Do you want to take action to get redress for the Maangamizi (Afrikan ‘Hellacaust’ of chattel, colonial and neo-colonial forms of enslavement) as it affects you, your family and community?
Here is an example of how you can do so; see the revised ‘Stop the Maangamizi!’ postcard template, which we urge you to send to your MP, you can find out details about your MP here.
The postcard is one tool aimed at enabling you to better lobby and engage with establishment decision-makers about including Maangamizi impact issues as they affect you, your family and community in the constituency representational work and local, national and international policy-making they prioritise.
Please keep us updated about any progress you make as we are beginning to map which MPs are responding positively to the campaign aims.
Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide! Campaign (SMWeCGEC) Spearhead Team
Since originally posting these comments under the video on 14th December 2016, when the youtube link was checked yesterday 15th December 2016, the comments mysteriously became unavailable despite them being viewable for some hours when the comments were initially posted. The original comments are now available again for viewing under the you tube video. This video has been shared on many social media platforms. Since the video is publicly accessible and has been widely circulated, so must this public response be made available too.
Having watched this video, it would have been better if the recording of the whole discussion on the 1st August Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March was posted to get a full sense of what the discussion was that proceeded the interventions from Glenroy Watson in the Q & A session (from 20 mins of the recording) in relation to the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March specifically. These comments I am making are therefore in response to the discussion in the above video pertaining to the 1st Mosiah (August) Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March. This video recording is available for the public to view and has been circulated across many social media platforms.
It is important for viewers to know that the organising of the Reparations March is part of a broader strategy that has legal, extra-legal, parliamentary, extra-parliamentary as well as community organising and mobilisation dimensions. Whilst critical discussion, dialogue and debate about the efficacy of specific strategy and tactics is part of the battle of ideas in arriving at the best way forward, I am somewhat concerned by the inadvertent impression that the conversation pertaining to the March by the speakers in the above recording cultivates. Viewers could be left with the limiting and incorrect impression that grassroots activists and leading organisers involved in developing and implementing reparations strategy and tactics pertaining to the March and its related activities, are not thinkers or strategists; lack the intelligence and cognitive wherewithal to be strategic, develop critical conceptual tools on the best methodologies for effecting and securing reparatory justice social change or fashion imaginative policies regarding implementation of what they are organising to achieve; or indeed that they are not engaged in their own creative processes of activist learning, knowledge co-production, research, critical debate and discussion or even aware of the strengths and limitations of the tactics they embark upon at particular points in our reparations-movement-building processes. Furthermore viewers are denied proper analysis of the context of ordinary people’s leadership and for a significant number, their involvement in the March organising and mobilising processes being interpreted as forms of ‘direct action from below’ that stem from the active resistance and opposition of ordinary people to the continuing impact of the Maangamiziin their lives.
A further impression may also be created that the best way forward is for some elite group of ‘professionalised’ civil society experts or lobbyists who are unaccountable to Afrikan Heritage Communities, our specific Communities of Reparatory Justice Interest and our autonomous community organisations and institutions, are the ones who should be speaking, representing and negotiating for everyone else in terms of lobbying and other similar tactics etc. Furthermore, that what is required and more likely to be ‘successful’ is a more watered down, ‘liberal’ set of visions, demands and declarations Indeed, such assumptions, perspectives and views reveals some of the often obfuscated national and class politics, interests and struggles within the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations (ISMAR). In addition, such assumptions, perspectives and views are in danger of reinforcing the notion that ordinary people are powerless, lack agency should just be spectators in the contemporary process of emancipation from the modern-day Maangamizi, which is part of the means by which power to Afrikan people will be restored making it more likely that reparatory justice can be effected and secured.
The Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March is not just a March, it is organised as an action-learning participatory March where Afrikan Heritage Communities led from the ground-up, collectively learn how to better fight injustice and unjust systems of power as well as build on the powerful insights they gain about structures and systems of power oppression and exploitation and how to build counter-power to help advance reparations social movement-building with various constituencies within the Afrikan Heritage Communities in general and specific Communities of Reparatory Justice Interest. For many, it is in the processes of marching and engaging in allied programmes and activities of the March, including through its partnership with the ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide’ Campaign (SMWeCGE), that participants co-facilitators and organisers enhance their ability to think, act, theorize and imagine “outside of the box”. Priority is given to mobilising Afrikans people’s individual and collective agency and ‘power to’ effect and secure reparatory justice through community organising, reparations social movement-building and alternative institution-building. Social movement-building is the long-term, coordinated effort of individuals and organised groups of people to intentionally spark and sustain a (reparations) social movement from the ground-up. Part of which is by sustaining the March and other organizing processes that build collective power by organizing constituencies of Afrikan Heritage Communities and our Communities of Reparatory Justice Interest, to build a change agenda and engage in joint actions to access and implementour human, peoples and Mother Earth rights, entitlements and responsibilities, challenge and change ideologies of injustice and social inequity and seek to transform social power relations in our people’s favour. It entails: “the creation of movement infrastructures required for sustained organising and mobilisation, including social relationships, organisational networks and capacity, affective solidarity, as well as movement-related identities, frames, strategies, skills, and leadership.”
It is publicly known, and well known to Glenroy Watson, that the March has never been just about marching for a day. In the first year (2014) the Reparations March was also a vehicle for delivery of a reparations petition and in the second (2015) and third years (2016) of the annual March the ‘Stop the Maangamizi’ Petition got handed in to number 10 Downing Street, Office of the UK Prime Minister as part of the programme of activities of the March.
The Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee (AEDRMC,) which Glenroy Watson knows facilitates the organising and mobilizational processes towards the annual Reparations March, are well aware that Parliament is closed on the 1st August. The 1st of August was originally chosen in the first year of the March as the day of the March because it is the officially commemorated “Emancipation Day”, marking the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act in the British Empire, on 1st August 1833. Furthermore, the significance of 1st August 1833 is that it is the date that after all the years of resistance by chattelised Afrikans, torn away from the Motherland, Britain and its fellow European enslaver-nations of Afrikan people were compelled to recognise that they could no longer continue to enslave us without severe consequences. It therefore represents a symbolic day highlighting Afrikan people’s refusal to accept enslavement, in every manner, including its present-day manifestations.
In addition, it was determined that we as Afrikans and people of Afrikan heritage should March in protest at the fact that it was in the passing of the above piece of legislation; one of the most unjust passed in the recent history of Afrikan people’s resistance to the Maangamizi. Please note the full title of the act: ‘Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies; for promoting the Industry of the manumitted Slaves; and for compensating the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves commencing on 1st August 1834’.In this act, the British Parliament legislated that enslaved Afrikans in the Caribbean would be forced to pay more than 50% of the cost of their own so-called emancipation. In 1833 the British Parliament determined that the 800,000 enslaved Afrikans in the Caribbean were deemed to be chattel and to have a market value of £47 million. This same Parliament provided the sum of £20 million in grants to our people’s enslavers which was deemed to be fair compensation to them for the loss of their so-called human chattel. This same British Parliament determined that the remaining £27 million would be paid by the enslaved people to their enslavers, by means of a 4-6 year period of unjustly extorted free labour known as ‘Apprenticeship’. It was expected that all people over six years would work for 60 hours per week as apprentices to their so-called former enslavers, 45 hours of which were extorted by their enslavers.
This recording quite graciously includes the flyer with the aims of the Reparations March and any basic comprehension of the March aims makes it clear that the aims are not expected to be realised by simply marching for one day. The aims also include recognition and a profiling of Afrikan people’s varied demands, programmes and initiatives for securing reparatory justice in recognition of the diversity of strategy and tactics being deployed by various constituencies within the ISMAR. This is why the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee adopted 9 blocs (i.e. Ancestors, Global Afrikan Family, Community, Repatriation, Interfaith, Artists, Trade Unionists, Students, Non-Afrikan Allies) as part of the mobilising process towards the annual Reparations March and to carry on the process of contributing to and strengthening reparations social movement-building, community, mobilising and organising after and between Marches.
See here for more info about the organising blocs of the March:
Since the 2016 1st August March the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee has held two public evaluation meetings which have provided information on the strategy that the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee are working to. For your information, the Co-Chairperson of GACuk, Abu Akil was in attendance at the last public evaluation meeting on 20th November 2016, where a hard copy of the following progress report was handed-out to all present:
In addition, a copy of the following form on how people could get involved with and contribute to the various mobilisation and organising processes of the March, (which is available on the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March websitewww.reparationsmarch.org ), was also handed out at the same public evaluation meeting:
It would not be unreasonable to expect that Glenroy Watson, (GACuk Secretary) would have also been aware of this information at the time this video was filmed on 28th November 2016 as he does mention not being at the “last evaluation meeting” (at 20 mins 30 of the recording).
To clarify, the aims of the March are as follows:
To draw attention to Afrikan peoples’ global determination to not let the British State and other perpetrators get away with the crimes of the Maangamizi (Afrikan hellacaust and continuum of chattel, colonial and neo-colonial enslavement);
To hand in the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide petition calling for an All-Party Commission of Inquiry for Truth & Reparatory Justice in order to raise consciousness about the fact that all the attacks on us, in both individual and collective instances, amount to Genocide/Ecocide in Maangamizi continuity, necessitating reparations;
To increase awareness of the necessity to ‘Stop the Maangamizi’ and its current manifestations such as austerity, attempts to recolonise Afrika, mentacide and deaths in police, psychiatric and prison custody;
To demonstrate Afrikan peoples’ strength, capacity and determination to speak truth to, and challenge establishment power, with our growing grassroots power to effect and secure reparatory justice on our own terms;
To highlight Afrikan people’s grassroots demands and initiatives for effecting and securing reparations.
