leonard Tim Hector
* Racism, Colonialism, and the heritage of Slavery By Yvette Abrahams, 
Research Co-ordinator ‡Khib Women's Centre
* Guerrilla reports by  Elizabeth Araujo,

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I Have A Dream of Reparations and more

By Leonard Tim Hector

The other day I had to marvel at the ignorance, the conservative stupidity of 
some of the black men who taught me. I came across an article by one of my 
former teachers, one Leonard Shorey, arguing the white man’s case for not 
paying reparations for centuries of Black slavery. Shorey made the white 
supremacist case better than any Klu  Klux Klan high priest would have done. He 
argued that since Black men sold other black men into slavery, whites were not 
solely responsible for slavery – blacks were too - and therefore, no 
reparations should be paid.

I have rarely seen such ahistorical simple equation reasoning in all my life. I 
shudder to think that such foolishness taught me as they attempted to make me 
grow up stupid under the union jack.

This view reflects ignorance of the fact that where one finds oppression, 
members of the oppressed group help to enforce their own oppression. It was 
true for mediaeval Serfs, and for Jews in Hitler’s holocaust. 

This argument is as stupid as saying that because Jews participated and 
collaborated in the holocaust, there should have been no trial at Nuremberg, no 
trial of Eichman. 
 
This argument also reflect lack of knowledge of the origins of slavery, so 
eloquently outlined in one of the most celebrated passages in history, found in 
the opening of CLR James’ world-renowned Black Jacobins - the one historical 
and sociological analysis of plantation society which puts the Neanderthal 
views of Shorey in the schoolboy’s rubbish bin:
"The tribal wars from which the European pirates [of slaves] claimed to deliver 
the African people were mere sham-fights; it was a great battle when half-a-
dozen men were killed. It was on a peasantry in many respects superior to the 
Serfs in large areas of Europe, that the slave trade fell. Tribal life was 
broken up and millions of detribalised Africans were let loose upon each other. 
The unceasing destruction of crops led to cannibalism; the captive women became 
concubines and degraded the status of the wife. Tribes had to supply slaves or 
be sold as slaves themselves. Violence and ferocity became the necessities for 
survival and violence and ferocity survived. The stockades of grinning skulls, 
the human sacrifices, the selling of their own children as slaves, these 
horrors were the product of an intolerable pressure on the African peoples, 
which became fiercer through the centuries as the demands of industry increased 
and the methods of coercion were perfected."

If every West Indian schoolgirl and boy had to learn this passage it could help 
to remove some of the black guilt and inferiority complexes which plague some 
of us, making us enemies of our own people. We in the Caribbean have hailed 
as "great teachers" men who were authoritarian and brutish, who believed that 
blacks were so incorrigible and hard-headed that the strap as an instrument of 
coercion and unmitigated violence became the principal instrument of education. 
It needs to be said that teachers, in their authoritarianism, unbridled 
arrogance, and undiluted reactionary views, made us all uncritical objects of 
our subjection and subordination. They did not lead us out, but reinforced our 
inferiority and accommodation to oppression. 

Views like that of Shorey are echoed by those who white wash Dr King’s legacy 
with his "I Have A Dream" speech - which is all most modern people know of him. 
By glorifying this speech, America has tried to reduce one of the finest men of 
the 20th century to mere oratorical brilliance. King was much more than that 
and was one of the key figures who called for reparations as demonstrated in a 
striking passage from, “Why We Can’t Wait":

"No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation 
and humiliation of the Negro in America [or the Caribbean, or Brazil] down 
through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent [American] society 
could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed upon unpaid wages. The ancient 
common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of one human 
being by another. The law should be made to apply for American [Caribbean and 
Brazilian] Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by 
the government of special, compensatory measures, which could be regarded as a 
settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law. Such 
measures would certainly be less expensive than any computation based on two 
centuries of unpaid wages and accumulated interest. I am proposing, therefore, 
that just as we granted a GI Bill of rights to war veterans, America launch a 
broad based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, our veterans of 
the long siege of denial."

The Rev. Michael Eric Dyson did an analysis of King’s profound and enduring 
demand for reparations. Dyson noted that "[o]ne of the greatest pitfalls of 
idolising the "I Have A Dream" speech and failing to grapple with King’s views 
on compensation to blacks is that it obscures King’s dramatic change of heart 
and mind about the roots of racism."

