People from the African continent and its diasporas will attend workshop to share struggles, experiences and discuss ways to advance reparations
People from the African continent and its diasporas will attend workshop to share struggles, experiences and discuss ways to advance reparations
Reparations for what? At least here in Germany there’s virtually (and I’m covering my bases here, I’m fairly sure that it’s literally nobody) nobody left who could be held even partially responsible for colonialism, and I am not willing to pay for crimes that I did not commit. Very few people are, I’d imagine.
You’re still reaping the benefits from colonialism before your lifetime. Your prosperity is founded on wealth stolen from countries still suffering from the theft. It’s okay to want to repair this.
If colonialism has made those countries poor, then they should have gotten rich once they were no longer part of a colonial empire. At the same time countries which had large colonial empires should have gotten poor, when loosing their empire.
What we mostly see is that this is not the case. Portugal got rich after its empire collapsed. Spain was about as rich as its former colonies for a long time. France and the UK did not collapse after loosing their colonies. There are rich countries, which never did have many colonies or only small ones for a limited time, like Germany, Scandinavia or Switzerland. You also have Oman, which did not get rich despite having had colonies. We also have Africa, which only has Botswana as a country genuinly benefiting from no longer being a colony. However that was after diamonds were found inside Botswana shortly after independence. Funnily enough Botswana also asked to be a colony. Everybody else more or less failed to get rich.
That is not to say that colonial empires should not pay for crimes they comitted or return stolen artifacts. The benefits of colonialism were mostly going to a small elite in the colonial countries and cost the states a lot of resources, which in many cases would have been better spend on other projects.
I can’t say I know enough about the topic to have formed an opinion on whether or not reparations would be justified or not. But here is a point I’ve seen made that has stayed with me
While it’s true that none of us actively participated in colonialism, we still continue to profit by it. Many businesses were founded by money made in the colonies or by wares imported from them, many institutions grew by exploiting and stealing from the people living in them. At the same time the people in the former colonies still suffer from the consequences.
It’s a bit similar to calling for the higher taxation of rich people. Often they inherited their money and huge parts of it were made by exploiting poorer people, which is why it seems unfair to many (including me) that they should give back something to society. Some of my ancestors made good money owning a colonial goods store and I’m sure I owe at least part of my privileged situation to this money. I can understand that the descendants of the people who laboured for these goods might not think that that is fair.