Please note for historical accuracy, one of the very public priorities of the March that the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee is working to is utilising theMarch to hand-in the’ Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide’ (SMWeCGE) Petition in partnership with the ‘Stop the Maangamizi’ Campaign. The SMWeCGE Petition is one of the campaigning tools of the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations (ISMAR) for mobilising Afrikan people’s power to exert upon the British Houses of Parliament and the European Parliament towards establishing All-Party Commissions of Inquiry for Truth & Reparatory Justice (APPCITARJs) and other actions necessary to advance the process of dialogue from the ground-upwards, with the British and other European states and society on the ‘how’ of securing Reparatory Justice. Accordingly, the annual Reparations March accompanies strategic lobbying to establish APPCITARJs at the levels of the UK and European Parliaments with various other endeavours taking place in between in different European countries. Such a goal is part of a demand being made on the British and European states to honour the need and right of the descendants of the Afrikan enslaved to speak in a public forum, provide testimony and evidence of how the legacies of enslavement are resulting in continued human and peoples’ rights violations, impaired quality of life and the ensuing destruction of the essential foundations of life for Afrikan people today.
By way of emphasis, please note the SMWeCGE Petition is delivered as part of the multiple programme of activities of the March which takes place all-year round. Such information was omitted from the commentary posted on the Reparations March, if indeed it was mentioned at all by anyone who contributed to the discussion in the above video.
The 2016 Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March saw the introduction of the POPSAR (People’s Open Parliamentary Session on Afrikan Reparations) which took place at Parliament Square, (opposite the British Houses of Parliament), developed in association with the SMWeCGE Campaign:
The POPSAR is a mass conscientisational forum for public debate and discourse on Afrikan Reparations as a matter of critical social importance. The purpose of the POPSAR is to engage participants and public audiences in action-learning on participatory democratic parliamentary debate on critical issues such as Afrikan Reparatory Justice. Each year a different reparations related motion will be debated and people are encouraged to engage in practical rehearsals in preparation for the annual POPSAR on 1st August which takes place as part of the programme for the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March. So yes, the British Houses of Parliament are closed, but our people hold our own ‘People’s Open Parliamentary Session’ on this date as part of our demonstration of “Afrikan peoples’ strength, capacity and determination to speak truth to, and challenge establishment power, with our growing grassroots power to effect and secure reparatory justice on our own terms!“
Please read the following to find out a progress report on the activities of the March in association with the SMWeCGE Campaign and other partnerships.
‘Our collective reparations work is about much more than marching for one day!!!’ (Published in November 2016)
Please also see the lobbying tool of the SMWeCGE Campaign which is supported by the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee and is handed out publicly as part of the outreach being led by the Grassroots Reparations Education & Outreach Teams (GREOTs) in London and Bristol which do public mobilisation and organising work all year-round.
Teams being action-learning exemplars of the dictum ‘Education is Preparation for Reparations’ by becoming advocates for the cause of ‘Stopping the Maangamizi’ as part of the process effecting and securing Reparatory Justice;
Teams promoting the role of the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March as part of the ‘street column’ of the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations (ISMAR).
Teams being the first point of contact in the education and mobilisation of Afrikan people and the general public in relation to the March – it’s aims and intended outcomes.
Teams providing the general public with information about the ‘Stop the Maangamizi Campaign (SMWeCGE), its petition, the SMWeCGE Postcard’ and the annual March, (in addition to its associated events), which takes place on 1st Mosiah (August), which is also known as Maangamizi Awareness Month. Part of the purpose of the GREOTs include: 1. Teams being action-learning exemplars of the dictum ‘Education is Preparation for Reparations’ by becoming advocates for the cause of ‘Stopping the Maangamizi’ as part of the process effecting and securing Reparatory Justice.
A thorough reading, digestion and overstanding of the information contained in the above documentation will demonstrate that the March is more than a one day event and most certainly does not stand alone!!!
To get a fuller perspective of the contributions being made by the March, its related activities and those of the SMWeCGE Campaign, to reparations social movement-building, it would be useful to compare and contrast these initiatives of the UK contingent of the ISMAR with other reparations related actions taking place within the UK and other countries with Afrikan Diaspora populations.
It is unfortunate that no one from the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee, or its campaigning partner, the SMWeCGE Campaign, were invited to provide information or clarification or even answer to the critiques of the March. Such a biased discussion, being publicly circulated pertaining to the Reparations March could reasonably lead to the conclusion that there is an attempt to deny the Black/ Afrikan ‘Radical Imagination’, rationale, collective thought-processes and praxis of those engaging in tangible reparatory justice activism as part of ISMAR-building in the UK from the ground-up. People who say they are for reparations should also practice Reparatory Justice Ethics (RJE). The conversation started by Professor Maulana Karenga on reparations ethics is something we should all pay serious attention to and help develop in order to know how best to deal with each and with the issues involved in ISMAR-building.
Please see Karenga’s article on the ‘Ethics of Reparations: Engaging the Holocaust of Enslavement’ here:
The PARCOE article: ‘On Matters of Integrity, Ethics and Representation Within the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations’ is also relevant –
We must all endeavour to be seen to be doing true justice to our sacred cause of Afrikan reparatory justice.
In Service & Struggle
Esther Stanford-Xosei
Official Spokesperson, Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee (AEDRMC)
Coordinator-General, ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide!’ Campaign (SMWeCGE)
16/12/16
“Progressive social movements do not simply produce statistics and narratives of oppression; rather, the best ones do what great poetry always does: transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society. We must remember that the conditions and the very existence of social movements enable participants to imagine something different, to realize that things need not always be this way. It is that imagination, that effort to see the future in the present, that I shall call “poetry” or “poetic knowledge.” I take my lead from Aimé Césaire’s great essay “Poetry and Knowledge,” first published in 1945. Opening with the simple but provocative proposition that “Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence ofscientific knowledge,” he then demonstrates why poetry is the only way to achieve the kind of knowledge we need to move beyond the world’s crises. “What presides over the poem,” he writes, is not the most lucid intelligence, the sharpest sensibility or the subtlest feelings, but experience as a whole.” This means everything, every history, every future, every dream, every life formfrom plant to animal, every creative impulse—plumbed from the depths of the unconscious. Poetry, therefore, is not what we simply recognize as the formal “poem,” but a revolt: a scream in the night, an emancipation of language and old ways of thinking…”
Robin D.G. Kelly, ‘Freedom’s Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination’, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), pp.9-10)
“What are today’s young activists dreaming about? We know what they are fighting against, but what are they fighting for?… the most powerful, visionary dreams of a new society don’t come from little think tanks of smart people or out of the atomized, individualistic world of consumer capitalism where raging against the status quo is simply the hip thing to do. Revolutionary dreams erupt out of political engagement.”
Robin D.G. Kelly, ‘Freedom’s Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination’, p8
“Unfortunately, too often our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether or not they “succeeded” in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions themselves. By such a measure, virtually every radical movement failed because the basic power relations they sought to change remain pretty much intact. And yet it is precisely these alternative visions and dreams that inspire new generations to continue to struggle for change.”
Robin D.G. Kelly, ‘Freedom’s Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination’, Preface
This is the covering letter delivered to the Office of the UK Prime Minister, Rt Hon Theresa May, MP on 1st August 2016 as part of implementation of the aims of the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March:
This is the initial response received from the Correspondence Office at No 10 Downing Street dated 2nd August 2016.
Please note that the text concealed on the top left hand corner of the letter of acknowledgement is the home address of SMWeCGE Coordinator-General, Esther Stanford-Xosei. When one submits an application to hand in a petition via the Downing Street Liaison Office, one is required to also include a return address for receipt of acknowledgement, as per the requirements of Form 2103- Petition to Downing Street.
The 2016 Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March saw the introduction of the POPSAR (People’s Open Parliamentary Session on Afrikan Reparations) in association with the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide (SMWeCGE) Campaign.
The POPSAR is a mass conscientisational forum for public debate and discourse on Afrikan Reparations as a matter of critical social importance.
The purpose of the POPSAR is to engage speakers and audiences in action-learning on participatory democratic parliamentary debate on critical issues such as Afrikan Reparatory Justice.
Each year a different but reparations related motion will be debated and people are encouraged to engage in practical rehearsals in preparation for the annual POPSAR on 1st August which takes place as part of the programme for the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March.
In between Marches, members of the public are invited to rehearse arguments for reparations and to also find ways of countering the opposing arguments. The theme for the 2017 POPSAR will be announced by October 2016.
See the following videos for some snippets of the speeches made at the POPSAR.
Please note such productions were produced independent of the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee (AEDRMC).