There is no doubt that King hoped for a colour-blind society. But he came to 
recognise that its realisation would come "only as oppression and racism were 
destroyed." It is impossible to understand King’s hope for society where men 
and women will be judged not by the colour of their skin – but by the content 
of their character - without holding uppermost in mind that though King 
believed that the concept of white supremacy is so imbedded in white society 
that many whites "are unconscious racists," some do confront notions of their 
racial superiority and struggle to overcome it. 

However, King himself in "A Christmas Sermon on Peace", acknowledged on 
Christmas Eve 1967 to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation "that not long 
after talking about the dream in Washington, I started seeing it turn into a 
nightmare." King, with his marvellous and unrivalled cadence of speech, spoke 
of the degrading poverty he observed in U.S. ghettos "as the antithesis of his 
dream". He and said that "if something isn’t done, and in a hurry, to bring the 
coloured peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long 
years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed."

It is obvious that such injustice must be overcome and overthrown. It is 
obvious too, that it is in this "necessity or fear of a worse evil" that the 
overwhelming majority of the world’s working people live.

It is well to note when slavery was abolished by the British in the Caribbean, 
millions of pounds sterling compensation or reparations was paid to the slave-
owners in 1834, the perpetrators of the worst inhumanity of man to man. The 
victims, enslaved Africans, were paid not a cent. It is full time to correct 
that grave historical wrong.

The colonization of the world by Europeans was not an act of Innocence. It was 
not a charitable act by any fantasy of the imagination or any objective  
analysis. Entire cosmologies were dumped on the trash heap of a crusading 
European ideology that meant to plunder, not only the peoples’ mind, but their 
bodies as well (Reading, 1950). The liberation of the minds of the African 
people will be a tougher battle than the eradication of settler regimes.


[Editors’ note: This article is an extract from a much longer article].

RACISM, COLONIALISM, AND THE HERITAGE OF SLAVERY

By Yvette Abrahams, Research Co-ordinator ‡Khib Women's Centre


In my work on eighteenth and early nineteenth century South African history, I 
have spent five years writing about the enslavement of the Khoekhoe (the 
indigenous peoples of South Africa) during this period. A volume later, it 
still seems to me that I have left much unsaid. What does it mean to be 
enslaved in your native land? What are the cultural consequences of this 
process, not only amongst the Khoekhoe themselves, but also in the society 
which has developed, and gained wealth upon their unpaid labour? Above all, 
what is the cultural legacy of two hundred and fifty year's of slavery? I have 
come to believe that the racist and sexist stereotypes developed during this 
formative period of South African history came to affect not only the Khoekhoe, 
but eventually all other Black people. Today, we would like to think slavery is 
over. We can believe this only because we are a society in denial about the 
racism which still exists.

I would like to begin by defining slavery from a gendered perspective as a 
system of institutionalized rape. This is reflected in the legal system at the 
time, which defined slaves as property, that is, objects without a motive will. 
A slave woman could therefore, by definition, not be raped. She could not be 
raped because, by definition, she could neither consent nor refuse any use of 
her body. While Khoekhoe women were, by and large, not legally enslaved, but 
rather owned and used under a category of  "prisoners of war", this legal 
definition of slavery tended to be reflected in the cultural and social systems 
in which the Khoekhoe also, perforce, had to live. Colonial society was one in 
which women of colour, Black women, could not be raped. Uses and abuses of 
their bodies, both as sexual beings and as free labour power, were part of the 
social fabric.

What is the legacy of this system? First, there is the issue of the profits 
which were made off these women's unpaid work. Today one of the widest fault-
lines between the races is that of wealth. The descendants of slave women are 
poor, the descendants of slave owners are rich. Because slavery was a system 
based on racial difference, this outcome is a clearly racist outcome. 

Second, the stereotype of Black women as constantly sexually available is one 
which is still with us in our mass media and literary culture. The woman who 
could not, would not, say no, is still a constant in the South African social 
consciousness. Regardless of the efforts of the women's movement in spreading 
awareness of the need for a human rights culture even for women, it is time 
that we realized we are up against centuries of history. We need to be 
realistic in our expectations of how long it will take to rectify that.

