60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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290 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness reparations do is to force whites to acknowledge the brutal reality of our common history, something white society generally has refused to do. It provides a historically grounded explanation for the continuing burden of racial oppression: the unequal distribution of economic resources, land, and access to opportunities for social development, which was sanctioned by the federal government.’ 12 Manning ads: ‘Consequently, it is that same government that bears the responsibility of compensating those citizens and their descendants to whom constitutional rights were denied.’ Affi rmative action was essentially ‘payback equality’, in the words of political scientist Ronald Walters; it created millions of job opportunities, but did relatively little to transfer wealth from one racial group to another: ‘Onethird of all African-American households today has a negative net wealth. The average black household’s wealth is less than 15 percent of the typical white household’s. Most of our people are trapped in an almost bottomless economic pit from which there will be no escape – unless we change our political demands and strategy from liberal integrationism to a restructuring of economic resources, and the elimination of structural defi cits that separate blacks and whites into unequal racial universes.’ Introducing the reparations component in our deliberations is fundamental, as Manning argues: ‘“Reparations” transforms the dynamics of the national racial discourse, moving from “handouts” to “paybacks”. It parallels a global movement by people of African descent and other Third World people to renegotiate debt and to demand compensation for slavery, colonialism, and apartheid… [T]he greatest challenge in the national debate over African-American reparations is in convincing black people, not whites, that we can actually win. The greatest struggle of the oppressed is always against their own weaknesses, doubts, and fears. The reparations demand is most liberating because it has the potential for transforming how black people see themselves, and our own history.’ Conclusion In his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the playwright Harold Pinter made an impassioned and powerful speech. He asked why ‘the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought in Stalinist Russia were well known in the West, while American state crimes were merely superfi cially recorded, left alone, documented’. 12 Ibid.
is there a south perspective on genocide? 291 Across the world the extinction and suff ering of countless human beings could be attributed to rampant American power. ‘But,’ said Pinter, ‘you wouldn’t know it. It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.’ Pinter’s words were more than the surreal. The BBC ignored the speech of Britain’s most famous dramatist. I will end on a sad note, about my own country. Four days ago [in November 2007] the legislative assembly approved a new criminal code that makes it a crime for any woman to interrupt her pregnancy for therapeutic reasons including danger to the mother’s own life. All the more tragic, because the majority governing party, the Sandinista front, voted overwhelmingly in favour of the measure, on account of its alliance with the Catholic Church hierarchy. Nicaragua became the sixth country in the world to ban all forms of abortion, after the Vatican, Malta, El Salvador, Honduras and Chile. Poor women in Nicaragua are being condemned to death, because the rich ones can seek a life-saving abortion, or any abortion, outside the country. This targeted violence against women, this genocide, can be prevented, if people and organisations act and stand with the women of Nicaragua. Yesterday president Kaunda reminded us where we all came from. That common motherland is being targeted. Let men defend our mothers, our daughters, our spouses and our sisters. All women, at any time, in any place. They – you – are the best of what we are and what we can be.
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no. 50 | december 2008 Revisiting t
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Revisiting the heart of darkness -
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Acknowledgements The larger part of
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Dennis Brutus, born 1924 in then Rh
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60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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