Reparations as a concept is one of the most misunderstood terms with popular understandings of reparations associating it with financial compensation. It is important to look to how reparationists have defined the term. In a paper presented at the Birmingham Preparatory Reparation Conference, on 11th December 1993 organised by the African Reparations Movement (ARM, UK), Dr Kimani Nehusi[1] asserts that understanding the term reparations “demands that this notion be applied to the specific historical experience and the related contemporary condition of Africans” asserting that “the meaning of this term transcends repayment for past and continuing wrong, to embrace self-rehabilitation through education, organisation and mobilisation.”Nehusi goes on to highlight the etymology of the term ‘reparation’ which originates from Latin pointing out that there are a number of meanings associated with the term.
One of these lines of development being the modern English term repair meaning: to restore to good condition, to set right, or make amends concluding that the Modern English term ‘reparation’ speaks to: “the act, or instance of making amends; compensation.” Similarly, Waterhouse (2006) quoting from the Oxford English Dictionary points out that the concept of making amends is only one of two of the original meanings of repair and reparations, and that the other set of meanings are “to restore or renew.”[2] Waterhouse therefore concludes that reparations are best understood as efforts to repair past damages however, he also asserts that the broader meaning of repair, “relates to the transformation of the thing damaged,” best to be understood as meaning “its restoration or renewal.”
This notion of reparations as repairs has also been advanced by continental based Afrikan public intellectuals such as Nigerian Professor Chinweizu, who in his famous paper presented at the Abuja Conference ‘Reparations and New Global Order: A Comparative Overview’ defined reparations in this way:
“Let me begin by noting that reparation is not just about money: it is not even mostly about money; in fact, money is not even one percent of what reparation is about. Reparation is mostly about making repairs. self-made repairs, on ourselves: mental repairs, psychological repairs, cultural repairs, organisational repairs, social repairs, institutional repairs, technological repairs, economic repairs, political repairs, educational repairs, repairs of every type that we need in order to recreate and sustainable black societies….More important than any monies to be received; more fundamental than any lands to be recovered, is the opportunity the reparations campaign offers us for the rehabilitation of Black people, by Black people, for Black people; opportunities for the rehabilitation of our minds, our material condition, our collective reputation, our cultures, our memories, our self-respect, our religious, our political traditions and our family institutions; but first and foremost for the rehabilitation of our minds”.[3]
It can thus be concluded then popular conceptions of reparations within the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations (ISMAR) should be viewed as an obligation to make the repairs necessary to correct current harms caused as a result of past wrongs. Under this view, reparations can be viewed as a process that restores hope and dignity and rebuilds communities rather than being reduced to a pay check. This notion of ‘reparations as repairs’ has also been advocated by reparations legal and political theorists in the USA. For example, Yamamoto et. al (2007) advocate the ‘reparations as repair’ model to help elevate the role of reparations potential to “create social healing and generate practical theory” as well as ways of ”doing justice” that link scholars and front-line reparations advocates with legal policymakers and the [American] public.[4]
The right to reparation has also been recognised as a fundamental right and well established principle in international law which according to the human rights organisation REDRESS that helps torture survivors obtain justice and reparations “has existed for centuries” and refers to the obligation of a wrongdoing party to redress the damage caused to the injured party. [5] Typically in the 19th and 20th centuries, reparations came to be associated with punitive sanctions against aggressor states following their defeat in war. However, among the significant transformations of reparations politics in more recent times has been a shift from reparations involving states, to cases involving both states and civil society actors, who are usually racial or ethnic groups united by their common experience of a historical injustice.
Under international law, “reparation must, as far as possible, wipe out all the consequences of the illegal act and re-establish the situation which would, in all probability, have existed if that act had not been committed.”[6]In 2005, the UN General Assembly adopted the ‘Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Violations of International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law‘.[7] These principles go some way towards codifying the norms relating to the right to reparation and also dispel one of the most common misconceptions, i.e. that reparation is synonymous with compensation. Other forms of reparation contained in these norms include: restitution, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition.Ultimately, reparations are meant to redress past wrongs, to stop and repair the harms inflicted, and to rehabilitate those who continue to suffer the consequences of these harms, what are referred to as the individual and collective victims in international law. With this in mind, it is always imperative to consider whether the means of reparation under consideration will effectively lead to the ends envisaged, including analysis of any consequences, (both positive and adverse), of such measures of reparations being proposed or advocated for.
Repatriation is not Separate from Reparations, but Rather an Aspect of Restitution: a Specific Form of Reparations
It is common in some circles to hear the term reparations and repatriation used as though they represent two different yet complimentary aspects of reparatory justice, when in in fact, repatriation is an aspect of reparations and would appropriately be a form of restitution arising from the Afrikan Diaspora’s collective exclusion from citizenship due to the Maangamizi which resulted in the deracination and loss of peoplehood, citizenship and right to belong to Afrika for people of Afrikan origin. After all, Afrikan people were kidnapped from Afrika and trafficked against our will to many parts of the Afrikan Diaspora. It follows that what is typically considered to be repatriation has to be seen as a legitimate way of redressing and repairing these original crimes. The right of return is a principle which is drawn from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights(UDHR) and theInternational Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), intended to enable people to return to, and re-enter, their country of origin. The UDHR article 13 states that “[e]veryone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” (emphasis added).
However, repatriation meaning a return to one’s patria or fatherland or the process of returning a person to their place of origin or citizenship is in itself not sufficient. Firstly, Afrikan people’s concept of Afrika being the Motherland is not the same as the Roman concept of patria. Afrika is recognised as being a Motherland, not a Fatherland because it is the birthplace of humanity, the cradle of human civilisation and culture. For a people in the process of reestablishing their National Self-Determination, repairing and restoring themselves, repatriation cannot be reduced to just a return to a particular country of origin or physical return. It must entail the re-establishment and creation of bonds between displaced Afrikans and Afrikans in the Motherland; a return to community and people, and the restoration of community and nationhood. It must also be remembered that this right to return is also a right of displaced and dispossessed Afrikan people on the Continent of Afrika.
In reclaiming the ‘Power to Define’, it must also be recognised that there can be ‘No True Reparations without Rematriation’. The Indigenous concept of Rematriation refers to restoring a living material culture to its rightful place on Mother Earth; restoring a people to a spiritual way of life, in sacred relationship with their ancestral lands; and reclaiming ancestral remains, spirituality, culture, knowledge and resources. In effect, rematriation requires, as anti-colonial leader Amilcar Cabral taught, a return to the source of a people’s own being; reaffirming Afrikan people’s right to take our own place in history; rejection of colonial and neocolonial structures, ideologies and worldviews of European imperialism and elitist Arab hegemonic national chauvinism and other foreign oligarchies in the process of building politically a mass based Afrikan cultural renaissance. Rematriation is vital because of the need for cognitive justice in framing indigenous Afrikan conceptualisations of reparations.
Classical and Indigenous Afrikan Approaches to Reparations
Dr Maulana Karenga, Professor of Africana Studies in his paper: ‘The Ethics of Reparations: Engaging the Holocaust of Enslavement’ asserts that reparations, like all our struggles, begins with the need for a clear conception of what we want, how we define the issue and explain it to the world and what is to be done to achieve it. [8]He puts forward the argument that the ethical dimension is the first and most fundamental dimension of the reparations issue. He teaches that in the Husia, the sacred text of ancient Egypt, there is an Afrikan concept of restoration, i.e., healing and repairing the world that is appropriate in discussing our struggle to advance the cause of reparations. This concept is serudj which is part of a phrase serudj-ta, which Karenga states means to repair and heal the world making it more beautiful and beneficial than it was before.
Accordingly, he asserts that this is an ongoing moral obligation in the Kawaida (Maatian) ethical tradition and is expressed in the following terms:
(1) to raise up that which is in ruins; (2) to repair that which is damaged; (3) to rejoin that which is severed; (4) to replenish that which is depleted; (5) to strengthen that which is weakened; (6) to set right that which is wrong; and (7) to make flourish that which is insecure and undeveloped.
Equally as relevant is the work of Mogobe B. Ramose, Professor of Philosophy who teaches on Afrikan conceptions of justice and race. In his paper ‘An African Perspective on Justice and Race‘, he argues that since it is no longer tenable to argue that the idea and practice of law was alien to the indigenous Afrikan peoples prior to colonisation, an essential aspect of repairing the damage of enslavement and colonisation is to reclaim Afrikan conceptions and frameworks of justice. [9]Quoting Kéba M’Baye, Ramose reminds us of the importance of working according to Afrikan conceptions of justice and seeking to gain recognition for Afrikan people’s rights to do so when he states: “A debt or a feud is never extinguished till the equilibrium has been restored, even if several generations elapse … to the African there is nothing so incomprehensible or unjust in our system of law as the Statute of Limitations, and they always resent a refusal on our part to arbitrate in a suit on the grounds that it is too old”.
Thus in the ubuntu understanding of law, an injustice that endures in the historic memory of the harmed is never erased merely because of the passage of time. The work of former N’COBRA Legal Consultant and Ajunct Professor of Law, Adjoa Aiyetoro is relevant here. In her article ‘Formulating Reparations Litigation through the Eyes of the Movement’ she advocates that: “In order for people who have been shut out of the system to obtain meaningful remedies for violations of their human rights, redefinition of some ordinary and some uncommon terms must be accepted by the legal system”.[10]
Reparations for What?