Third, there is the issue of post-traumatic stress disorder. Rape trauma 
syndrome has been shown to affect individuals detrimentally for years, 
sometimes decades, after the traumatic event. Some women never really get over 
it. Now, think of this in terms of social psychology! It is not so that the 
women who lived through slavery were in any way treated for their trauma, on 
the contrary, in addition to their constant vulnerability to sexual violence, 
they had to work harder than any human beings should have to work. Yet it has 
been demonstrated that the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorders can be 
passed on from generation to generation. So what we can be said to have here is 
two and a half centuries of rape trauma syndrome, followed by the final land 
dispossession of the Khoekhoe, followed by segregation, followed by apartheid. 
Where has been the opportunity for us as a people to heal, not just the psychic 
wounds of our own time, but our legacy of generations of unhealed, festering, 
wounds caused by slavery as a system of institutionalized rape? Is it 
acceptable for leaders of this country now to turn their back on us, the 
descendants of slaves and Khoekhoe, and expect us to move on as if nothing has 
happened? How does our past history and our present abandonment affect us, our 
activism, and the possibilities of building a strong culture of human rights, 
when our right to a healthy mind was taken from us long before we were born? 

Finally, there is the crucial issue of reparations. For anyone not stricken 
with collective amnesia, it is clear that the legacy of slavery is still with 
us. To deny this legacy is to deprive our female forebears the respect due to 
them. They survived a system the inhumanity of which we are hard put to imagine 
today.  To give just one example amongst many to make this point clear: there 
is a law firm, Fairbridge Arderne and Lawton, which owned slaves in the 
nineteenth century. This firm still exists; as a legal person it presents an 
unbroken continuity with the era of slavery. The profits this firm made from 
the unpaid labour of colonized human beings have either remained in the firm or 
been distributed to its partners over the past two centuries. The descendants 
of those slaves remain poor. The question I want to pose is: does this firm, 
and the many, many legal persons who have historically profited from slavery, 
have no moral obligation to make restitution? Should it not be making some 
contribution to a mental health service for the descendants of slaves? It is 
not a complex exercise to calculate the value of the unpaid labour, to say 
nothing of the human suffering, inflicted by this legal person. 

The issue of reparations is not about restitution - there can be no restitution 
for the suffering of our female ancestors. Their lives cannot be measured in 
money. Neither do I consider reparations necessary for punitive purposes. The 
harm that was done was done - there is nothing we can do to undo it. But I do 
believe that we need reparations to safeguard the future. This paper concludes 
by arguing that the only way we can build a human rights culture which is 
secure and stable for generations is to ensure accountability. To walk away 
from our history in South Africa, to pretend that it is over when the pain and 
suffering of our history is still so obviously part of us, is the surest way to 
risk the proliferation of human rights abuses. People need to take 
responsibility for what they have done and what they have profited from. Only 
when potential abusers know that their abuse shall be tracked down to the last 
detail, no matter how matter over how long the centuries; and only when the 
last profit of human rights abuses is paid over to its victims; only then will 
we be able to rest at ease, secure in the knowledge that the girl-children yet 
to be born have a fighting chance to lead decent lives. 

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Guerrilla reports:
Our Guerrilla reporter, Elizabeth Araujo, asked people at the conference what 
their expectations of the NGO Forum were. Here is what they said:

Our organisation is expecting to learn strategies for dealing with issues of 
racism at  different levels. We want to find out what are the best strategies 
that others have adopted and to create as much awareness as possible. Racism is 
not an issue of Black and White. It exists even where you speak the same 
language and have the same skin colour.
Barrister Oby Nwankwo 
Executive Director of CIRDDOC  (Civil Resource Development and Documentation 
Centre ) in Nigeria, which addresses human rights violations.

To now be free from the hands of the oppressor. The rights that have been 
denied us will be restored to us. Our presence here will be an eye-opener…Human 
rights going global is not an exception.
Paul Anike
At the conference with CIRDDOC

We have to come out with very good visions to fight racism. Not only ideas, but 
actions.
Omer Kebiwou Kalameu
Consultant Researcher in Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Coordinator for 
International Service for Refugees and Peace

I think there’ll be some change, things like not to treat people badly, to 
treat people fairly, equally. We are the same.
Osborne Gwala
South African citizen

I find it strange that in the year 2001 we’re having a Racism Conference. In 
fact, that we’ve spent all these resources to get  people here. It shouldn’t 
have been about colour; it’s  a question of human beings getting along. It’s 
about tolerance, people trusting. Trust and love – human emotions that have 
been prostituted.
Connie Nagiah
Conference Media Liaison Team

To ease the tension between people – Black, White, Coloured, Indian, men and 
women. Let’s move away from that. People are people – each to their own and 
lets respect each others cultures.” & “Basically people are people.
Fikile and Sengetile
South Africans at Conference

I’m hoping for a greater awareness of issues.
Erika Harriford
Human Rights Advocates, Inc.

[End of Intersections Issue 1 Part
1]

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