The argument for British reparations

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LIKE OUR national rugby, cricket and football teams and some of our parastatals – Eskom, SAA and Transnet spring to mind – South Africa is underperforming.

Briefing the media this week, President Jacob Zuma said South Africa “is in a crisis”.

We could do with a respite, however short-lived.

I’ve been trying to pay attention to the arguments of the resurgent “save the…” lobby groups at parish level.

At the risk of sounding like a killjoy, I feel there is a case to make neighbourhood meetings joker-free zones. Images of Save the Berea, Save the Point Waterfront and Save the Stables meetings illustrate the point.

There are fractious but serious deliberations involving livelihoods.

There are those who pitch for the sole purpose of preserving a Victorian, Edwardian or Georgian heritage. A handful provide diversionary photo ops, making a spectacle of themselves.

Whose heritage are we preserving? For millions of blacks, the colonial inheritance remains a curse.

An enlightened, yet critical view of how past generations coped with challenges and uncertainty under colonial and apartheid rule has been replaced by these prejudicial fantasies of inheritance.

The campaigns also resonated with Duncan du Bois’s letter in the Sunday Tribune sister paper The Mercury this week. Although written in a different context, he quoted historian, Professor Jeff Guy, about “concepts from our colonial and imperial past live on in the post-apartheid present” with telling poignancy.

Having lived and travelled in Britain, it was interesting to observe the attitudes of some of Her Majesty’s subjects and of her loyalists and expats in South Africa.

There was a time when black foreigners were eyed with suspicion as potential illegal over-stayers by the immigration officers at Heathrow.

Those were the days when the sales people in upmarket establishments paid no heed to the shabbily dressed black shopper. They focused on rich Americans, Arabs and, of course, the Japanese tourist.

Today, as South Africa enters the third decade of its political freedom from the British and overall white governance, a transformation – still incomplete – is taking place, which essentially has changed the assumptions of post-colonial and postapartheid nationhood.

It is a nation still racked by poverty, where 16 million people survive on government handouts and millions more have no access to proper sanitation.

Which raises the question: For whose benefit was South Africa governed in the past 300 years?

And as the country grapples with the political, economic and social legacies of that shameful past, the issue of reparations comes up.

In South Africa’s case, an argument for reparations must be based on an assessment of British rule. It was an outpost of the Empire.

Elaborate railway networks in the colonies did not come about because the guardians of the Empire wanted to promote religious pilgrimages for the natives and tourism. There were hard-nosed strategic and commercial calculations that served British investors and industry.

Even in the post-colonial years we were naive to negotiate flawed “offset” agreements with companies like British Aerospace. It merely makes a minority in Britain feel great about doing good. We were too buried in a wilful state of collective amnesia, not remembering Albion’s past perfidies.

British development assistance serves no such purpose now. The problem with British reparations aid to South Africa is that it is misplaced. Post-colonial angst may be good for purposeful seminars involving NGOs and other poverty brokers. That culture of goodness doesn’t resonate with hardnosed South Africans who expect Britain to be equally hard-nosed.

Good diplomacy and charity can’t go hand in hand.

Two years ago the government criticised the UK after it announced it would stop direct aid. The writing was on the wall when UK ministers said the relationship with South Africa should be based on trade, not development. No authentic reconciliation would be possible unless based on acknowledgement of culpability; remorse, reparation and justice. None of these has taken place. Britain has not atoned for the wrongs it has done.

The constitution accorded a special status for the victims of social oppression to facilitate their eventual creation of a level playing field.