Reparations is not just a legal case or a political claim but also a social movement. In ‘An Approach to Reparations‘ Human Rights Watch maintain that “when addressing relatively old wrongs, claims of reparations should not be based on the past abuses of enslavement and colonisation solely, but on its contemporary effects.”[11] They point out that people today, i.e. the descendants of the enslaved who can reasonably claim that today they personally suffer the effects of past human rights violations through continuing economic or social deprivation are deserving of reparations.
There is great potential in utilising the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crime of Genocideas an advocacy tool. In his book ‘Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities‘, Joao H. Vargas, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology establishes that the relentless and intergenerational oppression and marginalisation of large numbers of Black people in modern societies constitutes genocide, in that groups among us are subjected to conditions of life that are sufficiently destructive to amount to instances of genocide. In this regard, it is important to also understand indirect genocide (which involves creating life conditions which destroy a group and facilitate intra-community violence).
According to Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term genocide, genocide has two phases: one, the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. [12] In the 1948 Genocide Convention, genocide is therefore defined as follows:
“Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Vargas poses the following challenge:
“We either begin to address, redress, and do away with what make possible the multiple facets of anti Black genocide, or we succumb to the dehumanising values that produce and become reproduced by the systematic and persistent disregard for the lives of Afro-descended individuals and their communities.”[13]
It is important to therefore recognise however, that there are two dimensions to reparations, the external and the internal. The external is what we say others owe us but the internal self repairs are what we must engage in by way of restoring our agency, and asserting our right to self-determination and dignity as people of Afrikan heritage. Many Afrikans in Afrika and other parts of the Afrikan Diaspora are asserting the highest form of reparations as being a restoration of our sovereignty and the need to forge Pan-Afrikan Sovereignty which never ceded and has never been restored since Afrika was colonised. Independence and sovereignty are not the same things! There are two main ideological tendencies, that which has been associated with various forms of Afrikan/ Black nationalisms and linked to the restitution of land, language, culture, community, nation and Pan-Afrikan citizenship. The other dominant tendency has been the integrationist approach which sees reparations as being about Afrikans gaining more fulfilling experiences of citizenship within the West and more successful integration of Afrikans within Euro-American nations.
The question is can reparations truly occur if we are simply seeking to emulate our former colonisers, do we not owe it to ourselves to (as Frantz Fanon admonished us many years ago):
“Now, we who are campaigning for reparations cannot hope to change the world without changing ourselves. We cannot hope to change the world without changing our ways of seeing the world, our ways of thinking about the world, our ways of organising our world, our ways of working and dreaming in our world. All these, and more, must change for the better. The type of Black Man and Black woman that was made by the holocaust – that was made to feel inferior by slavery and then was steeped in colonial attitudes and values – that type of Black will not be able to bring the post-reparation global order into being without changing profoundly in the process that has begun; that type of Black will not be even appropriate for the post-reparation global order unless thoroughly and suitably reconstructed. So, reparation, like charity, must begin with ourselves…”.[15]
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[1] K. Nehusi (1993) ‘The Meaning of Reparation’ unpublished paper presented at the First UK Preparatory Conference on Reparations, (1993)
[2] C. Waterhouse, ‘The Full Price of Freedom: African Americans Shared Responsibility to Repair the Harms of Slavery and Segregation’, Graduate School of Emory University PhD thesis, (2006), p3.
[3]Presented at the ‘First Conference on Reparations for Slavery, Colonialism and Neo-colonialism’ which took place in Nigeria in 1993.
[4] E.K Yamamoto, E.K,, S. Hye Yun Kim, S. and A.M Holden, A.M ‘American Reparations Theory and Practice at the Crossroads,’ California Western Law Review, Vol.44, No.1. (2007).
[5] REDRESS, ‘What is Reparation’ http://www.redress.org/what-is-reparation/what-is-reparation
[6] See Permanent Court of Arbitration, Chorzow Factory Case (Ger. V. Pol.), (1928) P.C.I.J., Sr. A, No.17, at 47 (September 13); International Court of Justice: Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. U.S.).
[7] ‘Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparations for Victims of Gross Violations of international Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Law’, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 60/147, 21 March 2006.
[8] Presented at The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) Convention, Baton Rouge, LA, 2001 June 22-23
[9] http://them.polylog.org/3/frm-en.htm
[10] http://law.nyu.edu/ecm_dlv2/groups/public/@nyu_law_website__journals__annual_survey_of_american_law/documents/documents/ecm_pro_065061.pdf
[11] http://www.hrw.org/legacy/campaigns/race/reparations.htm
[12] Raphael Lemkin, ‘Axis Rule in Occupied Europe’ (1944)
[13] J.H. Vargas Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities (New York, Toronto, Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008), p.x
[14] Frantz Fanon,’The Wretched of the Earth’, Chapter 6. Conclusion (1961)
[15] http://www.ncobra.org/resources/pdf/Chinweizu-ReparationsandANewGlobalOrder1.pdf
“The use of law as one of the most important instruments of our Afrikan struggle for reparations, indeed the need to locate our claim to restitution for the damages caused by gross violations of Afrikan sovereignty must raise immediately for us the essential questions of whose Framework, whose Law and whose Justice“
Kofi Mawuli Klu ‘Charting an Afrikan self-Determined Path of Legal Struggle for Reparations’, A draft paper for presentation to the 11th December 1993 Birmingham Working Conference of the Africa Reparations Movement, UK, 1993
In the above paper, presented at the African Reparations Movement conference launch in the early 1990’s as a contribution to reparations-movement-building and movement-lawyering, jurisconsult Kofi Mawuli Klu advocates the need for Afrikan people to chart our own self-determined path of legal struggle to enforce and secure reparations. However, this requires decolonisation and repair of the law, legal system and processes. Ahead of his time, Klu asserted the self-rehabilitation and healing in a Fanonian sense that comes about through Afrikans exercising agency in the shaping, making and implementation of international law. This model has subsequently been referred to as international law from below by various legal scholars. Klu affirms seven principles which should be followed in charting an Afrikan self-determined path of legal struggle for reparations. These include:
Demystification of the law.
Developing legal creativity and creativity in applying what has been referred to as the ‘legal imagination‘.
Afrikan popular democratic involvement in the law-making process.
Recognition of the criminal injustice of enslavement, colonisation and neo-colonisation from the perspective of the legal consciousness of Afrikan people.*
Judging the crimes and wrongs of enslavement in accordance with Afrikan law.
Promoting mass adjudication of the Afrikan and other indigenous peoples cases for reparations through grassroots benches of an International Peoples Tribunal on Crimes Against Humanity.
Developing international legal strategies on the formulation and prosecution of the Afrikan case for reparations.
*Legal Consciousness is the sum of views and ideas expressing the attitude of a group or people toward law, legality, and justice and their concept of what is lawful and unlawful. Legal Consciousness therefore traces the ways in which law is experienced and interpreted by specific individuals and groups as they engage, avoid, or resist the law and legal meanings. Legal consciousness also entails the process by which a group or people concretize their political goals and demands and the means by which they try to give them universal force in the form of laws and policy. It follows that legal consciousness is a form of social consciousness and closely related to political consciousness.
Building on this unrivaled foresight, the ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide‘ Petition concludes by stating that it “will also galvanise grassroots work towards establishing glocal sittings of the Ubuntukgotla -Peoples International Tribunal for Global Justice (Ubuntukgotla-PITGJ) as part of a series of actions which will put a full stop, by way of holistic and transformative reparations, to all acts of Genocide/Ecocide against Afrikan people.”
What is an International Peoples’ Tribunal?
An international peoples tribunal is a process initiated by communities and/or civil society groupings which seeks to establish whether a state, international organisation, corporation, or less frequently specified individuals have committed breaches of international law or of another body of law or norms, (such as national law, Afrikan law, indigenous law of peoples’ law); which involves the presentation of evidence and arguments to a body of people deemed competent to adjudicate on relevant issues in the best interests of the communities themselves, nations or humanity as whole. In light of documentary and other forms of evidence presented to tribunal members in formal proceedings, it presents a reasoned set of findings based on an evaluation of such evidence and they can also pass judgements. There is however considerable variation in in the emphasis and practice of such tribunals which are also described in various terms such as a people’s tribunal, people’s hearing, or tribunal of conscience.
Seizing back Afrikan people’s power to define, make, shape and advocate for legal strategies and processes in our own best interests and in accordance with Afrikan forms of law and jurisprudence, the term Ubuntukgotla has been chosen to give culturally competent expression to the increasingly popular notion of an international people’s tribunal.
The Ubuntukgotla–PITGJ is a court of peoples humanity interconnectedness. The term is comprised of the Afrikan terms ubuntu and kgotla. A Kgotla is a Tswana traditional institution of participatory democracy, i.e. peoples assembly or court in Botswana which has a number of functions including:
(1) enabling public debate and consultation on policy and legislation;
(2) being a judicial institution in which cases are heard providing access to justice;
(3) soliciting views from the community on government actions and decisions or those of any other interest group; and
(4) facilitating the means to come to an agreement or key issues pertaining to the health and well-being of the community.
