Reparation

Durban and the "Southern Rebellion"

In 2001, reparation did not seem poised to be a keyword for postcolonial thought in the 21st century. The United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), which took place with much anticipation in Durban in September 2001, was wracked by controversy about the demand — articulated especially by delegates from the Caribbean — that the United States and Europe recognize the legitimacy of reparation claims for the crimes against humanity of the Atlantic slave trade and Indigenous genocide. The prospect that the reparation question would be addressed in this international venue was so explosive that the US withdrew from the conference. They were not alone in their obstruction; Hilary Beckles, a leading figure in the Caribbean reparations movement, relates how unified "Anglo-American opposition," abetted by "colluding Europe" and some African states, sought to quell the insurgent effort to situate reparation at the heart of the twenty-first century global antiracist project WCAR was meant to inaugurate.1

WCAR was supposed to be a stirring and even celebratory occasion. The post-apartheid South African setting symbolized the triumph of antiracist struggle, offering a usable past for the new century and implying that even seemingly intractable instances of racial injustice in the present could be moved toward their own eventual resolution. But the concerted repression of reparation claims suggested that the Global North was unwilling to entertain any antiracist program that challenged the material inequalities that flowed from and perpetuated racial subordination. In this respect, South Africa — with its entrenched post-apartheid economic inequalities — was a highly appropriate setting, though perhaps not in the way UN organizers had intended.

It was not just antiracist aspirations that were strictly circumscribed in Durban but also postcolonial politics. Reparation claims challenged the postwar development paradigm that had proved so disastrous for postcolonial nation-states, entrapping them in positions of neocolonial subservience and manufactured austerity. As David Scott has observed, the Caribbean reparations movement is an act of historical redescription that recasts "the past's relation to the present . . . to foreground the sense in which Caribbean debt is the other side of European theft."2 Instead of an interminable game of catch up in which an imperial international order disburses foreign aid with strings attached, postcolonial peoples demand what they are owed for centuries of extraction, exploitation, and theft.

But at Durban, the influential culminating conference document, the Durban Declaration and Program of Action (DDPA), elided the call for reparation and equivocated as to whether the Atlantic slave trade had been a crime against humanity in its time, which might have opened the door to legal compensation claims.3 The suppression of the reparation debate and the US withdrawal were a bitter disappointment to activists and NGOs from Africa and the diaspora who had extensively prepared for an event they viewed as an important continuation of the First Pan-African Conference on Reparations and its 1993 Abuja Proclamation. If all this were not enough, the US and its allies set about delegitimizing WCAR with a powerful "smear campaign" that hinged on allegations of antisemitism at the conference and the large international NGO Forum that took place in parallel with the official UN event.4

Reparation was not the only flashpoint in Durban. Another postcolonial question — Palestine — shaped the conference and its long aftermath, and the two issues became conjoined in ways anticipatory of the reparative present. WCAR was an important venue for the assertion of Palestinian claims and the advancement of Palestinian solidarity campaigns. This took several forms, including an effort to reaffirm the polarizing 1975 UN Resolution 3379 on Zionism as racism. While this position was suppressed in the DDPA, it appeared in the Declaration of the NGO Forum, along with a forceful articulation of Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism.5 Durban also gave impetus to the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement launched in 2005, which drew on the strategies of the South African anti-apartheid campaign and found early support at WCAR and especially the NGO Forum.6

It was in this context that the conference was engulfed in an antisemitism controversy and Israel, predictably, withdrew alongside the US. The vitriolic and highly orchestrated delegitimization of WCAR that followed in the international press — which included attempts to associate the conference with the 9/11 attack that occurred just days later — was so sustained and effective that subsequent UN antiracism conferences have been reliably boycotted by the US, Israel, Germany, France, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In other words, for the past 20-plus years, a powerful axis of settler colonies, genocidal states, and imperial powers has undermined and withdrawn from an international venue in which nations of the Global South mounted a concerted challenge to the view that antiracism could dispense with reparation for past harms and redistribution of ill-gotten imperial gains.

