Timothy Musila

Here is another fraudster masquerading as a politician. Why does it so often seem to be the children of immigrants who volunteer for the dirtiest political work of the far right? Imagine arguing that human trafficking is abhorrent, but that apologizing to the victims would be dangerous because they might demand compensation from their traffickers. What kind of moral bankruptcy produces such reasoning? What is the value of acknowledging a crime if you insist that its perpetrators should never be held accountable? This is precisely how these crooked recycled conservatives manipulate public opinion. They deliberately present reparations as an impending financial punishment against ordinary British taxpayers, frightening people into believing that acknowledging historical crimes will somehow bankrupt their country. Yet British taxpayers spent over a century financing compensation for slave owners rather than the enslaved. Why is Braverman not discussing the immense fortunes accumulated by sections of the British aristocracy, merchant families, financial institutions and corporations through slavery and colonial exploitation? Why is she not asking how much of that wealth has survived through inheritance, property, financial assets and institutions that continue to exist today? Why should the descendants of those who accumulated fortunes through human suffering enjoy the protection of historical continuity while the descendants of their victims are told that history is irrelevant? Reparations do not automatically mean increasing taxes on ordinary British workers. They can involve restitution of stolen assets, contributions from institutions that profited from slavery, debt cancellation, fairer trade arrangements and the return of cultural property. And the supreme absurdity is that she invokes Britain’s role in abolishing slavery as though ending a crime somehow extinguishes responsibility for having committed and profited from it. Since when does a criminal deserve compensation or moral absolution for eventually stopping the crime?

When you talk about reparations, some of the first people who come to oppose them are ignorant Africans whose confidence far exceeds their intellect telling you, “We don’t need reparations.” Do you people even understand what you are rejecting? Do you think reparations mean a workers’ compensation cheque, that we are all going to queue at the bank and receive $100 or $500 for the suffering inflicted on our ancestors? Or that those our corrupt leaders receiving a $1billion check to acquire their next mansion in Dubai or Monaco? Is that really the extent of your imagination? Reparations mean repairing structural harms left by the slave trade and its immediate child colonialism and it takes multiple forms. Economic reparations include changing trade laws and agreements that keep formerly colonised economies supplying cheap raw materials while making it difficult for them to develop industries of their own. They can include preferential access to markets, removing tariffs that penalise processed goods, supporting local manufacturing, and changing procurement rules so African businesses can compete for valuable contracts. Reparations can include tax advantages for building businesses: tax credits for productive investment, relief for new enterprises, incentives for research and manufacturing, and measures that help businesses owned by affected communities accumulate capital. They can include debt cancelation, investment funds and ownership stakes that help people build lasting wealth. They can include returning identifiable stolen assets, millions of acres land, mines, confiscated gold reserves ( More than 2/3rd of the French gold reserve was taken from African countries since the colonial era). Cultural reparations can mean returning looted artworks, sacred objects, royal treasures, manuscripts and human remains ( The German are still holding onto tens of thousands of African skulls they massacred in Namibia for ex), with the resources necessary for their preservation under the authority of the communities to whom they belong. You cannot steal somebody’s heritage, charge admission to see it, and then present a temporary loan as generosity. Repair can also include funding museums, libraries, publishing houses, theatres, film and cultural institutions whose development was obstructed or whose work was treated as inferior. Historical reparations can mean opening colonial archives, returning records, identifying burial sites, documenting atrocities and supporting research led by the communities concerned to restore the names and lives of people reduced to numbers in those shipping registers. Linguistic reparations can mean investing in reinstating African languages as languages of education, science, administration and intellectual life. That includes training teachers, producing textbooks, and recovering knowledge that colonial institutions dismissed because it was transmitted in a language they refused to respect. Our nations have been so tied by debts that the IMF and our western debtors slash our educational budgets leaving our schools underfunded, making such reforms financially impossible. And this was intentional! Reparation means our Children should be able to learn through their own languages and acquire other languages without being taught to despise the first words through which they understood the world.Reparations means revising our school curriculums, both in formerly colonised countries and in the countries that profited from their subjugation. These measures require negotiation, enforceable commitments and public accountability. But listen to how quickly some of you ignoramuses dismiss the entire demand before making the smallest effort to understand it. The ignorance is sickening !

I have always been fascinated by a particular breed of African politicians in Europe who seem to have made it their life’s ambition to be more British than the British, more French than the French, and more hostile to Africans and immigrants than the most rabid nationalists in their adopted political circles. You find them in Britain, France, Belgium and across Europe, particularly in countries that once colonized Africa. Many are the children of African immigrants, sometimes the first generation born in Europe, whose parents arrived in those countries as foreigners. Yet their children have somehow developed an almost religious devotion to the most reactionary interpretations of European nationalism. They speak about immigration as though their own parents descended from the heavens with citizenship certificates in their hands. And I am not talking about Africans who happen to be conservative. I am talking about those who appear determined to prove their loyalty to their political constituencies by expressing a degree of contempt for immigrants, Africans and their own ancestral history that would embarrass even some European conservatives. The irony would be hilarious if its consequences were not so serious. Because these politicians occupy a particularly convenient position in the racial politics of Europe. Their African ancestry gives certain political movements an opportunity to present deeply contested positions on immigration, race and colonial history through someone whose very presence is then offered as proof that racism could not possibly be involved. It is the political equivalent of the racist who insists that he cannot be racist because he once dated a Black woman. Except that this time, instead of producing a Black girlfriend, they produce a Black politician with an African surname and a spectacular appetite for defending their ideological prejudices. What particularly disgusts me is the historical revisionism that sometimes accompanies this performance. Imagine being so desperate to demonstrate your European patriotism that you begin defending an imperial history whose victims included people who looked like your grandparents. And for what? To prove that you are sufficiently British? Sufficiently French? That your African ancestry has been politically disinfected to the satisfaction of your audience? I find this obsession with proving oneself more authentically European than Europeans themselves intellectually fascinating and morally disturbing. This is the context in which I examine Kemi Badenoch’s politics. Badenoch is entitled to her conservative convictions, just as anyone else is entitled to challenge them. But her Nigerian heritage does not make her interpretation of British colonial history more credible, nor does it make her positions on race and immigration immune from criticism.