The term ubuntu which translates as: “I am because of who we are” is a concept from the Southern Afrikan region which means literally “human-ness”, and is often understood to mean”humanity towards others”. It is also considered, in a more philosophical sense, to mean “the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity. In Southern Afrika, ubuntu has come to be used as a term for a kind of humanist philosophy, ethic or ideology, also known as Ubuntuism or Hunhuism propagated in the re-Afrikanisation process of these countries during the 1980s and 1990s.
The Ubuntukgotla–PITGJ is being developed as a site of an activist ‘doing of law’ which also includes knowledge-production and praxis on making, enforcing and implementing just law. Although like other peoples tribunals, it may be perceived as a deviant or even illegitimate ‘institution’ within the institutional landscape of dominant forms of law.
Civil society (peoples’) tribunals initiated by citizens of conscience and oppressed groups have emerged to fill the normative vacuum created by the gap between the ideals, of justice and access to justice. In this regard, people’s tribunals are seen as more effectively responding to the failures, exclusions and mendacity of existing domestic and international state and state sponsored institutions apparatuses to provide effective redress for human, peoples and Mother Earth right violations and atrocities committed, despite having formal power and jurisdiction to do so. They do so by: asserting the rights of peoples (and people) to articulate law that is not dependent on endorsements by states for its legitimacy; as well as utilising, interpreting and developing international and other forms of law.
People’s tribunals can critique the content of existing international law where such law perpetuates oppressive power relations. Oftentimes, peoples’ tribunals have resulted in a greater democratisation of international law-making from belowand provided additional accountability mechanisms for the exercise of and abuses/misuse of power by states and international organisations. They have been used by many different peoples and special interest groups.
For example, in 1993 the indigenous people of Hawaii developed the Ka Ho‘okolokolonui Kānaka Maoli-Peoples’ International Tribunal Hawai‘i in which the United States and the state of Hawai‘i were put on trial for crimes against the original people of Hawai‘i, the Kānaka Maoli. A video has been made of this tribunal which we recommend you view. It can be found here.
The Ka Ho‘okolokolonui Kānaka Maoli Tribunal features a panel of international judges that was convened to hear the charges, which included genocide, ethnocide, the taking of their sovereign government and the destruction of their environment. The Tribunal judges and prosecutor/advocates came from Japan, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Jordan, Korea, Afrika, the U.S., Puerto Rico and the Cree, Cherokee, Shawnee and Creek nations. It traveled to five islands to see and hear firsthand the words and personal experiences of witnesses, many of whom faced arrest and eviction from native lands. At the end of ten days, the Tribunal called upon the United States and the world to recognise the fact that Hawaian sovereignty has never been extinguished. It also called for the restoration and return of all lands to which Kānaka Maoli have a claim.
Peoples’ tribunals are formed to take up a variety of cases that may fall under the following, sometimes overlapping, categories:
Violations by the state of the rights of citizens or residents of that state, including violations of the rights of peoples within that state;
Claims of the denial of the right to self-determination;
The treatment by regions or groups of states of particular groups of people;
Historical injustices such as conquest, enslavement, colonisation and other thematic issues;
The role of international organisations, especially international financial institutions, in the regulation of the international and national economic and social systems;
The interaction between state law and the violations of the rights of persons by ‘private’ individuals (including corporations) and the responsibility of business, especially transnational corporations, in the violations of human rights.
In most cases, peoples’ tribunals arraign individual states, international organisations, corporations or combination of these. In some cases peoples’ tribunals ‘put on trial’ named individuals.
As a people’s tribunal, the Ubuntukgotla-PITGJ derives its power from the voices of Afrikan heritage community victims and survivors, and also those of national and international civil societies with relevant knowledge and expertise to establishing and providing evidence on the concrete manifestations of the Maangamizi including the genocide of Afrikan heritage communities. The Ubuntukgotla-PITGJ will have the format of a formal human rights court,however, it is not a criminal court in the sense that individual persons are indicted. In the first instance, the prosecutors will indict the state and institutions of the UK, based on the proofs presented of responsibility for the widespread and systematic crimes against humanity committed in the current phase of the Maangamizi. It is expected that, as support for and the influence of the U-PITGJ grows, it will be also be able to build the capacity to address other instances of genocidal crimes that have been perpetrated on other peoples who have experienced European settler colonialism, conquest and invasion. This is why it is important to recognise the interconnections between the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations (ISMAR) and the Peoples Reparations International Movement (PRIM).
The proof presented will consist of documents, audiovisual materials, statements of witnesses and other recognised legal means. The power of the Ubuntukgotla-PITGJ will be to examine the evidence, develop an accurate historical and scientific record and apply principles of international law to the facts as found. It is expected that the chosen judges will produce a verdict based on the material presented and call upon the Government of the UK to realise that so far they have failed to take legal and moral responsibility for the victims. This verdict can also be used as a basis for an United Nations resolution and other actions on these crimes.
How can the Ubuntukgotla-PITGJ contribute to Afrikan people’s empowerment and healing?
By taking as its primary source the voices, experiences, aspirations, demands and visions for reparatory social change of the peoples’ and communities of the violated themselves, from which all other specialist support groups – lawyers, the media, politicians, institutionalised academics, economists, and others – may build upon by utilising their specialist languages for resistance in diverse sites of public judgement.
Through establishing informal but public and ‘judicial’ processes to deal with atrocities committed by States resulting in the moral power and authority of informal quasi judicial processes.
Through giving effect to Afrikan peoples’ voices of judgement, developing and disseminating the often silenced articulations of Afrikan people’s legality as part of a legal strategy of resistance whose contribution is to advance, through the specific language of law, the broader struggles against the violence of the Maangamizi today.
Volunteer researchers required to contribute to a people’s history-making process of securing reparatory justice!
If you are a law or politics student or have other relevant skills and experience and you are interested in using your knowledge and skills to support Afrikan people’s struggle for holistic redress and secure Afrikan Reparatory Justice, you can become a volunteer researcher. We are looking for volunteer researchers who would like to join the SMWeCGEC research team in preparations for establishing the APPCITARJ and the Ubuntukgotla-PITGJ.
If you are a social justice advocate, legal practitioner or cause lawyer and would like to offer pro-bono advice or support to this community-led initiative; are willing to build equitable relationships with people and organisations challenging historical and contemporary injustice; and are prepared to respect the approach of social justice/community lawyering,*please also get in touch as above.
*Community lawyering has many variants: collaborative lawyering, community, lay lawyering, cause lawyering, social justice lawyering, political lawyering, critical lawyering, rebellious lawyering, movement-lawyering etc. The common thread among them is that the clients, not the lawyers, play a central role in resolving the issues that have an impact on their opportunities to succeed. It is: lawyering that is community-located, community-collaborative, community-directed and based on the collaboration of lawyers, clients and communities in which they live; and transforming law and lawyering to address the inequalities experienced by subordinated and underserved groups. The legal system in the UK and other Westernised countries is very individualistic. It tends to atomise and depoliticise disputes, which work against a community organising model. Furthermore, the facilitation of individual rights has not benefited the long-term needs of communities, especially impoverished communities, especially where such impoverishment is as a result of intergenerational injustice. The Sargent Shriver National Centre on Poverty Law (USA) defines “community lawyering” as a “process through which advocates contribute their legal knowledge and skills to support initiatives that are identified by the community and enhance the community’s power.”
Similar to the different schools of thought in community organising, community lawyering has many different strains. However, what sets lawyers who adopt community lawyering apart from each other boils down to their answers to the following three questions: Who do you work with? What do you do for them? And how do you work together? Similar to community organising, the answers to these questions vary depending on the political orientation of the lawyer and the theory of social change they ascribe to. By combining legal recourse and community organising, it is possible to utilise “community lawyering” as a social change strategy.” This approach engages lawyers who are prepared to de-emphasise litigation as the primary tool for advancing social justice. Instead, community lawyering encourages such lawyers, in collaboration with communities, their groups, activists and organisers, to critically and creatively examine non-traditional forms of advocacy such as facilitative leadership, institution-building, community organising, collective action and other grassroots actions including strategic litigation, media events, community education workshops and public demonstrations. This is done as a way of addressing the legal and non-legal problems of their clients.
Community lawyering can also be described as a more participatory process that fosters collaboration between lawyers and their community (group) clients, rather than fostering—if not perpetuating—the dependency that most clients have on their lawyers to solve their legal problems in a conventional lawyer-client relationship. The role of a “community lawyer” entails working in partnership with one’s community clients and utilises multiple forms of advocacy, to address their individual as well as systemic problems. Community lawyering practitioners recognise that their clients are partners—not just in name—but in leadership, control and decision-making. Through collaboration, lawyers can support Afrikan Heritage Community groups in building their own resources and community capacities to advance their own interests in effecting and securing reparatory justice in a self-determined and self-directed manner.
Another critical component of community lawyering is creating race-conscious cultural competence—a set of beliefs, values, and skills built into a structure that enables one to negotiate cross-cultural situations in a manner that does not force one to assimilate to the other. The goal of race-conscious community lawyering is to support lasting structural and systemic changes that will bring about holistic reparatory justice for racialised groups.