I have lingered on what the political scientists Abigail Bakan and Yasmeen Abu-Laban have called "the Durban moment" because it importantly periodizes the history of postcolonial reparation politics.7 Durban was a pivotal episode in a story of postcolonial exhaustion and failure that has become a dominant account of the postcolonial project. Naomi Klein has described Durban as the apex of a "southern rebellion" that sought to defy debt as a mechanism of impoverishment and control in an imperial international economic order.8 Reparation claims were an especially consequential element of this rebellion because they mobilized the moral weight of racial injury at a time when transitional justice was the principal idiom of human rights discourse. Precisely for this reason, the rebellion at WCAR was crushed, echoing previous attempts to use international institutions of liberal governance to pursue global economic redistribution, such as the New International Economic Order.9 Durban thus appeared to be the inglorious capstone to a twentieth-century postcolonial narrative that arced from triumph to disappointment at "the failure of mid-twentieth-century decolonization to reverse colonial plunder, to redeem a collective past, and to plot a livable future."10 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror — a campaign of imperial plunder for which no reparation has been paid — appeared to confirm Durban's status as a dead letter.

Durban also crystallizes some of the organizing contradictions of reparations today. The conference offered a striking spectacle: vehement antisemitism allegations were not just used to silence criticism of Israel but as a cover to thwart the discussion of reparation. Moreover, even commentators who recognized the justice of placing Palestinian claims on the agenda at Durban, such as Klein, wrote as though the reparation question and the Palestine question were wholly distinct and indeed competing issues. The efforts of some states at WCAR to advance the contentious matter of reviving resolution 3379 when there was no likelihood of its success, Klein observed, "instantly upstaged Africans' demands," "frustrating... the countries fighting for a new consensus on the legacy of slavery."11 But there is another way of conceiving the relationship between reparation and Palestine at Durban. Activists from Africa and its diaspora sought a twenty-first-century reparatory settlement that would finally address racial inequities that persisted despite formal decolonization and civil rights. Relatedly, the forceful inscription of Israeli apartheid and the demand for Palestinian self-determination into the record at Durban challenged the defining reparative settlement of the twentieth century, which had permitted the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people in the name of reparation for the Holocaust. Palestine was part of the "southern rebellion" at Durban, not a distraction from it, and this rebellion suggests the ways that reparation and refusal might be intertwined — a point I return to in the final section of this essay.

"The Greatest Political Movement of the 21^st Century"?     

Despite the consequential defeat at Durban and the endlessly compounding damage of the imperial present, reparatory claims and promises today echo in institutions around the world—museums, universities, national parliaments, newsrooms — and in the streets, most audibly during the global 2020 uprisings for racial justice and police abolition. Reparation is no longer a marginal discourse that can be dismissed as the demand of a radical fringe with little prospect of mainstream support. Instead, reparations are a global political movement and the language of repair saturates our culture. A notable string of recent developments — including several striking and highly publicized acts by European governments towards the restitution of African material culture, such as Germany's return of Benin bronzes to Nigeria in 2022 — has produced the sense of an acceleration and overall shift in the tenor of reparation talk.12 Rather than a series of siloed cases or episodic victories, the reparations movement might now be plausibly described as a political dispensation in the making. In an assessment published almost twenty years after the disappointment at Durban, Beckles, who now heads the CARICOM (Caribbean Community) Reparations Commission (CRC), could declare that "the reparatory justice struggle would be the greatest political movement of the twenty-first century."13

The ascendance of reparation has been assisted by a definition of reparation as broadly a matter of reparatory justice, rather than strictly monetary compensation. The CRC's influential 2013 Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice takes this approach, defining reparation as a suite of interconnected measures that include debt cancellation, formal apologies, cultural institutions, technology transfer, trauma treatment, and education. While some recent victories have entailed monetary compensation, such as the 2012 UK legal case that won reparation for the victims of British counterinsurgent terror in Kenya during the Mau Mau Rebellion, reparation is widely understood as entailing not just a range of remedies but also a variety of practices, among them projects of historical accounting and self-examination by important institutions throughout civil society. A growing number of universities in the UK and the US are examining how their wealth was garnered from enslavement and colonial expropriation and committing resources to various reparatory schemes that purport to provide more equitable access and representation.14 Similarly, The UK newspaper The Guardian recently published the findings of an independent report its owners had commissioned, "in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement," on the paper's significant historical links to the Atlantic slave trade. The paper's owners have pledged "a decade-long programme of restorative justice" funded with upwards of 10 million pounds.15

