Apartheid, Genocide and Reparations:How Might We Deal With the Present and the Future?

The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.
– Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

We live IN the first truly global age.

The politics of the post-Washington consensus with its dominant liberal institutionalist tradition is largely technocratic and refuses to address the asymmetries of power.

In essence, the governance agenda, as constructed by international institutions and dominant states, has largely stripped questions of power, domination, ethics and justice from the conversation.

Moreover, for too long economists, historians and politicians had marginalised ethics. Some still do.

One of the first influential attempts to humanise economics was by the Nobel prize laureate Amartya Sen in his influential book ‘Development as Freedom’, published in 1999.

Apartheid, genocide and reparations are normative concerns, with significant indivisible goods that need to be negotiated. Such concerns sit uncomfortably within the state-centric corset of the post-Washington consensus.

The ongoing negotiations on genocide and reparations between Namibia and Germany take place in such as context.

In Namibia, the legacies of apartheid and genocide are part of the fabric of the archaeology of the present. To deal with the diverse legacies of apartheid and genocide, specific normative interventions are of primary importance.

The primacy of the international dimension of ethics and the ethical dimension to the international needs to be foregrounded, more so in bilateral relations between Namibia, Germany and South Africa. 

Apartheid and colonialism with genocide as its most brutal expression, were morally repugnant. Ethically, both require reparations as part of a just and fair, integrative approach to historical justice.  

THE TECHNOLOGIES OF POWER

It is instructive that in the ongoing conversation about the 1904-1908 genocide and reparations in this country, reference to the more recent period of apartheid rule was largely absent.

While there were significant differences between apartheid and colonialism, the two forms of power shared some disturbing commonalities.

For example, both invoked a negative cognitive framing of people other than white or European.

Both shared common threads of social relations. As a potential commodity form, black life and labour were not only needed, but also exploited for their industrial utility in agriculture and later in copper and diamond mining.

The specifics of the commodity form and the particulars of the market in which blacks were forced to partake, were predetermined by an extractive logic of natural resources.

Both the former apartheid state and the German colonial state extracted natural resources to fuel their industrial development.

This was done at the expense of the indigenous population and economy.

Alienation of land, discriminatory taxation and coercive means were used to ensure a steady supply of cheap labour to the mines, the fishing sector, the railways, commercial agriculture and towns.

Yet, the same population that supplied cheap labour was exposed to humiliating depredation and restrictive social control.

The logic of race under apartheid and German colonialism should also be understood as an economy of denial and displacement, based on the European settler’s denial of a common humanity or destiny between them and the natives.

These denials were expressed in attitudes, emotions, laws, regulations and institutions.

As a political project, apartheid and German colonialism, consisted of drawing relative rigid lines of separation that entered the everyday social lives of both the rulers and the ruled.

Space and the mobility of people had to be controlled so as to produce a specific form of social mapping, much in evidence in towns and cities. 

Segmentation (or the drawing of lines of separation) extended to institutions, such as schools and hospitals, cemeteries, relations between people, space and territory and even feelings in the case of apartheid.

Apartheid and German colonialism also shared various technologies of power.

In relation to Africans, the techniques of both power and profit ultimately centred on the body: The individual body of the migrant and the domestic worker and the racial body of the populace.  

Apartheid did differ from German colonialism in that the racial distribution of death did not result in the native population’s decimation.

This could not be allowed to happen as native labour was needed to keep the white-controlled economy alive.

Indigenous African labour was the raw material that literally kept the dominant white minority alive under a system of legally sanctioned segregation.

STATE CENTRISM

In the context of the post-Washington consensus, the seminal importance of sovereign states continues to be preeminent.

With their resources and rule-making capacities, they remain at the base of any strategy to develop the provision of a public goods agenda. 

In the context of calls for reparations, the new international political economy has major implications for the current governance and development agenda.

Largely because it is driven by members of a transnational policy elite.

Therefore, the current policy agenda has no conception of the residual strength of identity and memory politics, the erosion of dignity, the draining of spirituality, the importance of social bonds within communities and, by extension, no ethical agenda for addressing these concerns.

Thus, it is unsurprising that indivisible goods, meaning core needs and values – goods which are by nature indivisible – and goods which are invisible and highly valued because of their linkage to core needs and values, are generally not open to negotiation. 

RECONCILIATION AND REPARATIONS

From an ethical perspective, Namibians need to enter into a conversation about our entwined past with Germany and South Africa and how we could conceivably transcend the negative legacies of the past.

How we could strike a balance between memory and erasure.

This would require a significant recast of how history is taught in schools and universities.

It should be followed by social and spatial reconstruction as an integral part of genuine reconciliation.

Namibians are increasingly forced to reconstruct themselves out of many fragments and juxtapositions of forms, images and memories drawn from the country’s entwined, if splintered, histories with Germany and South Africa.

Namibians are constantly trapped in contradictory repertoires of ethnicity, race, tribalism, the formal/informal, urban/rural, former exiles and those who fought against apartheid at home, and ‘tradition’/‘modern’.

This is because ‘national reconciliation’ has little cultural, ethical and historical traction.

It is an elite and party-political project that is not informed by an ongoing national conversation of what it might mean to coexist as Namibians, nor on humanising memorialisation. 

Negotiations between Namibians and Germans, should be about far more than wishes, wants and desires.

Far more than monetary concerns and unrealistic time horizons, they should be about ethical and moral demands.

About how to negotiate indivisible, as opposed to divisible, goods.

About notions of justice and fairness, even if a just outcome may not be fair to all concerned.

From such a perspective, reconciliation inside Namibia becomes a necessary precondition for reconciling with Germany and South Africa. 

At the very least, important memorial sites such as Hornkranz, where the first attack of 12 April 1893 took place and where a significant number of women and children were brutally massacred, should be proclaimed national heritage sites.

The sacrilege of a tourist facility at Shark Island must end.

The reality is that Namibia has a highly fragmented and, by and large, essentialist ethnic topography of memorialisation.

An inclusive memory culture does not exist.

Surely, the more recent liberation struggle is not the only history worthy of memorialisation?

Memorialisation needs to be humanised, not essentialised, nor painted with an ethnic brush, for genocide and apartheid torpedoed the fabric of global humanity.

An injury to one, is an injury to all.

Morally, this makes the case for reparations. The nature of the ongoing negotiations with Germany need to prioritise indivisible goods over divisible goods.

The path to meaningful reconciliation with Germany and South Africa lies in a cultural project; using culture with its ability for forgiveness, its core indivisible goods, its fractured yet enduring identities, and potential for building human understanding.

A diversity of human agencies beyond the three states, should build upon our entwined histories towards reconstructing and rediscovering a common humanity. 

– André du Pisani is professor emeritus of politics at the University of Namibia with a keen interest in ethics, history and conflict transformation.

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