Latest News Archive

Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items

Reparative Justice as Human Rights

25 April 2024 Photo Supplied

Opinion article by Khanya B Motshabi, Senior Lecturer of Public Law and Strategy Lead of UFS Africa Reparation Hub.

Unjustified injuries inevitably trigger demands for remediation, almost always, at some point. If so, colonial-apartheid atrocities rightly produce claims to redress. This face of reparative justice claims is easily cognisable. But it hides a deeper and larger claim to wholeness. Wholeness returns something to its original condition, or nearly there, and compensates for intervening fissures. Return and reparation are thus key remedies for colonial-apartheid harms. Wholeness builds on such ideas as replacement, atonement, restoration, and restitution. Wholeness concepts recognise, enable, and propel national reconstruction, an essential for shattered nations. This logic is perfectly compelling. Appreciation of colonial-apartheid depredations may be faint. However, colonial-apartheid harms equate to major world system shocks. Think of natural and ecological disasters, public health crises and material armed conflict. Picture post-1945 Germany. Imagine post-Belgian genocide Congo. Take Rwanda post-genocide. And on, we could continue.

Inevitable calls for justice

Reparative justice scholarship must frame the imperative of global justice. It imagines the world of our dreams. These fit the emerging world system opportunities, including timing inflections, to which I return. The fundamental justice thrust of reparatory scholarship is as eternal, of course, as is unremedied unjust injury. This intellectual, and political, ambition fuels the University of the Free State (UFS) Africa Reparation Hub. Reparatory scholars must prove the historic injury. This is not a tool of attack, discomfiture, or division. It merely grounds the justice claim. Domain scholars must, directly and indirectly, articulate this justice claim. Accordingly, we must cement relationships with both the African Union (AU) and sub-continental multilateral organisations. The Reparation Hub helps formulate AU reparative claims across conceptual, legal, political, and diplomatic realms. The Hub is assembling a Panel of Experts on Africa Reparations Experts (PEAR). The hub is creating a comprehensive Africa reparations information archive and resource repository. Recently, the Hub, Department of Public Law and Faculty of Law hosted their first reparations seminar, with Prof Saleem Badat as leader and Prof Pearl Sithole as discussant. The Hub officially launches in June 2024. The Hub continues its reparatory justice research. Undergraduate and graduate teaching and learning programmes could and should follow, in well-chosen good time, with due protocols.

Building the framework for justice

Reparative scholarship inhabits an ethically and morally attractive moral universe. Subjugation of former colonists, often current neo-colonialists, does not belong there. That would be wrong. Indefensible. What we want is a world defined by justice. There, human security and a sound peace and community among nations are possible. The supplicant status of former colonies must be reversed. The current world order obstructs - effectively precludes - human rights realisation in the post-colony. Post-colonial human rights enjoyment rests not simply on abstractions like freedom, equality, dignity, separation of powers and the rule of law. Intrinsically, these abstractions offer obvious human rights and human dignity value. Less obvious is their contextually defective human rights proposition. That the lofty rhetoric, and ostensible principles, should easily co-exist with endemic violations is strange. Deliberate worldwide human abuses, including war and genocide, especially against dark coloured persons are strange, or should be, strange. One international hegemon was at peace for about fifteen units of its near 250-year life, only. A global power has militarily attacked an estimated 85 to 100 countries, merely between 1945 and 2011.

The archetypal victim is a global South human. This is a poor human rights formula for the mythological exotics, the ones who by general misperception, are deservedly subject races. African peoples, lawyers and scholars hardly have coherent experiential human rights stories. Such is our history, past and present. That human totality has shared aspirations matters not a jot. That humanity shares the same earth-space community is an incidental and dismissible insight.

Perforce, the foundation of global South human rights protection is different. Coloniality, or enduring post-colonial colonial relations, must end. Reparation must, among other things, reverse at least those development deficits connected to colonial exploitation. Reparation, in the material form, can restore some extracted economic value. As both end and means, reparation is essential for post-colonial human liberty and fulfilment. Accordingly, decoloniality and reparations inherently drive quality post-colonial human rights outcomes. Instrumentally, decoloniality and reparations enhance global South human rights realisation. Political design imperfections aside, the painfully emerging multipolar global democracy may offer superior human rights actualisation. Life is, in this sense, a gamble. We have no choice on that world architecture gamble. But the geopolitical recalibration, itself, is afoot and assured. So, reparative justice features in a precious trio: decoloniality, reparations and multipolarity. Under this trio lies a vital ontology: validly, dark peoples are indeed human and dark nations are indeed nations. Dark peoples legitimately claim, and truly enjoy, human rights and human dignity. That eminent scholar, Michael Riesman, illustrates acutely. Human rights and human dignity are not myth system. Human rights and human dignity are operational code, reality.