There are two ways to view this conjuncture. From one perspective, the ubiquity of reparation discourse and its assimilation to the language of liberal morality implies that the justice of reparation claims have an ineluctable moral force that has propelled their growing acceptance by the political class and its public, overcoming opposition of the kind exerted at Durban. Of course, no such moral advance ever just materializes through the spontaneous goodwill of ruling elites or historical beneficiaries. The political legitimacy of reparation today is undoubtedly a testament to the tenacity of radical political activists who, as Robin D. G. Kelley has observed, approached reparations as an enduring "social movement." While we are nowhere near what Kelley describes as reparation's ultimate horizon — "to radically transform society . . .  redistributing wealth, [and] creating a democratic and caring public culture" — its new plausibility suggests that reparation as an analytic has succeeded in "exposing the ways capitalism and slavery produced massive inequality."16

The appeal of reparation's growing hold on the political if not yet material disposition of things is that it permits us the possibility of a postcolonial present of fruition rather than failure, disrupting that entrenched narrative of postcolonial exhaustion and disappointment. This perspective lets us view the many decades in which postcolonial peoples demanded and were denied reparation as preparation for the present. Past defeats have even seemingly energized renewed present efforts, as Beckles emphasizes when he describes how "the disaster in Durban" turned an issue that had previously been a preoccupation of the Caribbean radical left into "a bridge between left and right" and "engendered a new level of determination . . . that moved the reparations discourse from rhetoric to reality."17 The twentieth-century aspirations of what Adom Getachew has called "anticolonial worldmaking" (and not just nation-building) have not been extinguished; both Getachew and the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò see the reparations movement as a global project of racial justice that revives those worldmaking ambitions.18

But there is another equally plausible way of viewing what some critics have called the contemporary "reparative turn."19 This perspective is rightly suspicious of the very ubiquity of reparation and its elevation to an object of liberal piety. Are we in a new reparative dispensation in which reparation demands from below, as it were, will finally prevail? Or is reparation today an alibi that permits the rhetorical inflation of even the most perfunctory efforts to redress past wrongs while fabulous wealth continues to accumulate in the autocratic hands of a few? Notably, none of the examples of reparation I have mentioned entail the robust remaking of social or international relations that reparation's most visionary advocates have demanded. Critics have observed that the various reparatory initiatives universities are undertaking, which include student scholarships, diversity hiring, and the establishment of academic centers dedicated to the study of slavery, are all things universities should be doing anyway.20 Calling them reparation is aggrandizing, especially since in many cases, as Tressie McMillan Cottom has argued, these plans simply repackage old ideas of dubious transformative potential, such as equality of opportunity and preferential admissions, in the newly sanctified language of reparation.21 Meanwhile, the phrase "reparations washing" has entered the vernacular, in connection to Lloyd's of London's corporate response to its post-2020 report on the company's historical implication in the slave trade.22 And while the restitution of artifacts and material culture is especially poignant owing to its tangibility, these are often largely symbolic gestures that reaffirm the presumption of European benevolence, relinquishing some objects in order to legitimize ongoing investments in cultural infrastructure still organized by the ethos of ethnographic capture.23

Reparation claims can be made to serve a range of interests and may be readily absorbed and appropriated in service of the status quo. A cautionary case here is Germany's 2021 official acknowledgement of the genocidal character of its 1904-1908 campaign against the Nama and Ovaherero people in German Southwest Africa, which was accompanied by an agreement with the government of Namibia that included a formal apology and a billion-euro development program. While the German government refused to adopt the language of reparation for fear of establishing an opening for other colonial-era claims, just as Britain settled the Mau Mau case rather than go to trial and risk a legal precedent, this agreement was understood to be compensatory in intent if not in name. However, while the development program may be encoded within the moral order of reparation and human rights, it offers little more than the moribund arrangements characteristic of third-world development that the reparations movement aims to supersede.24 While the Nama and Ovaherero peoples have fiercely resisted this interstate agreement in their name, in other instances critics have charged advocates and spokespeople for reparation, such as the CARICOM CRC, with reproducing neocolonial relationships and defending elite class interests.25

Such scenes bring to mind Frantz Fanon's alertness, at the height of decolonization, to both the colonized's indisputable right to reparation and the danger of reparation's cooptation as a moral decoy and neocolonial stratagem.26 After all, reparation is a problematic for the history of decolonization, and not just a twenty-first century "turn" or a contemporary political innovation. Seen in this light, reparation appears not just a divided discourse fractured by opposing ideological pressures but a vexingly circular one. Repetition, rather than exhaustion, might name the impasse of a postcolonial present stuck restaging past dilemmas and disappointments. What, then, might reparation mean today and tomorrow?

