DEALING WITH HISTORIC SLAVERY

Intro: It is time Western governments started to talk seriously about reparations

ON December 19, 2022, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, announced his country’s apology for participating in and profiting from the transatlantic trade of enslaved people. This is the first time a Western nation has formally apologised for its role in slavery, an indictment on others who should similarly take the stand and show genuine remorse.

Speaking at the National Archives in The Hague, Mr Rutte said the role of the Netherlands in slavery was “ugly, painful, and even downright shameful”.

“For hundreds of years, people were made merchandise, exploited and abused in the name of the Dutch state,” Rutte said. “For that, I offer the apologies of the Dutch government.”

That the Dutch government found the courage to fully acknowledge and officially apologise for its role in “abetting, stimulating, preserving and profiting from centuries of slave trading” is highly commendable and liberating.

However, the paths to reconciliation and healing suggested by the government are equally underwhelming.  

In his apology, Rutte admitted that “centuries of oppression and exploitation still have an effect to this very day” and talked about “doing justice to the past and healing in the present”.

To start this healing process, the Dutch PM said, his government will work to “enhance knowledge of the history of slavery” and to “ensure more awareness, acknowledgement and understanding”. To facilitate this, Mr Rutte announced the creation of a $216m fund to tackle the legacy of slavery and boost education.

Yet, nowhere in his landmark apology did Rutte express an intention to take the one action descendants of enslaved people have repeatedly said would make the biggest difference in righting the wrongs of the past: by paying reparations.

The Netherlands, like most Western nations, owes the immense economic prosperity it is experiencing today in large part to the profits it made from slavery.

In 2019, a five-year research project funded by the Dutch Research Council, entitled “Slaves, commodities and logistics” concluded that “economic activities related to the slave trade between Europe, Africa and America made a significant contribution to Dutch prosperity in the second half of the eighteenth century”.

According to the study, in the year 1770 some 5.2 per cent of the Dutch gross domestic product (GDP) was based on the transatlantic trade of enslaved people – a contribution that is equivalent to the entire port of Rotterdam today. Rutte did not mention any of this in his carefully curated speech.

Despite offering a historic official apology for slavery, the Dutch government clearly still has no intention to return to the descendants of enslaved people what it stole from them.

Regrettably, the Netherlands is not alone among countries that benefited from slavery in refusing to pay. The governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and others are remaining stubbornly silent in the face of increasingly louder calls for reparations.

The basic premise and defence of governments’ refusal to pay up always offer the same tired arguments when it comes to addressing racial injustice of the past. They claim that “no one alive today is directly benefitting or suffering from slavery”, that it is “a thing of the past”, and that “it would be impossible to determine who deserves to be paid”. Such arguments, of course, do not stand even the most basic of scrutiny. For one thing, people are still clearly benefitting and suffering from slavery.

In the United States, the Brookings Institution estimates that the average white family has around 10-times the amount of wealth as the average Black family. In the United Kingdom, too, people from Black African backgrounds typically hold the least wealth, which equates to around one-tenth of the wealth held by white Britons.

Such inequalities, compounded by systemic racism in all areas of life and society – from health and housing to education and law enforcement – are direct, modern-day consequences of slavery affecting millions of people.

And slavery is hardly just a “thing of the past”. In countries shaped by and built around it, such as in Suriname – one of the smallest countries in South America – where direct descendants of people enslaved by the Dutch were brought to work in plantations now make up most of the population.

In Africa, the immense wealth lost to slavery cannot simply be ignored or forgotten, since its return of what’s owed would resolve most of the continent’s fundamental problems almost overnight.

The question of who should receive reparations is not necessarily complicated either. After the abolishment of slavery, the Netherlands, the US, France, Denmark and the UK all moved to compensate former slavers for so-called “loss of property”. The UK government only finished paying the debts it acquired to pay former slavers in 2015. But all this time, none of the former slave-holding countries paid a single penny to formerly enslaved people or their descendants.

It is therefore high time for compensation to be paid not to those who “made people into merchandise” but to those who continue to carry the pain and the scars of their ancestors.

The Caribbean Community, a grouping of 15 Caribbean countries whose populations are dominated by descendants of formerly enslaved people, created a 10-point plan for reparatory justice for European governments.

The group wants, among other things, a full formal apology, repatriation opportunities, debt cancellation, the transfer of technology, psychological rehabilitation, and African knowledge programmes.

This 10-point plan would be a good starting point for governments truly willing to confront the past and start a healing process.

Any form of economic redress cannot merely assuage the collective conscience of white people in the West: it must be unapologetically substantive and enduring, despite the high costs of financial restitution.

Some 160 years after the abolition of slavery in Europe and the US, Western countries, quite evidently, have an obligation not only to apologise, but also to commit to reparations and by embarking on comprehensive social justice programmes.

Apologies are commendable. But descendants of enslaved people also need proper indemnity and social change.