Rethinking Reparations for African Enslavement as Cultural, Spiritual and Environmental Repair

Lead Research Organisation: University of Edinburgh
Department Name: Sch of Literature Languages & Culture

Abstract

This project emerged from meetings held in the UK and West Africa with activist organisations and researchers as part of an AHRC networking project (2017-19) linked to the UN International Decade for People of African Descent (IDPAD, 2015-24) [Reparations for Slavery: From Theory to Praxis, AH/P007074/1]. Organized in collaboration with the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe (UK) and the Association Panafricaine pour une réparation globale de l'esclavage (Benin), these meetings led to the creation of the International Network of Scholars and Activists for Afrikan Reparations (INOSAAR). We concentrated on creating a more holistic understanding of the meaning of reparation and reparative justice from African community perspectives. This included finding creative ways of healing the longstanding legacies of African enslavement, including cultural loss and environmental degradation, and highlighting the lack of research into models of reparation that engage with cultural, spiritual and environmental forms of repair. Existing models tend to favour top-down, state-led approaches that rely on international law courts and monetary repayment; whereas we identified the equal importance of grassroots, community-led initiatives that are focused on repairing the loss of African culture and spirituality, and the links between cultural repair and the environment. These two interconnected areas form the basis for this project. The first relates to the processes by which the descendants of those who were forcibly displaced from Africa are able to re-establish their cultural and spiritual links to the African continent; a process known as 'rematriation'. The second relates the ways in which struggles for reparative justice are underpinned by the need for 'planet repairs' and the role that African culture and knowledge can play in contributing to ecological and reparative social movements more broadly.
In response, we identified a three-phase (P) project with specific aims and objectives:
P1. To create a high-quality video-documentary in Benin on cultural loss and the reconnection of African descendants to the continent with unprecedented access to Beninese cultural and spiritual sites;
P2. To expand African youth participation in reparations activism through a training workshop in Ghana focused on planet and cultural repair, including professional training in communications and video-making;
P3. To develop links to traditional African leaders in Ghana (building from our existing connections in Benin) through a workshop looking at rematriation and planet repair, and the importance of policymaking that facilitates these processes.
Each phase aims to raise awareness and deepen our understanding of reparation as linked to cultural, spiritual and planet repair, while contributing to the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations (ISMAR). Working closely with African community and activist groups in Ghana, Benin and the UK, while using the experience of our existing network, this funding will enable us and our partners to expand the benefits of our network to larger numbers of interested communities. The video-documentary will promote the importance of cultural and spiritual rematriation, showing this to be an integral part of achieving reparation for African and African descended communities. The youth workshop will provide training in video-making and communication skills to build links and solidarity with the ISMAR and global climate change movements, such as Extinction Rebellion. The workshop with the Ghanaian paramount chiefs will act as a pilot to feed into public policy on African rematriation and planet repair through traditional leadership structures. Together, these activities will make a positive contribution to the UNIDPAD by promoting the importance of African heritage and culture to global movements for reparative and environmental justice.

Publications

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Description This award took place in two countries: Benin and Ghana, both in West Africa. It included organizing two workshops in Ghana and undertaking filming work for a video-documentary in Benin.
The first training workshop with youth (18-25) enabled us to identify the need for better communication and networking opportunities to allow young people to develop their own means of telling their story through multimedia.
The second training workshop with the Ghanaian Paramount Chiefs enabled us to explore and define key terms such as Rematriation and Planet Repairs in collaboration with UK-, USA- and Ghana-based reparations activists and scholars.
The filming in Benin opened up a whole area of research looking at oral histories relating to anti-slavery resistance and enabled us to interview traditional kings and other spiritual leaders on key questions relating to the African Diaspora and the possibilities of returning (or rematriating) spiritually and culturally to Benin. Within this, we learned about the power of Vodoun as a spiritual practice and faith in fighting against slavery and in maintaining spiritual links to the African Diaspora, as well as its power to heal those who have returned, for example on roots visits to reconnect to African heritage. These themes will form the basis of a video-documentary.
Exploitation Route It is hoped that the youth who were trained in the media workshop will use the equipment to produce their own film shorts explaining their African-centred approach to Planet Repairs. It is also hoped that the workshops with Paramount Chiefs will lead to summer schools on Planet Repairs through the creation of a knowledge-exchange programme with the University of Edinburgh.
The video-documentary, once produced, will showcase the way that Benin has been working to protect its indigenous culture and spirituality, and how Beninese spirituality (Vodoun) can be used to reconnect those in the African diaspora to their African roots as part of a reparatory justice process in the wake of slavery as a crime against humanity.
Sectors Education,Environment,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
 