The Ruins of Repair

The skepticism that some postcolonial critics and others on the left have leveled at reparative arrangements which from some angles look like progress must be resituated in light of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In the almost quarter century since Durban, many of the imperial, settler-colonial, and genocidal states that rejected the demand for reparation at Durban and sabotaged its sequels have taken reluctant steps toward reparation, always as a result of agitation and pressure. I do not want to diminish the victories such efforts have won, or to dismiss the case that committed activists and theorists have made for reparation's role in securing racial justice. Yet the terms on which reparation is secured are shaped by the asymmetry between claimants and historical perpetrators — who extend reparation without fundamental transformation of those asymmetries, producing moral dividends disproportionate to material effects. This is the circularity I have described: the postcolonial past demonstrates how irrepressible claims for reparation are not just resisted but coopted and absorbed, and yet we fall back on the idiom of reparation because of its power as an analytic and because the history of racial and colonial atrocity does unquestionably require repair.

The genocide of Palestinians in Gaza — the most recent phase of a long process of elimination — disrupts this circularity, this oscillation between reparation's possibilities and limits, by demonstrating the bankruptcy of the reparative paradigm established in the last century and inherited by our own. Since October 7th, 2023, the same imperial and settler states upon which reparative demands are made have supported, armed, and sought to legitimize Israel's brazen genocide. Occurring in full view of the world, livestreamed and witnessed in real time, these atrocities have thrown into stark relief the extent to which reparation can itself function as an imperial technology. What else are we to make of the contradiction of these states' intermittent steps toward the repair of lingering injuries whose enabling conditions — slavery, colonial rule, Indigenous conquest — they declare over and done, and their unflinching willingness to pursue and permit atrocities whose irreparability and injustice are wholly evident now? Perhaps, from the perspective of state power, reparation is simply the cost of doing business, a bill to be paid in the degraded currency of a distant tomorrow, if at all, for violence willed in the present. For the perpetrator, then, reparation is not debt but credit. 

Palestine brings the question of reparation still more fully into crisis because this is genocide in the name of reparation. Since 1952, Germany has paid billions of dollars in reparation to Holocaust victims and their descendants and to the state of Israel, but it is Palestinians who have paid the highest costs of Europe's settlement for the Holocaust, as concisely captured in the demand to "free Palestine from German guilt" seen on signs at Palestinian solidarity protests in Germany and beyond. Since the Nakba, Palestinians have identified how Europe's reparative settlement for its antisemitism and the irreparable crime of the Holocaust has consigned them to the position, at best, of "the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees" — reparation's remainder.27 Palestinian resistance to these terms, including at Durban, has helped bring about a heightened campaign of global solidarity and refusal. However, this resistance has met considerable backlash. To their harshest critics, Palestinians and their supporters across the Global South appear to threaten the very basis of the reparative paradigm organized by the Holocaust: their resistance has been cast as antisemitism and terrorism since long before October 7th. To the liberal imagination, the claim about Durban was that Palestinian demands for a renegotiation of the mid-twentieth-century reparative settlement were out of sync with the demands of others for reparation now. Meanwhile, Palestinian demands for the right of return pointedly refuse the debt/credit temporality that organizes so many reparation claims. 

Reparation, the cultural critic David Eng reminds us, is a mechanism of racial differentiation. The claims of the racialized and colonized are invariably timely yet interminably deferred because those to whom reparation is owed are still excluded from the realm of the human, "left to perish in the dark regions beyond the circle of love and repair."28 This is demonstrably true, for Palestinians and many others. Yet surely a postcolonial politics of reparation must do more than appeal for inclusion within that circle, since reparation produces remainders, no less than the twentieth-century pursuit of the nation-state form. David Scott has suggested that the twentieth-century demand for postcolonial sovereignty has withered, replaced today by "a moral-political present shaped by a reparatory claim on the colonial slave past."29 In important respects, Palestinian self-determination was forced out of step with the twentieth-century sovereignty paradigm, since, in Eqbal Ahmad's words, "at the dawn of decolonization, Palestine was colonized."30 Today, we are confronted by a similar temporal disjuncture in which Palestine inhabits the gap between two regimes of repair. If we are indeed in a new era in which reparation, rather than decolonization is, per Beckles, "the greatest political movement of the twenty-first century," then the genocide in Palestine alerts us to its limits and contradictions.   

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Sonali Thakkar is Associate Professor of English at NYU, where she teaches postcolonial literature and theory, critical human rights, race and ethnic studies, and Jewish and Holocaust studies. She is the author of The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought (Stanford University Press, 2023). 

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