MICHAEL SCHMIDT: How toppling Rhodes helped to prick the conscience of the West on slavery

In the Benin capital of Cotonou stands a new 30m tall sculpture of a black woman toting a shotgun and a sword, unveiled on July 30 to mark the country’s 62nd year of independence from France and reminiscent of the female Agoodjie warriors of the 18th-century court of Queen Tassie Hangbé.

The sculpture was raised on the former “Slave Coast” country in a period that has seen a sea-change in how former imperialist powers are handling the brutal legacy of their slaving past, with a string of apologies from leading statesmen and the establishment of funds in attempts at atonement.

On September 12, Bloomberg cited unnamed sources that the Netherlands is planning to announce it will create a fund of about €200m to raise awareness about the country’s dark legacy of slave trading.

It is the first of a series of recent initiatives by former colonial powers and institutions that touches on SA because of the more than 60,000 slaves forcibly imported to the Netherlands’ Cape colony from 1652 to 1807 by its United East India Company (VOIC).

Prof Pamela Scully of Emory University in the US, co-author of Sarah Baartman and the Hottentot Venus, tells Business Day that “the legacies of slavery and how people did and did not get incorporated into whiteness in subsequent years, and thus their experiences of colonialism and apartheid more generally, are a significant feature of SA history. It affects so many people”.

The Dutch slave trade endured until outlawed in 1814, and embraced the colonies of the Cape and the East Indies (now Indonesia) under the VOC, plus 13 trading forts on the West African coast, New Holland (now part of Brazil), Curaçao (now the Netherlands Antilles), Guyana, and Suriname in the Caribbean under the Chartered West India Company.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte did not mention the planned fund during a state visit to Suriname last month, but hinted at a big announcement to be made later in 2022, saying there is a need for recognition of “the horrible suffering inflicted on the enslaved, acknowledgment of the struggle and resistance that there was, and of course recognition of the social impact of the period of slavery in our present”.

Rutte said he had personally been convinced by the Black Lives Matters movement that the issue had to be tackled. The Dutch initiative also comes after its central bank announced a €5m fund to finance slavery-related projects in the Netherlands and the Caribbean — and that is but one of several initiatives to apologise for and attempt to repair the damage done.

Scully says Black Lives Matter “has mobilised many to reconsider the historical legacies of slavery and colonialism. It has raised the consciousness of many across the globe. The #RhodesMustFall movement contributed also to this larger awareness. I don't think we should minimise politicians’ response to, and education by, popular uprisings and sentiment”.

She argues that the current climate of making amends could be seen to have started with the return of Saartjie Baartman’s remains and her national burial in 2002 in SA, which perhaps “galvanised other countries”.

In 2021, the Jesuits in the US announced they were building a fund starting at $15m that aims at eventually attaining $1bn to issue grants to uplift the close to 5,000 identified living descendants of plantation-worked slaves owned by the Catholic order in the early US over a period of about a century.

The agreement arose out of negotiations initiated by the descendants of 272 enslaved men, women, and children sold in 1838, for the equivalent of $3m in today’s terms, to improve the fortunes of the cash-strapped Jesuit college that later became Georgetown University — and it has set, in Scully’s words, “a good, practical, and ethical” benchmark for other slavery-linked religious orders and universities to follow.

She hailed the fact that apologies for colonial atrocities have started coming thick and fast: in June, King Philippe of Belgium, on a visit to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, offered his “deepest regrets” for his predecessors' brutal rule there, marked by “paternalism, discrimination, and racism”, while French President Emmanuel Macron recently visited former colonies Algeria, Senegal, and Benin, vowing to open France’s colonial archives in full to allow investigations of the “painful moments” of their past.

But it is reparations in their various forms — from bursaries for descendants to the removal or proper contextualisation of offensive monuments, the return of stolen human remains and heritage items, and the restitution of assets including land — which are controversial and complex. Critics of the Jesuit deal have called rather for a full accounting of all the profits the order made off its slaves on the plantations. How reparations funds such as these will be administered and disbursed, and according to what principles remain a thorny subject.

Germany’s offer in 2021 of €1,1bn in development aid in recognition of the Namibian genocide in which more than 110,000 died more than a century ago, aroused the ire of the affected Herero, Nama, and San peoples for its lack of consultation with them, viewing the money not as reparations but as assistance to the politically dominant Ovambo tribe which was not touched by the genocide.

Canada’s decision to pay C$2bn in reparations for its policy of forcibly acculturating about 150,000 indigenous children over the 1870s to the 1990s has also drawn heavy fire. Though Pope Frances apologised in a July visit for the “evil” inflicted in state-funded, church-run schools on the stolen children, indigenous chieftains and activists said reparations could not make amends for the languages and cultures thus obliterated, and for the tens of thousands of children who died during their “schooling”.

Scully says the history of slavery and emancipation should be hallmarks of SA school and university curricula, adding: “It would be good to have various wine farms discuss upfront the histories of slavery and bondage, as well as histories of forms of sexual violence that went along with slavery. I am really impressed by Solms Delta in Franschhoek that addresses the histories of dispossession and has tried to do something to apologise by sharing the wealth”, with workers of colour owning the brand and 45% of the wine farm.

• Schmidt, a veteran SA journalist, is a descendant of a granddaughter of the first freed slave in the Cape, Angela of Bengal. The granddaughter in turn became a slave owner at Groot Constantia, demonstrating the complexity of reparations.