Description All-Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Policymakers/politicians
Results and Impact Since March 2020, the International Network of Scholars and Activists for Afrikan Reparations (INOSAAR) has been working with the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) to get a national motion passed relating to the creation of an All-Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice. The motion passed at national level and we are now working with local Councillors to get it passed at local level.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2020,2021,2022
URL https://greenworld.org.uk/article/green-party-commits-seeking-slavery-reparations
 
Description Ghana Workshops with Paramount Chiefs - Planet Repairs 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Other audiences
Results and Impact A workshop was held in Ghana with traditional African leaders - the Paramount Chiefs - where we discussed the themes of rematriation and planet repairs, and the importance of policymaking that facilitates these processes.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
 
Description Ghana Youth Training Workshop: Media Literacy 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Study participants or study members
Results and Impact 15 young people (aged 18-25) from Ghana, Columbia and the UK attended a two-day media training workshop to develop their skills in using camera equipment. The aim of the workshop was to enable them to begin making their own short films on reparatory justice-related subjects linked to 'Planet Repairs' from African-centred perspectives. They were trained by a professional videographer from the USA.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2012
 
Description INOSAAR Roundtable Series: Land and Reparatory Justice 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact Land has been a major question in reparatory justice, more so since the dispossession of Afrikan people of their homeland started escalating with chattel enslavement and colonization by European powers. That is why self-emancipating enslaved Afrikans sought to regain land for rebuilding their communities and reasserting their own Afrikan sovereignty away from the plantations of their enslavement. This gave rise even in the Diaspora of Abya Yala to polities like Palmares and other Quilombos, Palenques and Maroon settlements such as that led by Nana Pokuwaa, otherwise known as Nanny of the Maroons.
Underlying the recent unrest sweeping U.S. cities over police brutality is a fundamental inequity in land, wealth, and power, all of which has circumscribed Black lives since the end of slavery. The restitution promised to the formerly enslaved, among which is the famous '40 acres and a mule', never came to pass. There was no redistribution of land and no monetary reparations for the wealth gained by the enslavers from the labour stolen from Black bodies. This also holds true for the freedmen and women of the nations of the Caribbean and Latin America.
As is well recognized, it was greed and violence that drove European colonizers' acquisition of land in Afrika and Abya Yala (the so-called Americas). Their efforts were aimed at conquering and dehumanizing the original owners through military might and enslavement. Land was seized with total disregard for the Indigenous peoples' traditional beliefs and the cultures underpinning their spirituality. Many Indigenous communities lost their heritages, identity, languages, cultures and spirituality, which were intimately tied to the land itself. These losses were omnipresent factors of Afrikan enslavement.
For formerly chattelized Afrikans, the failure (after abolition) to provide land for their resettlement violates a fundamental principle of being. In much of traditional Afrika, land is the birthright of every Afrikan Indigenous person. It has a communal dimension whereby all members of the community are expected to share its resources under some form of traditional authority. This concept of traditional authority is important because, in addition to being a uniting force, the community leadership is often seen as a steward with divine authority over land (http://www.wcc-coe.org/wcc/what/jpc/echoes-16-05.html). As Rev. Rupert Hambira writes, 'The question of land, which is the primary source and sustainer of human life, cannot but be central to the spirituality of all the Indigenous communities. [ Thus] the question of access to land and a harmonious relationship to it is so central not only for the spirituality but the overall world-view of Indigenous communities in general'.
Even from a European perspective the denial of land rights also violates the process of liberation and the Enlightenment ideals that interconnects land ownership and the achievement of personal freedom. As de Crèvecoeur wrote in 1782, 'ultimate personal freedom in America is achieved by working and owning land' (Letters from an American Farmer).
The foundational links between land as a material asset to sustain life and promote survival, and land as a site of spiritual renewal and continuity for the newly-freed Afrikan people, are evident in the Freedmen's Committee's appeal to General Oliver Howard in 1865 on Edisto Island (1865). Those men were mindful of both Enlightenment precepts and the ancient Afrikan fundamental belief in the inseparability of humanity from nature, i.e., from the land as home to the living, as well as the sanctuary of the ancestors and the gods. They rejected the new proposal to deprive them of the land promised as reparation for their unpaid labour and other forms of dehumanization. They demanded Homesteads and 'land enough to lay our Fathers bones upon'. To be without this land 'is not the condition of really free men' (https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/after_slavery_educator/unit_one_documents/document_seven).
Freedom remains hollow, particularly in those parts of Afrika where, in spite of the claim that apartheid has been abolished, white settler-colonialism continues to maintain its racist stranglehold on land violently robbed from Indigenous Afrikan communities. According to a 2017 land audit by the South African government, 72 per cent of the country's arable land remains in the hands of white settlers, who account for fewer than 10 per cent of the total population. Land grabbing from Indigenous Afrikan communities is continuing up until today. Organizations like the Extinction Rebellion Internationalist Solidarity Network and Survival International campaign to denounce colonial malpractices of conservation. It is noteworthy that such malpractices are being carried out by transnational NGOs such as WWF who are continuing to dispossess Afrikan communities of land and deny them access to their ancestral homes in forests and desserts under the greenwash guise of expanding conservation to address the climate and ecological crisis. It is in the light of such developments, which are being decried as worsening genocide and ecocide by giving rise to eco-fascism, that INOSAAR sees the urgency of lending its voices to discourses on land, dispossession and reparatory justice.

