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Reparations and The Politics of Race
And why Black folk may never see a penny…
Reparations is a topic which will never go away.
And like most topics, it is shaped by the business and politics of race.
A few days ago, it emerged that white Zimbabwean farmers, who were forced off land which their ancestors stole from the natives, are in line for a 3.5 billion dollar compensation from the current government of the South African nation.
Now let’s contrast this with Africans, at home and abroad.
When the atavistic Belgian, Leopold II was in charge of the area known as the Congo Free State, the man slaughtered millions of people in his bid to extract the precious resources buried underneath the African earth and when the full extent of his crimes were exposed, nothing was done to compensate the descendants of those who had suffered immensely.
And they weren’t the only ones at the receiving end of the genocidal instincts of white supremacy.
The Herero people who make up Namibia were killed in vast numbers by the Germans, who were keen to replicate what their European neighbours had done on the continent.
The rivalry among the French, German and British was always going to spill over for those caught in the crosshairs but no one envisaged the point…