Movement-lawyering is a specific form of community lawyering but the lawyers work in collaboration with grassroots movements. This lawyering recognises that community members and organisers have expertise that should be valued. In fact, movement lawyers should also be engaged in a process of political study and growth collectively with movement-organisers that are aligned with particular community struggles. Here are some tips for lawyers that are aligned with movements and are particularly relevant to how lawyers can best support communities, their activists and organisers who are engaged in reparatory justice struggles as part of the ISMAR.
This article was updated on 07/08/17, 27/06/18 and 17/10/20 from when it was originally published in 2015
“The damage sustained by the Afrikan peoples is not a thing of the past, but is painfully manifested in the damaged lives of contemporary Afrikans from Harlem to Harare’ in the damaged economies of the Black World from Guinea to Guyana from Somalia to Suriname.”
Abuja Proclamation of the First Conference on Reparations for Enslavement, Colonisation & Neocolonisation, 1993
No exact template or model exists for the All-Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth & Reparatory Justice (APPCITARJ) in that it will have to be shaped in a way that meets the needs and aspirations of Afrikan Heritage Communities that have been enslaved, colonised or otherwise oppressed by the British Empire and/or the current British State. However, our vision is that the APPCITARJ will consist of British and European Parliamentary Commissions established with representation from the political parties in these parliaments and thy will hear our submissions as Afrikan Heritage Communities who have been impacted by the Maangamizi (Afrikan hellacaust of chattel, colonial and neocolonial enslavement). This is an example of the revolutionary use of reform in that we are tactically seeking to use establishment institutions and some of their processes to achieve some of our revolutionary objectives for reparatory justice social change and transformation.
For us in the ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide!’ Campaign (SMWeCGEC), this is not about taking our individual and collective cases to parliamentarians for those parliamentarians, on their own, to decide on the merits of our individual/family/people’s case and to make final judgements about what the outcomes should be. In our view, this adjudication function can best be achieved by the establishment of the Ubuntukgotla-Peoples International Tribunal for Global Justice(U-PITGJ) in which representatives of our people and other peoples who have experienced European colonialism, enslavement and genocide become the judges using law from our various people’s legal traditions. Rather, the establishment of the APPCITARJs, at the levels of the Westminster Houses of Parliament and the European Parliament, are a tactic to facilitate widespread evidence gathering which reveal facts about the magnitude of the Maangamizi and for the public dissemination of that evidence as part of the battle to win hearts of minds and influence public opinion to support our people’s cause.
It is therefore important for the proposed APPCITARJ to seek an appropriately weighted balance between an individualized approach that places victims and perpetrators at the centre of the process and recognising as well as redressing the impact of the Maangamizi on whole collectivities. However, this requires a focus on tackling the systemic aspects of the Maangamizi and examining the role of institutions, structures of legitimisation and governance in its continuance. In this regard, we are keen to ensure that the systemic aspects of the Maangamizi are no longer hidden from scrutiny or public accountability.
Dissemination of such evidence in the arena of the British public will compel the majority of the British public to agree with us that there is an overwhelming case for their criminal ruling classes to answer. In effect, we want our people to have a ‘hearing’ and to speak to the public, (court of public opinion) through the British Parliament. This entails exposing the evidence to the glare of the public and utilising various forms of media who will be reporting on the proceedings to influence public support for our cause of Afrikan Reparatory Justice. According to the 2005 UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to A Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law, an essential aspect of reparations include, among other measures: investigation of the facts, official acknowledgement and apology, receipt of answers; an opportunity for victims to speak in a public forum about their experiences and to have active involvement in the reparative process. We are therefore seeking to ensure that our people’s testimonies will bring to light all the gory details that the British public has not been allowed to hear; has been denied true education about; and that we too have not been allowed to narrate on platforms with official legitimisation.
This parliamentary and extra-parliamentary process will create the opportunity for a diverse collectivity of Afrikan voices, from all over the world, to speak to the Maangamizi crimes of the British Empire, the British State and its ruling classes, by providing public testimony about our family and people’s case, as we see it. Once these testimonies of ordinary people, as well as the various research and other forms of documentation of the Maangamizi that exists, are being heard over and over again, clarity will dawn on the British public.
Ultimately, we are seeking to ensure that our combined evidence, voiced, recorded and reported from the UK and European Parliaments, paints the horrific truth of the culprits crimes. This is an opportunity we have never been given. Once the British public have heard the whole truth, it will be easier for us to win them over to our side; to publicise who the main culprits are ; and elucidate the harm that their deception over the years has done not only to Afrikan Heritage Communities, but also to the British people as a whole. This spark-rippling process will in itself compel the majority of those conscientious members of the British people to join us all in movement-building to stop the harm and repair the damage being done to themselves, and to others, in their name. So what will be a just retribution in terms of holding such perpetrators to account? One form of retribution is to strip the criminals of their ill-gotten wealth and status (“Expropriate the Expropriators!) and reclaim our wealth for Reparatory Justice Redistribution.
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A large part of our people’s case for compensation is that this is unjustly obtained intergenerational wealth includes the wealth that which we as Afrikan Heritage Communities, are historically owed and have been denied, in addition to what is being stolen from and owed to our contemporary generations. We therefore advocate that we must have out of that redistributed wealth, all that we need to repair our own selves i.e. Afrikan Community Self-Repairs*. Although, we concede that the majority of British people deserve some of that wealth from their ruling classes in terms of wealth that has also been stolen from them over the years. Practically, this is how we see that external compensation in the form of the just redistribution of our people’s wealth will be secured.
*Afrikan Community Self-Repairs are the self-determined efforts that need to be made in building our own power, in such a way, that Afrikan heritage communities are able to identify and enhance ongoing work towards stopping the contemporary manifestations of the Maangamizi, which are putting the individuals, families and other social groups that make up our communities into a state of disrepair; as well as reasoning and consciously carrying out the alternative solutions for glocally rebuilding our power base as communities, in such a way that that they are eventually transformed, in accordance with the principles and programmatic demands of Pan-Afrikan Reparations for Global Justice.
“The inheritance of rich people’s wealth by their children should stop. The expropriators should have their wealth expropriated and redistributed“
Arundhati Roy
So for us, the strategic purpose of the APPCITARJ is to divorce the masses of the British public from aligning with their ruling classes in order that they can once again be on the right side of history (as were their abolitionists); in collaborating with us to strip their ruling classes of their ill-gotten wealth and other gains and collaborate with us to secure its redistribution.
One of the greatest challenges for transformative reparatory justice change processes and mechanisms is addressing not only the histories of acts of Maangamizi dispossession and violence, but also those of structural violence, where power relations are manifest through the systematic and collective violation/s of economic, social and cultural rights. In many contexts, racialised and otherwise marginalised populations, particularly those of Afrikan heritage, are often systematically excluded from community development initiatives as well as often being denied full participation and substantive Afrikan Heritage Community representation in social, economic and political life. So the way other commissions of inquiry or truth commissions have interacted with ‘victims’ of these harm causing violations; such as receiving testimony, writing histories of victimization in such a way that assists such groups to recover their agency, and recommending reparative approaches – can be replicated with Afrikan Heritage Communities as a collective victim.
The 2014 Instance de la Vérité et Dignité (IVD, Commission for Truth and Dignity) in Tunisia pointed the way, by seeking to address the broad range of demands that the Tunisian Revolution made, including not just for truth, but also threats to dignity including issues such as the lack of graduate jobs and the often extreme geographical inequalities that came to the fore in Tunisia under the Ben Ali regime. To address the issue of the collective and structural violence of social exclusion; and for the first time in the history of truth commissions; the IVD defined and implemented the concept of a collective victim as including: “any person who suffered harm following a violation…, be they individuals, or groups of individuals” (Organic law on Transitional Justice).
To maximize the impact of collective reparations for Afrikan Heritage Communities requires that such reparations not only address harms, but also the structures and institutions underpinning such harms, and ensure that the such reparations transform the circumstances of unjustly impoverished and marginalised victims. Such transformation occuring in such a way as to address contemporary injustice in its multiple dimensions, (i.e. historical, ethnic, social, political, cultural, religious, sexual, epistemic and ecological). Such injustice being underpinned by ‘cognitive injustice’ which is the failure to recognise the plurality of different knowledges by which Afrikan Heritage Communities give meaning to their existence. It is only by pursuing global cognitive justice that holistic and transformative reparatory justice can become a reality. Hence why in our approach to developing the APPCITARJ, we are cognizant of the need to also adopt approaches, processes, mechanisms and initiatives that incorporate the legal cosmovisions (Indigenous worldviews), ideas and claims of Afrikan people. This in itself, requires a more complete set of tools for building alternatives to the present system of legalized injustice.
“Always remember that the people do not fight for ideas, for the things that exist only in the heads of individuals. The people fight and accept the necessary sacrifices. But they do it in order to gain material advantages, to live in peace and to improve their lives, to experience progress, and to be able to guarantee a future for their children. National liberation, the struggle against colonialism, working for peace and progress, independence – all of these will be empty words without significance for the people unless they are translated into real improvements in the conditions of life.”