We ask panelists and participants to consider the following:

1. What would reparative justice in the form of land distribution and land rights on the continent of Afrika involve and what issues are at stake?
2. Legalized discrimination and state-sanctioned brutality, murder, dispossession and disenfranchisement continued long after the American Civil War ended. Some argue that this history has profoundly handicapped Afrikan Americans' ability to create and accumulate wealth, as well as to gain access to jobs, housing, education. How might we address this fact as an issue of reparatory justice?
3. Dispossession of property via gentrification and the government's right of eminent domain (also known as land acquisition, compulsory purchase and expropriation) have resulted in the loss of homes and destruction of Black communities throughout the Continent and Diaspora of Afrika. What considerations should be given to these factors in terms of reparatory justice?
4. Can reparative justice be fully achieved without consideration of the dispossession and landlessness of millions of Afrikans displaced by chattel enslavement, colonialism and neocolonialism?
5. To what extent do reparatory justice frameworks adequately connect the question of access to land and spiritual and cultural repair?
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021
URL https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=3909263342442863
 
Description INOSAAR Roundtable Series: REMATRIATION, or Rethinking Reparations for Afrikan Enslavement as Pan-Afrikan Envisioned Repairs Highlighting Cultural, Spiritual and Environmental Return to Mother Earth' 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact To launch our new Arts and Humanity Council (AHRC)-funded project on 'Rethinking Reparations for Afrikan Enslavement as Cultural, Spiritual and Environmental Repairs', the International Network of Scholars & Activists for Afrikan Reparations (INOSAAR) held a three-hour workshop on 15 July 2021. Our aim was to explore and define two key areas of relevance to the struggle for reparatory justice for the transoceanic trafficking and enslavement of Afrikan peoples.
The first relates to the processes by which the descendants of those who were forcibly displaced from Afrika are able to re-establish their cultural and spiritual links to the Mother Earth on their mother-continent of Afrika; a process known as 'Rematriation'. This is an indigenous concept that 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.
The second relates the ways in which struggles for reparatory justice are underpinned by the need for 'Planet Repairs' and the role that Afrikan culture and knowledge can play in contributing to ecological and reparative social justice movements more broadly. Planet Repairs is about the need to proceed from a standpoint of pluriversality that highlights the nexus of reparatory, environmental and cognitive justice in articulating the need to repair holistically our relationship with, and inseparability from, the earth, environment and the pluriverse. It means giving due recognition to Indigenous knowledges in contrast with western-centric Enlightenment ideals that separated humanity from nature and devalorized Indigenous systems of knowledge to justify exploitation for capital accumulation.
Working within these two broad definitions, we asked our participants and speakers to consider the relevance of Rematriation to their work, along with its possibilities and challenges, and models and examples, in contrast with government-led 'homecoming programmes' or repatriation. We also asked them to think about the extent to which Afrikan indigeneity itself is under threat and why this should matter for Afrikan heritage communities in the Diaspora, as well as the need for Rematriation not just within the Diaspora, but also on the continent. Finally, we asked about the role that can Afrikan cultures and knowledges can play in contributing to ecological and reparatory justice movements.
The workshop opened with libations led by Dr Tony Van der Meer (University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA), while the session was chaired by Professor Joyce Hope Scott (Boston University, USA).
To kick things off, Aura Carreno Caicedo (Afro-Colombian student and member of the Extinction Rebellion Internationalist Solidarity Network) shared her video and spoken word performance of 'Malaika'. Aura explained that she had created this moving poem from her experiences in school, where her identity as an Afro-Colombian woman was either unrecognized or associated only with an anonymous and enslaved Black figure. This negation of her identity led her to create this poem as a form of self-reparation, enabling her to express her thoughts and feelings about erasure and non-recognition. 'Malaika', she said, 'is an action, a verb' that works to contest the process of negation by reclaiming her personhood and connecting her back to the rich ancestry of her Afrikan roots.
