THE African Union (AU), which originated as the Organisation of African Unity championing the liberation of Africa from European occupation, is now 62 years old.
The theme for this year ‘s Africa Day commemorations is: ‘Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations’.
This means reparations for Africans at home on the continent and in the Diaspora.
It is, in essence, an allusion to a common experience to which ‘reparations’ suggests victimhood.
Reparation is a derivative of ‘repair’. A simpler way of understanding reparations is to accept that every repair presupposes damage. And in its very essence, reparation translates to the value one attaches to the damaged item. Nobody goes out of his/her way to repair what has no value. When no damage is identified the need for repair does not exist.
The concept of reparations is not alien to indigenous African experience. (‘Reparations’ only sounds exotic and sophisticated in European languages that were used to devalue African culture.) Taking Shona culture as a case in point, the idiom ‘Mushonga wengozi kuripa’ defines the concept of reparations without ambiguity. And, it emphasises liability, punishment and amicable closure. In its most original form, whose instances are still within living memory, muripo wengozi was pegged at the ultimate price which was life. A life taken through murder was replaced with another life in which case the primary reparation was a woman offered by the murderer’s family to bear a child to replace the lost life in the victim family. This insistence that life taken should be replaced by another life stands at variance with the concept of an eye-for-an-eye (death sentence for murderers) which, ironically, came with the champions of human rights from whom we are claiming reparations.
Their law claims two lives and sustains a feud. In contrast, the Shona concept was also intended to foster healing by forging a blood relationship between the families of the murderers and their victims.
The new child became a muzukuru to the murderer’s family and daughter or son to the victim family. The two became family and that would be the end of the feud. Of course, the correctness of this should not be trivialised by pulling it out of the ancient context and applying it to modern law. It is the moral correctness of attaching proper value to African life that should be borrowed from the concept yengozi to inform the African quest for reparations today.
This is African lived and living law — ngozi hairovi. Mushonga wengozi kuripa.
The quest for reparations as foregrounded by the AU is one that stretches into five centuries of history strewn with sites of tragedy in which the black man was the victim of racial violence and genocide at the hands of the white man of which the last outpost of this tyranny was South Africa whose President Cyril Ramaphosa was, recently, the object of racial bullying by US President Donald Trump, a generational beneficiary of the extraordinary crimes against Africans and people of African descent.
The foregoing reference to the Shona idiom: ‘Mushonga wengozi kuripa,’ is a deliberate effort to mobilise indigenous languages as critical tools in correctly interpreting our reality for sustainable resolution of our problems.
Language is not just sound; it is meaning, too. It is the instrument of thought and a worldview that predisposes perspectives from lived experience. And because of that, no language is neutral. Every language carries interests embedded into its units of expression by lived experience. Every language sustains interests defined by the lived experience. Every language defends interests defined by the lived experiences of the indigenous speakers.
And in the centuries of history strewn with sites of tragedy in which the black man was the victim of racial violence and genocide at the hands of the white man, the hope for the indigenous Zimbabwe was predisposed in the idiom: ‘Mushonga wengozi kuripa’. It was not truth and reconciliation; it was not ‘willing-buyer willing-seller’ of plundered heritage and it was certainly not forgiveness without vengeance that left the criminal’s loot intact and entrenched the victim in deeper deprivation.
It is plausible to say that the majority of those who joined the armed liberation struggle during or after Ordinary Level would have first met the European meaning of ‘reparations’ in their study of European history of the First and Second World Wars under the British curriculum. The reparations the Germans were required to pay fellow Europeans and Jews they had wronged emphasised an unambiguous European understanding of the concept and how much value they attached to it. So did the trials at Nuremburg and the mass hangings of the German war criminals that followed. The European sense of justice was shown to be unforgiving in that respect. It was not truth and reconciliation with the Nazis; it was not ‘willing-buyer willing-seller’ of heritage the Nazis had plundered across the world and it was certainly not forgiveness without vengeance that would have left the Nazi war criminal loot intact and their European victims in deeper deprivation. Nazi war criminals were hunted right to the gates, tried and hanged even after they had become wheelchair bound from age. Right up to 2016, which is over 70 years after the end of the Second World War ailing, senile and wheelchair-bound Nazis in their 90s were still being tried and ordered to pay reparations to identified descendants of victims.
The AU, which was founded in 1963, is now 62 years old. What this means is that, offhand, it should be safe to say that the theme of reparations and relevant actions is 62 years overdue.
This is in view that the quest for self-determination that could demand reparations by organised armed struggle became a formal commitment through the OAU 62 years ago.
The foregoing position is premised on the irrefutable fact that the reparations the Germans were forced to pay were an outcome of their defeat. Their defeat put them in a position where they could not refuse.
But history also makes it abundantly clear that the war crimes and genocides for which they were paying reparations were not their first. The very same Germans had committed the very first genocide of the 20th century in Namibia, then a colony known as German South West Africa. Between 1904 and 1907, the Germans had wiped out over 100 000 of the indigenous Herero and Nama people of Namibia.
And right to date, 35 years after Namibia won the right to self-determine reparations through armed struggle, nothing has happened. And this is primarily because Africa has appealed to the conscience of the criminal for reparations.
African scholarship has ignored to study the history that leaves no illusion as to the type of enemy from whom we are expecting reparations.
African scholarship has ignored to study the history that leaves no illusion as to the type of conscience that would permit one to harvest the life of a fellow human being for their own exclusive benefit and not see anything wrong with that because they are a different colour of skin.
To be continued …