Amilcar Cabral, Guinea-Bissau: A Study of Political Mobilisation, 1974, p.91
Among the challenges facing reparations for Maangamizi resistors and survivors, is to differentiate between reparations and the requirement that a state deliver basic public services. Reparatory justice measures will not be secured from others outside of a comprehensive and holistic Afrikan Heritage Community Pempamsie (sewing together) Community Self-Repairs Plan and related policies, which must accompany and shape it. This is why we in the SMWeCGEC, in partnership with the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee (AEDRMC), its allied organisations and other formations, are mobilizing and supporting others to self-organise year-round building on the 2017-2018 Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March theme of ‘Promoting the reparatory justice change that we are organising to bring about’ with the 2018-2019 theme: ‘Nothing About Us Without Us: Actualizing the Reparatory Justice Change We Envisage‘!
The beginnings of such a Pempamsie Plan were documented in the 2003 Black Quest for Justice Campaign (BQJC) legal & extra-legal Strategy for Pan-Afrikan Reparations for Gobal Justice; and were included in its legal action supported by the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe (PARCOE), the Black United Front (BUF), the then newly formed Global Afrikan Congress (GAC) and the International Front for Afrikan Reparations (IFAR).
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Characteristics of Commissions of Inquiry with Truth Commission Functions:
“In recent decades, the truth commission has become a mechanism used by states to address historical injustices. However, truth commissions are rarely used in established democracies, where the commission of inquiry model is favoured. I argue that established democracies may be more amenable to addressing historical injustices that continue to divide their populations if they see the truth commission mechanism not as a unique mechanism particular to the transitional justice setting, but as a specialised form of a familiar mechanism, the commission of inquiry. In this framework, truth commissions are distinguished from other commissions of inquiry by their symbolic acknowledgement of historical injustices, and their explicit “social function” to educate the public about those injustices in order to prevent their recurrence.”
Abstract, Kim Pamela Stanton (2010), pii
To get a sense of what we are envisioning for the APPCITARJ, it is best to understand what a truth commission is.
• Truth commissions are generally understood to be “bodies set up to investigate a past history of violations of human rights in a particular country -which can include violations by the military or other government forces or armed opposition forces.”[1] Priscilla B. Hayner, in ‘Unspeakable Truths’ delineates four main characteristics of truth commissions:
1. First, they focus on the past and its impact. The events may have occurred in the recent past, but a truth commission is not an ongoing body akin to a human rights commission.
2. Second, truth commissions investigate a pattern of abuse over a set period of time rather than a specific event. In its mandate, the truth commission is given the parameters of its investigation both in terms of the time period covered as well as the type of human rights violations to be explored.
3. Third, a truth commission is a temporary body, usually operating over a period of six months to two years and completing its work by submitting a report. These parameters are established at the time of the commission’s formation, but often an extension can be obtained to wrap things up.
4. Fourth, truth commissions are officially sanctioned, authorised, or empowered by the state. This, in principle, allows the commission to have greater access to information, greater security, and increased assurance that its findings will be taken under serious consideration. Official sanction from the government is crucial because it represents an acknowledgment of past wrongs and a commitment to address the issues. Furthermore, governments may be more likely to enact recommended reforms if they have established the commission.
Goals of truth commissions include:
• Making recommendations for redress suffered by victims and survivors • Recording and educating about the past • Identifying perpetrators • Formulating policy proposals and recommendations on rehabilitation and the healing of Maangamizi resistors, survivors, their families and the community at large • Providing the victims/survivors with different forms of support to ensure that the commission of inquiry/truth commission process restores the victims’ dignity • Preventing repetition of aspects of the Maangamizi • Forming the basis for a new pluriversal democratic order • Promoting reconciliation • Creating a collective memory.
You can see a list of previous truth commissions here.
Characteristics of commissions of inquiry with truth commission functions:
They are non-judicial mechanisms but can complement judicial mechanisms;
They are commissions of inquiry whose primary function is investigation of human and people and Mother Earth rights violations and violations of humanitarian law, unlike courts or tribunals which deal with adjudication;
They focus on severe acts of violence or repression;
They are victim-centred bodies focused on victims ideas, views, needs, experiences and preferences as primary focus as opposed to elite witnesses or perpetrators;
They formulate recommendations to guarantee the non-repetition of past crimes and reform state institutions involved in the commission of human, peoples and Mother Earth rights violations.
Truth Commission Activities
Investigations/ documentation of violations/ research
Statement taking
Interview/ public hearings
Victim Support
Events and programmes to promote intra and inter community cohesion, reconciliation and conciliation
Public awareness.
Advantages of the APPCITARJ:
It can delegitimize Maangamizi denial;
It can rebut misrepresentations of the old order through investigations, public hearings and detailed reports;
It can spur significant national debates;
It can help governments to take corrective/reparatory actions and develop reparatory policies;
It can provide a measure of accountability for the legacies of past and present atrocities and violations/abuses of human, peoples and Mother Earth rights through its findings.
There are many factors that will determine the composition and mandate of the APPCITARJ including how much we are able to bring pressure to bear on relevant decision-makers and institutions. There has already been some thinking, analysis, research and consultation on what the purpose of the APPCITARJ should be, although this is an evolving process.
The APPCITARJ will seek to:
acknowledge the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of the imposition of the Maangamizi, i.e. Afrikan chattel, colonial and neocolonial enslavement within and beyond the British Empire;
examine subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against Afrikans and people of Afrikan descent;
examine the impact of these forces on living Afrikans and Afrikan descendant communities, as well as other peoples;
make recommendations to Parliament and similar bodies at local, national and international levels, including the European Parliament, and;
Determine appropriate methods of dissemination of findings to the public within and beyond Britain for consultation about proposals for supporting Afrikan Heritage Community Self-Repairs and designing other forms of redress and repairs.
On the importance of speaking our grassroots power of truth to establishment power
“The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim… he or she has become a threat.”
James Baldwin, ‘The Devil Finds Work’, 1976
In providing testimony, the so-called victim/survivor becomes an agent, and his/her narrative is especially threatening because it dares to expose violations and violence when others declare that such oppressions do not exist.
The APPCITARJ will not substitute a judicial process and is not designed to let perpetrators off the hook. Hence the need for the APPCITARJ to evolve in conjunction with the U-PITGJ. The organising processes towards establishment of the APPCITARJ, including the mobilisational role of the SMWeCGEC, will also galvanise grassroots work towards establishing glocal sittings of the U-PITGJ, as part of a series of actions which will put a full stop, by way of holistic and transformative reparations, to all acts of Genocide/Ecocide against Afrikan people.
Begin preparing yourself for the APPCITARJ & U-PITGJ
You can prepare yourself for the APPCITARJ by beginning to do family and community research on how we and our immediate families each have suffered, continue to suffer and have also challenged the various crimes of the Maangamizi. In this regard, see the aims of the SMWeCGEC.
Afrikans in the UK and Europe organising towards establishing commissions of inquiry for truth and reparatory justice and local, national and international people’s tribunals to hold the governments of Britain, and other European countries to account. If you are able to gather such evidence you can assist us to arrive at a comprehensive assessment and a full picture of what our journeys and experiences of the Maangamizi have been across the Diaspora, as well as on the continent of Afrika.
Each person and representative of families and their communities have to become our own advocates and experts on your own situation and then we can bring all these experiences together as part of us becoming ‘reparations enforcers’ who are building the power and capacity to hold to account all those who are continuing to profit from the ill-gotten gains of the Maangamizi and are also complicit in its perpetuation today.
See the video below from the documentary ‘Freedom Summer’ for some APPCITARJ lessons from our Shero Fannie Lou Hamer.
Hamer’s testimony had such a huge impact upon the government and public in and outside the USA, and was so powerful, that President Lyndon B. Johnson called an impromptu press conference to get her off the air. This is a recording of the full testimony and also a transcript of that testimony. Her testimony provides an example of what we envisage could be the impact similar ISMAR-coordinated grassroots testimonies by our Afrikan Survivors, Resistors and Challengers of the Maangamizi, from all over the World to the APPCITARJs in the UK Parliament of Westminster and the European Parliament. We surmise that the ‘holding to account’ referred to above can best be done in a collective way by supporting the establishment of the Ubuntukgotla, court of peoples humanity interconnectedness, otherwise known as the Peoples International Tribunal for Global Justice (U-PITGJ), which we encourage you to support the development of. This can be done through hosting sittings of the tribunal, locally, nationally and internationally.
As part of the rationale for this approach, it is important to have a better sense of the historical antecedents of the SMWeCGEC in the UK, see these historic recordings from 2003 of Esther Stanford-Xosei, former legal advisor to the BQJC speaking about the BQJC legal & extra-legal strategy for reparations; the need for a UK commission of inquiry to address the legacies of the Maangamizi; and the commencement of the UK version of the ‘We Charge Genocide Petition and campaign’ under the auspices of then then Black United Front-Parliament (BUF-P). The second set of videos where Stanford-Xosei is interviewed, precedes in order and time the first video where she speaks to camera.
Set up a family or community group Maatzoedzaduara
You can set up a MAATZOEDZADUARA (i.e. Maat action-learning circles or ‘Maat Training Practice Rings’) which is a reparatory justice circle of Maat practitioners who learn to be the self-repairs change at the levels of their person, home, family, neighbourhood, workplace, school, places of leisure and worship, etc. These Maat Training Practice Rings encompass a number of families and lineages, across geographical boundaries and generations. For example, a home or family based Maat Training Practice Ring will entail getting a selected number of people in your family interested in unravelling family histories and using this knowledge to recognise and gather evidence of the harm that has been done to you as a family.