Yvette Modestin (writer, poet and activist focused on Afro-descendent experiences in Latin America, and founder and executive director of Encuentro Diaspora Afro in Boston, MA, USA) responded to Aura's poem with a poem of her own, entitled 'An Ode to Mi Corona' [my Crown]. For her, Rematriation is about reclaiming the Crown on our heads, while grounding our feet in resiliency. 'Art and writing heal', she said, 'grounding the self in our African spirit'. She spoke of how a 'poem showed up' in a moment of deep grief, helping her to heal, and how poetry is a medium for 'falling in love with who we are and where we came from'. 'We are an Americas of people of African and Indigenous descent' and we should be 'unapologetically African, unapologetically Black'. Her creative work is lead by IFA: a spiritual force that enables her to reclaim her Crown. The symbol of the Crown, linked to hair and locks, is the force (Asé) that allows us to gather strength anew each day. It is the antennae to guide our life.
She spoke about reparation as something that is always being represented (from the outside) as 'radical', but how that label of radicalism is an imposed idea that forces conflict upon us. Instead, 'we need to find a place of peace' and understand that Rematriation as reparation is about reconnecting and grounding to achieve peace, in line with Rastafari philosophical and spiritual thought. 'Our struggle is the same wherever we are in the world'.
From poetry, our speakers moved us towards thinking about Rematriation as a practice and a practical process. Nana Kojo Asare Bonsu (MAATUBUNTUMITAWO Global Afrikan Family Reunion International Council) led by speaking about his various visits to Ghana as a Jamaican man and his frustration at always having to obtain a visa. Kofi Mawuli Klu suggested an alternative route by encouraging Kojo to become part of an indigenous Afrikan community under the stewardship of one of Ghana's Paramount Chiefs, Osei Adza Tekpor VII. This was not a quick process, but required him to invest time and energy unlearning, relearning and self-learning for self-repair. He learned the extent to which he belonged to a people that had been oppressed. During a visit to Elmina Castle, he described feeling things beneath his feet and seeing figures from the spiritual realm moving about the place; how his wife began to wail, as they relived the trauma of those who had passed through that place of horror.
To journey to Rematriate meant returning to that trauma, then confronting the realization that there is no automatic right to return and that there is resistance and (political) obstacles to the very process of returning. However, there is a solution in the key role that can be played by Afrikan chieftaincies in addressing the damage done by the imposition of colonial borders in Afrika. Kojo has now Rematriated having been fully welcomed into, and become part of, an Indigenous Afrikan community under the chieftancy of Osei Adza Tekpor VII.
Dr Debra Boyd (Professor and author of Wax Prints of the Sahel: Cloth Portraits of Contemporary African History, 2021) kept our focus on the importance of Afrikan Indigeneity. She looked up information on 'Rematriation' in preparation for the workshop, but kept coming up with repatriation. She noted how this echoed her own studies into Nigerien literature (from Niger), which would always be imagined as Nigerian literature (from Nigeria), the one occluding the other. For her, Rematriation is centred on the role of Afrikan women and their reclamation of the natural resources of Mother Earth.
Her focus is on cotton and the production of textiles, notably Afrikan wax prints. Cotton has an industrial history that is linked directly to the enslavement of Afrikans, but is also an artisanal Afrikan tradition. 'Cotton', she said, 'is a fibre that changed the world, that was known as white gold, that was touched by women's fingers that were small enough to handle its sharp bolls.' From an artisanal perspective, however, the relationship of women to cotton, where women are the main producers, forms part of an important and overlooked history and tradition in the Sahel. In this case, cloth is linked to female power and the sacred values that people have invested in textiles. 'Cloth speaks', she said. It is a form of text, hence the name 'text-ile'. Moreover, 'cloth continues to speak after death', the Afrikan wax prints retelling stories of Afrikan history and culture. Cloth becomes a means of communicating and preserving these stories, playing an important social and political role that can be used as an ideological and pedagogical tool. However, this Indigenous Afrikan practice is now under threat from external competitors seeking to replicate and produce cloth cheaply, but without any economic benefit to Afrika.
