Reconsidering Reparations

Abstract

On 17 November 2018, members of the ‘Stop The Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide Campaign’ (SMWeCGEC)—a Pan-Afrikan Liberation Advocacy Campaigning formation that is part of the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations— took part in the #RebellionDay organised by Extinction Rebellion to push the UK government to face the climate and ecological emergency. The SMWeCGEC has strenuously argued that we cannot achieve climate justice without repairing the continuum of injustice that African persons on the continent and in the diaspora have suffered from. In his excellent book, Reconsidering Reparation, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò follows the steps of activists like the members of the SMWeCGEC and develops a clear normative and historical case for the inseparability of climate and racial justice. Táíwò shows that we should think of reparations as a ‘construction project’ (p. 4) that is not merely as an enterprise aimed at repairing the harm done by centuries of colonial and racial injustice. He convincingly argues that because our transnational institutions and structures were ‘built by the converging processes of trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism’—which he poignantly labels ‘global racial empire’ (p. 10)—, reparations should be global and ambitious in scale. They should be about ‘worldmaking’ (p. 5), i.e., about reconfiguring the world we live in.

Topics & Concepts