The path to human rights

The forecast multipolar, decolonial and reparative conditions present a signal world system opportunity. The timing seems apt. And the opportunity promises much. The constitutive work is currently underway, as is evidently though murky. The architecture is difficult to imagine, design and assemble. But our dreams are crisp and bright. We want and deserve to inhabit that new world. We, the Africans, have for too long been disposable, forgettable. A world order warm to African, African-descent and post-colonial peoples prizes multipolarity, decoloniality and reparation. Post-colonial human rights fulfilment presupposes this system design principle. The principle fuels African human rights and human dignity. So, its inherent priorities represent the world we want. There, international society defines, or punctuates, itself by human rights as multipolar, decolonial and reparative arrangements. The is the stuff of dreams. A world of dreams. The dreams of our children and their children. I previously claimed that ‘our children are the force behind the waves of history still to come.’ I repeat that claim. Supported by decoloniality, multipolarity and reparation, our descendants can shape human history and human rights. We dare not squander their legacy, not least through corruption and state capture. We want better. We must behave better. Decoloniality, multipolarity and reparative justice promise, and demand, better. Then, post-colonial human rights actualisation might be optimal.

News Archive

Historians must place African history on world stage – Dr Zeleza

2017-05-30

From the left: Panellists Rev Henry Jackson,
Prof Irikidzayi Manase and Arno Van Niekerk at a book
launch and panel discussion on Africa Day hosted by the
UFS Sasol Library.
Photo: Mamosa Makaya

“African historians must take seriously the challenge of placing African history in world history, and in the history of our species, Homo sapiens.”

With these words, Dr Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Vice Chancellor of the United States International University-Africa in Nairobi, Kenya, stressed the continent’s challenge.

According to him the contest should continue to recover and reconstruct Africa’s long history. Liberating African knowledges can be done by: “Provincialising Europe that has monopolised universality, universalising Africa beyond its Eurocentric provincialisation, and engaging histories of other continents on their own terms.”

University celebrates Africa Month in various ways
Dr Zeleza delivered the ninth Africa Day Memorial Lecture, titled The Decolonisation of African Knowledges, at the University of the Free State (UFS). The lecture, hosted by the Centre for Africa Studies (CAS), took place on 24 May 2017 in the Equitas Auditorium on the Bloemfontein Campus and was one of the ways in which the UFS celebrated Africa Month.

Scholars should immerse themselves in these thoughts
Dr Zeleza focused on two issues, which he said were interconnected. They were the unfinished project of decolonising African knowledges and the continent's positioning in global knowledge production.

He said Africa’s scholars and students should “immerse themselves in the rich traditions of African social thought going back millennia”. According to him the continent’s research profile still remains weak in global terms.

“It is imperative that the various key stakeholders in African higher education from governments to the general public to parents, and to students, faculty, staff, and administrators in the academic institutions themselves, raise the value proposition of African higher education for 21st century African societies, economies, and polities.”

“Colonialism is associated with injustice
and inequality, but what happens when
our liberators become our oppressors?”

Library celebrates with panel discussion and book launch
The UFS Sasol Library celebrated Africa Day by presenting a book launch and panel discussion on 25 May 2017, on the pertinent and current political theme of land redistribution with a comparative basis of land invasions in Zimbabwe.

Prof Irikidzayi Manase discussed his book White Narratives: The Depiction of Post-2000 Land Invasions in Zimbabwe, accompanied by Rev Henry Jackson who wrote Another Farm in Africa. A perspective of the economic implications of land redistribution in South Africa was discussed by panellist Arno Van Niekerk: Senior Lecturer of Economics at the UFS Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences.

Inequality still an African problem
The content of the books are a stark reminder of the burning issues of inequality and loss of identity of those who lost their farms in Zimbabwe, a collection of memoirs by white farmers and their families. Rev Jackson gave a religious perspective on reconciliation, forgiveness and the question of land ownership, saying that healing of injustice begins with forgiveness of past transgressions.

Van Niekerk highlighted that while land issues were important, “social cohesion is affected by the economic decisions that will be made”. In closing, Prof Manase called for serious consideration of what the future may hold. “Colonialism is associated with injustice and inequality, but what happens when our liberators become our oppressors?”

The panel discussion was attended by staff and students of the university, and was lit up by robust discussions on possible historical and future solutions to the question of land, decolonisation and political power struggles in Southern Africa and lessons to be learned from Zimbabwe.

UFS celebrates Africa Month (24 May 2017)

Back

Economic and Management Sciences

Education

Health Sciences

The Humanities

Law

Natural and Agricultural Sciences

Theology and Religion

Open Distance Learning

Business School

We use cookies to make interactions with our websites and services easy and meaningful. To better understand how they are used, read more about the UFS cookie policy. By continuing to use this site you are giving us your consent to do this.

Accept