After listening to 'Osun' (a Yoruba chant sung by people in the Diaspora), Ras Cos Tafari (Rastafari in Motion Exhibit Team) spoke of how the conversations taking place in the workshop were all reflective of Rastafari consciousness, noting that the workshop was 'like a spiritual experience'. Rematriation is about 'reclamation of your divinity' and that must not be forgotten. The music and poems we have shared are not just 'entertainment', but rather a reparatory process. We need to challenge colonial consciousness and recognize that 'Afrika belong to us' in order to rise out of victim mentality. The concept of Rematriation is therefore connected to that spiritual reclamation, with Rastafari consciousness being the bedrock and inspiration for Afrikan Rematriation.
Dr Davis-Kahina ChenziRa (Director of the Virgin Islands & Caribbean Cultural Center) then responded to Ras Cos Tafari in reverence and respect for the Rastafari who have been at the forefront of Rematriation. 'Afrika is our root', she said, and celebrated the collective spiritual energy and the guidance of our Elders and Elderesses. Picking up from Dr Boyd's references to cloth, she noted that we are all threads in a tapestry, that we are all doing this work together, each playing our part. She asked us to think about what we are going to do after this workshop in response to the 'versations' (not conversations) that were taking place. For her, Rematriation comes out, orally, as 'Rema'atriation' in reference to the seven concepts of Ma'at: truth, balance, order, harmony, righteousness, morality and justice. Just as Dr Boyd pointed to the importance cloth and cotton in energizing our bodies and of clothing as one of our basic necessities, so Dr ChenziRa spoke the need to pay attention to our basic needs, including what we are eating to ensure that we retain our spiritual energy. By reconnecting to ancient ancestral Afrikan legacies, we facilitate our ability to heal. But we also need to ensure that we are working together. We need to pull all the threads together to create our tapestry (our cloth). In this way, we can heal the effects of the Maangamizi (and its intentionally disruption of Afrikan humanity) by applying the ancient Afrikan principles of ReMa'atriation and Ubuntu.
Our final speaker was Dan Okyere Owusu (Media literacy and production consultant, and film maker, Boston, MA, USA) who defined the concept of 'Tarzanism' or the extractivism of (western) media and the way it produces messages about who Afrikan people are, which then become part of our shared imaginary. Instead of 'receiving other people's messages about who we are, we need to define ourselves through our own stories', he said. He is working in partnership with Medegbe TV (Benin) and Ghana TV, as well as his own Africa Gateway Online (AGO), to train people to tell their own Afrikan-centred stories and then pass that knowledge onto successive generations. Reclaiming stories through oral storytelling, using Indigenous languages and technology, means that media 'can be our friend if we produce it'. This reclamation of identity through the power of narrative and the media is therefore also part of enabling Rematriation to heal the disinformation that harms Afrika and Afrikan heritage communities around the world.
The concluding discussions raised a number of different questions that will go on to inform subsequent workshops, including the twenty-year anniversary of the Durban Declaration which is not being commemorated by western states, yet forms an important landmark in terms of reparation (Barryl Biekman), the need to interlink different struggles of relevance to the Afrikan diaspora (Tony Van Der Meer), the importance of connecting Rematriation to the recovery of land (Kofi Mawuil Klu), as well as the difficulties of negotiating with the African Union, since this body of member states was a path prepared by colonialism (Wale Idris Ajibade). Finally, the question of creating a joint statement around the problems going on in Haiti, Colombia, Cuba and South Africa was raised by Tony, with the decision to set up a special meeting about what we can do practically to support existing efforts in these countries. For as Kofi stated, Rematriation is also about 'addressing the plight of Afrikans across the world'.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021
URL https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=212675034080774