The Practice Rings will also explore how such harms have been passed down throughout the generations, resulting in increasing levels of disrepair. We are looking for case studies of some of these family stories documenting family member’s lived experiences of the Maangamizi and resistance to it. This unravelling of these stories is part of the process of repairing the harm and continuing damage being done and passed down intergenerationally within our own families.
You can also creatively utilise SMWeCGEC Petition Soulsquestathons (SMWeCGEC-PS), which are literally a collection of souls, for spark-rippling MAATZOEZADUARAs. The aim is to link chains of MAATZOEZADUARAs together encompassing a number of families, across geographical boundaries and generations, all over the place, as Grassroots Afrikan Reparatory Justice Action Learning Praxis Exercising Rings (GARJALPERs) of the U-PITGJ. This means that they will share their stories and practice not only testifying with these stories but also putting their cases through trial rehearsals. The key point about the Soulsquestathons is that the various participants connect to, compare and contrast their self-repairs reparatory justice work as families within these MAATZOEZADUARAs. Basically, these are intergenerational connections, not only of family members of the present, but also the past. It therefore becomes necessary for us to keep records about and bring the lives and work of our revered Ancestors into our everyday lives of the present.
If you would like to know more about how to get involved with the APPCITARJ/U-PITGJ or you would like support with setting up a Maatzoedzaduara please contact PARCOE on info@parcoe.com or 07751143043.
Share your story!
One of the roles of the APPCITARJ will be to gather statements from Maangamizi resistors, survivors and anyone else who feels they have been impacted by the Maangamizi and its legacies.
It is our intention to coordinate the collection of individual statements by written, electronic or other appropriate means such as audio-visual recordings with regard to providing a safe, supportive and sensitive environment for individual/collective/group statement taking/truth sharing.
If you would like to begin with compiling your story as a case study or indeed to make a statement about the impact of the Maangamizi, you are invited to contact us to discuss how best this can be done.
You can also lobby your local MP and other public elected officials to support the establishment of the APPCITARJ by utilising this SMWeCGEC postcard campaign tool.
It is important that you let us know how you get on with your local MP or other publicly elected officials so that we can keep a record of progress or where there is a need for more focused lobbying. Here are the contact details for the SMWeCGEC. Please also see this guidance on Guidance on Proposals for Parliamentary Actions.
What next?
In partnership with the Afrikan Emancipation Day Afrikan Reparations March Committee and other reparatory justice organising processes, we in the SMWeCGEC will continue to consult and canvass our communities, networks and constituencies of the ISMAR on the following four themes:
1. How best people can be involved and participate in the APPCITARJ? 2. Aims, hopes and fears for the APPCITARJ? 3. Mandate, terms of reference, powers and structure of the APPCITARJ? 4. What are the other ways to deal with the legacies of the Maangamizi and enforce accountability?
Volunteer researchers required to contribute to a people’s history-making process of securing reparatory justice!
If you are a law or politics student or have other relevant skills and experience and you are interested in using your knowledge and skills to support Afrikan people’s struggle for holistic redress and secure Afrikan Reparatory Justice, you can become a volunteer researcher. We are looking for volunteer researchers who would like to join the SMWeCGEC research team in preparations for establishing the APPCITARJ and the U-PITGJ. If you would like to get involved, please contact: Afrikan Reparations Transnational Community of Practice (ARTCoP) on artcop.edu@gmail.com or PARCOE on info@parcoe.com or 07751143043.
Support from movement lawyers is welcome!
If you are a social justice advocate, legal practitioner or cause lawyer and would like to offer pro-bono advice or support to this community-led initiative; are willing to build equitable relationships with people and organisations challenging historical and contemporary injustice; and are prepared to respect the approach of social justice/community lawyering,*please also get in touch as above.
*Community lawyering has many variants: collaborative lawyering, community, lay lawyering, cause lawyering, social justice lawyering, political lawyering, critical lawyering, rebellious lawyering, movement-lawyering etc. The common thread among them is that the clients, not the lawyers, play a central role in resolving the issues that have an impact on their opportunities to succeed. It is: lawyering that is community-located, community-collaborative, community-directed and based on the collaboration of lawyers, clients and communities in which they live; and transforming law and lawyering to address the inequalities experienced by subordinated and underserved groups. The legal system in the UK and other Westernised countries is very individualistic. It tends to atomise and depoliticise disputes, which work against a community organising model. Furthermore, the facilitation of individual rights has not benefited the long-term needs of communities, especially impoverished communities, especially where such impoverishment is as a result of intergenerational injustice. The Sargent Shriver National Centre on Poverty Law (USA) defines “community lawyering” as a “process through which advocates contribute their legal knowledge and skills to support initiatives that are identified by the community and enhance the community’s power.”
Similar to the different schools of thought in community organising, community lawyering has many different strains. However, what sets lawyers who adopt community lawyering apart from each other boils down to their answers to the following three questions: Who do you work with? What do you do for them? And how do you work together? Similar to community organising, the answers to these questions vary depending on the political orientation of the lawyer and the theory of social change they ascribe to. By combining legal recourse and community organising, it is possible to utilise “community lawyering” as a social change strategy.” This approach engages lawyers who are prepared to de-emphasise litigation as the primary tool for advancing social justice. Instead, community lawyering encourages such lawyers, in collaboration with communities, their groups, activists and organisers, to critically and creatively examine non-traditional forms of advocacy such as facilitative leadership, institution-building, community organising, collective action and other grassroots actions including strategic litigation, media events, community education workshops and public demonstrations. This is done as a way of addressing the legal and non-legal problems of their clients. Community lawyering can also be described as a more participatory process that fosters collaboration between lawyers and their community (group) clients, rather than fostering—if not perpetuating—the dependency that most clients have on their lawyers to solve their legal problems in a conventional lawyer-client relationship.
The role of a “community lawyer” entails working in partnership with one’s community clients and utilises multiple forms of advocacy, to address their individual as well as systemic problems. Community lawyering practitioners recognise that their clients are partners—not just in name—but in leadership, control and decision-making. Through collaboration, lawyers can support Afrikan Heritage Community groups in building their own resources and community capacities to advance their own interests in effecting and securing reparatory justice in a self-determined and self-directed manner.
Another critical component of community lawyering is creating race-conscious cultural competence—a set of beliefs, values, and skills built into a structure that enables one to negotiate cross-cultural situations in a manner that does not force one to assimilate to the other. The goal of race-conscious community lawyering is to support lasting structural and systemic changes that will bring about holistic reparatory justice for racialised groups.
Movement-lawyering is a specific form of community lawyering but the lawyers work in collaboration with grassroots movements. This lawyering recognises that community members and organisers have expertise that should be valued. In fact, movement lawyers should also be engaged in a process of political study and growth collectively with movement-organisers that are aligned with particular community struggles. Here are some tips for lawyers that are aligned with movements and are particularly relevant to how lawyers can best support communities, their activists and organisers who are engaged in reparatory justice struggles as part of the ISMAR.
Notes [1] Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths. New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 14.
Reparations are not just a legal case or a political claim but also a social movement. In ‘An Approach to Reparations’ Human Rights Watch maintain that “when addressing relatively old wrongs, claims of reparations should not be based on the past abuses of enslavement and colonisation solely, but on its contemporary effects.”[1] They point out that people today, i.e. the descendants of the enslaved who can reasonably claim that today they personally suffer the effects of past human rights violations through continuing economic or social deprivation are deserving of reparations.
Genocide
There is great potential in utilising the 1948 Convention on the Prevention of Genocide as an advocacy tool. In his book Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities, Joao H. Vargas, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology establishes that the relentless and intergenerational oppression and marginalisation of large numbers of Black people in modern societies constitutes genocide, in that groups among us are subjected to conditions of life that are sufficiently destructive to amount to instances of genocide. In this regard it is important to also understand indirect genocide (which involves creating life conditions which destroy a group and facilitate intra-community violence).
According to Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term genocide, genocide has two phases: one, the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.[2] In the 1948 Genocide Convention, genocide is therefore defined as follows:
“Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Vargas poses the following challenge: “We either begin to address, redress, and do away with what make possible the multiple facets of anti-Black genocide, or we succumb to the dehumanising values that produce and become reproduced by the systematic and persistent disregard for the lives of Afro-descended individuals and their communities.” [3]
Ecocide
Ecocideis the extensive damage to, destruction of or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been or will be severely diminished. [4]
The call to make Ecocide an international crime dates back to 1972 when over 7,000 people took to the streets in Stockholm in 1972 to demand that Ecocide be a crime. It was the time of the Vietnam War and world leaders had met in Stockholm to resolve environmental issues at an international level for the first time. A draft Ecocide Convention was submitted into the UN in 1973 which intended to make ecocide the 5th crime against peace (in addition to the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, the crime of aggression).
In 2010, the proposal to amend the Rome Statute to include an international crime of Ecocide was submitted by Polly Higgins into the International Law Commission (ILC).
The inclusion of Ecocide law as international law prohibits mass damage and destruction of the Earth and, as defined above, creates a legal duty of care for all inhabitants that have been or are at risk of being significantly harmed due to Ecocide. This campaign continues!
