Unjustified injuries inevitably trigger demands for remediation, almost always, at some point. If so, colonial-apartheid atrocities rightly produce claims to redress. This face of reparative justice claims is easily cognisable. But it hides a deeper and larger claim to wholeness.
Wholeness returns something to its original condition, or nearly there, and compensates for intervening fissures. Return and reparation are thus key remedies for colonial-apartheid harms. Wholeness builds on such ideas as replacement, atonement, restoration, and restitution. Wholeness concepts recognise, enable, and propel national reconstruction – an essential for shattered nations.
This logic is perfectly compelling. Appreciation of colonial-apartheid depredations may be faint. However, colonial-apartheid harms equate to major world system shocks. Think of natural and ecological disasters, public health crises and material armed conflict.
Picture post-1945 Germany. Imagine post-Belgian genocide Congo. Take Rwanda post-genocide. And on, we could continue.
Reparative justice scholarship must frame the imperative of global justice. It imagines the world of our dreams. These fit the emerging world system opportunities, including timing inflections, to which I return. The fundamental justice thrust of reparatory scholarship is as eternal as is unremedied unjust injury.
This intellectual, and political, ambition fuels the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Africa Reparation Hub. Reparatory scholars must prove the historic injury. This is not a tool of attack, discomfiture, or division. It merely grounds the justice claim.
Domain scholars must, directly and indirectly, articulate this justice claim.
Accordingly, we must cement relationships with both the African Union (AU) and sub-continental multilateral organisations.
The Reparation Hub helps formulate AU reparative claims across conceptual, legal, political, and diplomatic realms. The Hub is assembling a Panel of Experts on Africa Reparations (PEAR). The hub is creating a comprehensive Africa reparations information archive and resource repository.
Recently, the Hub, Department of Public Law, and Faculty of Law hosted their first reparations seminar, with Prof. Saleem Badat as leader, and Prof. Pearl Sithole as discussant.
The Hub officially launches in June 2024, continuing its reparatory justice research. Undergraduate and graduate teaching and learning programmes could and should follow, in well-chosen good time, with due protocols.
Reparative scholarship inhabits an ethically and morally attractive moral universe. Subjugation of former colonists, often current neo-colonialists, does not belong there. That would be wrong. Indefensible.
What we want is a world defined by justice. There, human security and a sound peace and community among nations are possible. The supplicant status of former colonies must be reversed. The current world order obstructs – effectively precludes – human rights realisation in the post-colony.
Post-colonial human rights enjoyment rests not simply on abstractions like freedom, equality, dignity, separation of powers and the rule of law. Intrinsically, these abstractions offer obvious human rights and human dignity value. Less obvious is their contextually defective human rights proposition. That the lofty rhetoric, and ostensible principles, should easily co-exist with endemic violations is strange.
Deliberate worldwide human abuses, including war and genocide, especially against dark coloured persons, are strange. One international hegemon was at peace for about fifteen units of its near 250-year life, only. A global power has militarily attacked an estimated 85 to 100 countries, merely between 1945 and 2011.
- Khanya B Motshabi is a senior lecturer of Public Law and the strategy lead of the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Africa Reparation Hub
