You do not say sorry with your mouth. Our historical consciousness of African moral law demands that we ask the Dutch, the French, the British, the Portuguese, the Germans, and all our other enslavers and colonisers: nixolisa ngani -with what are you apologising?
This is the core of our African restorative justice and jurisprudence.
As black people we ask this because it is understood the material makes manifest the spirit of intent. Reparations enflesh the spirit of atonement in our material world.
It is a question that demands that our enslavers and colonisers open their hands and show us the substance of their apologies.
We must be clear about what we are demanding, reparations will require nothing less than the end of this world, as we know it. To demand reparation is to demand remembrance. It is to remember how we arrived here. It is to have a historical memory of the past, present and future. And so, let us begin at the beginning:
Transatlantic slavery is the material and metaphysical womb of the modern world.
Our former enslavers and colonisers know this all too well, and it is for this reason they will refuse to open their hands, go beyond regrets and so-called apologies, and give reparations. To give reparations is to end the world, to turn upside down everything that this 600-year-old modern world system is built upon. To demand reparations is to confront the terrifying reality that everything in our material and metaphysical worlds will have to change.
No less a figure than the father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, declared in The Wealth of Nations (1776), that “the discovery of America [in 1492], and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope [in 1498], are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind”. In the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels repeated Smith’s claim in The Communist Manifesto, declaring that these twin events — the discovery of the so-called New World and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope — gave to navigation, commerce, and industry, a monstrous impulse never before seen in the history of the world. And yet, what Smith, Marx and Engels neglect to name is the ghost in the wondrous machine of modernity: the transatlantic slave trade.
At the very centre of the New Worlding that unworlded us as black peoples, was the Dutch East India Company, the VOC. Less than a decade after the first Dutch slave ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope, the VOC was founded in 1602. This first multinational monstrosity was the first to link the East and the West and pioneered the global slave trade. In so doing, the VOC became the 17th century’s richest and most powerful company.
For most of the Dutch Golden Age, the Dutch East India Company was a major player in the Indian Ocean slave trade while its sister company, the Dutch West India Company monopolised the transatlantic slave trade, providing the finance and technology that enabled their fellow English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese slavers to establish their own slave-based empires. As the world’s first multinational corporation, the accounting ledgers of the Dutch East India Company lay bare the fact that the term “racial capitalism” is, in fact, a tautology. Capitalism is always racialising. Racialisation is always capitalising. What is capitalism, if not a system sorting who is most fit for exploitation and extraction?
In 1637, the year the Dutch accelerated the global trade in African bodies by conquering the Portuguese slave markets of Elmina Castle, São Tomé and Luanda, Rene Descartes, the central Dutch Golden Age intellectual and father of modern Western philosophy pronounced its “first principle” — “I think, therefore I am”. Far from emerging in a historical vacuum, the Cartesian mind-body dualism was birthed alongside the rise of the transatlantic trade in African bodies, and constructed the precondition for reason and rationality in modern Western philosophy as “bodylessness.”
The Dutch apology for slavery is a sorry one. The Dutch apology for slavery is a sorry of the mouth
From there on, Descartes’ dictum constructed the reasoning and rational subject against the non-reasoning and irrational enslaved, embodied black, who, according to the likes of Hegel, Kant, Hume, and even Nietzsche was situated outside history, moral law, and consciousness. Thus, reason and rationality [was] structured by anti-blackness from the very start. The white fathers thus declared in oppositional terms: “we think, because the other does not” — “we are because the other is not” — “the master is because the slave is not”. With the rupture of transatlantic trade, the European metaphysical world deemed all people of African descent as having no claims to bodily integrity, territory or sovereignty because we have no claims to reason, rationality, morality, and ontological legitimacy that the master is bound to respect.
We see this in the Cape Dutch settlers’ dismissal of the moral and political arguments put forth by conquered indigenous leaders in the aftermath of the 1659 Khoi-Dutch war — South Africa’s first major war of resistance to slaver-settler modernity. The Khoi leaders, several of whom such as Nommoa had travelled to other parts of the Dutch slave trading empire, objected to Dutch land conquest by invoking their indigenous claims to sovereignty and territory based in African jurisprudence. They asked, “If [we Africans], were to come to Holland; would [we] be permitted to act in a similar manner as you act here?” The conquered Khoi leaders continued to try to reason with the settlers, demanding: “Who then, with the greatest degree of justice, can be required to give way — the natural owners, or the foreign invader?”
Exasperated by their insistence on their sovereignty, Jan van Riebeeck, the Dutch East India Company official who established Cape Town as a refreshment station in 1652, responded that he was not bound to respect their laws and claims to territory because their land had been, in his words, “won by the sword.” Thus claiming his European “right of conquest” — which had its genesis in the 1493 Papal Bull which authorised the Spanish Conquest of America — van Riebeeck deemed all indigenous land, no matter where, “empty land”, theirs to take. The moral law and reasoning of the masters thus superseded those of the enslaved and colonised.
In light of these unequal terms of engagement we consider the Dutch prime minister’s December 19 apology for the Netherlands’ historic role in the slave trade, and ask the Dutch state — nixolisa ngani? With what are you apologising?
The Dutch apology for slavery is a sorry one. The Dutch apology for slavery is a sorry of the mouth. Hands empty except for the offer of a €200m fund for museums and educational institutions to raise awareness about the legacy of slavery.
We ask — what is €200m for the centuries of economic, political, social, and spiritual crimes committed against our people? What is €200m from the bloodied purse of the beneficiaries of the Dutch slave trading Golden Age? What is €200m in an economy worth more than €894bn? €200m accounts for less than 0.02% of Dutch GDP. This insulting offer does not even account for 1% of the billions built on the blood of slaves.
We ask, what is the meaning of an apology forced down the throats of the descendants of the enslaved and colonised? To start with, the Dutch state ignored the request for the apology to be made by the Dutch king. That the Dutch prime minister then chose to make the apology on December 19 last year and disregard the request for the apology to be made on Keti Koti — the 150th anniversary of the abolition of Dutch slavery on July 1 2023 — is a grave insult. To add salt to the wound, the prime minister did not seek the organised input and support of the Caribbean. Nor did he acknowledge or seek the organised input of the many African countries which also suffered at their bloodied hands. Be it the West and Central African countries such as Ghana and Angola, whose Atlantic coasts bear the scars of at least 10 Dutch slave forts. Or Mozambique, and Madagascar, whose kidnapped peoples were shipped all over the Indian Ocean basin. Or South Africa, where the Dutch enslaved at least 63,000 people.
We must view the unilateralism of the Dutch apology for slavery as a statement of intent — the former master will continue to dictate the terms of reconciliation to the former slave. Our former enslavers will discipline us into the regime of compulsory forgiveness and reconciliation without reparation. Without reparation, our enslavers will continue to inherit and benefit from their crime.
Again : nixolisa ngani — with what are you apologising?
• Chigumadzi is the 2022-2023 Dorothy Porter & Charles Harris Wesley Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research.
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