Should Former Colonial Powers Pay Reparations? (Your Radical Questions with Simukai Chigudu)

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1:26Amol Rajan:Thursday's episode is Professor. No, are you a doctor or professor? What do I call you? Just Simukai. You call me Simukai. Both titles work, but I'm actually a double doctor. Double doctor. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Right. Full academic. I'm married to an academic. I know how this goes. My guest today is the double doctor Simukai Chigudu, Associate Professor of African Politics at Oxford University and a founding member of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, the movement pushing to decolonise the university and remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College. But as we discussed on Thursday's episode, and I implore you to go back and listen to it, it's a little bit more complicated than that.

2:02Amol Rajan:It's not a case of just tearing things down. It's about actually, in a weird sort of way, building things up like our knowledge. Anyway, his new book weaves together his experience growing up in post-independence Zimbabwe as part of the Born Free Generation, with a wider look at how British influence still shapes that country. It blends personal and political history to offer a very fresh perspective on race, class, identity, and the ongoing legacy of colonialism around the world. It's called Chasing Freedom, Coming of Age at the End of Empire. And if you want to know whether or not you found that freedom, you'll have to listen to Thursday's episode.

2:33Amol Rajan:But this is a good place to start. Right, Simakai, double doctor. Are you feeling ready? I am. Okay, be radical. Here we go. This is our first question from Mike in Belgium. Amal, reference Cecil Rhodes. The scholarship that's available to students, as I understand it, worldwide has benefited many. Yes, he has a history, but that history, which can be read and researched online or otherwise, should be published, all of it, warts and all, so people can see exactly who he was and what he did. But I don't think that is a reason for removing the statue, hiding things away. Better to get things out in the open so it's clear and obvious who this man was and what he did and why.

3:23Amol Rajan:Mike, thank you very much indeed. So Mike, I think Mike, if I could gently put it, is accusing the Roads Must Fall campaign of an attempt at concealment. And I'm going to encourage Mike to listen to last week's episode, because I think you would argue that that's sort of the opposite of what you're trying to do. Very much so. I mean, I think Mike and I actually share a set of common principles here, which is to say that for a figure as influential, as powerful, as historically significant as Cecil Rhodes, we need to be telling that history in the round. warts and all. It's mostly warts, but warts and all.

4:10And so I agree with him. I mean, you know, I think that something like the Rhodes Scholarship, which was relatively narrowly framed when it was commissioned, when it was given as a bequest to the university and intended to pursue effectively the creation of a secret society that would continue to advance Rhodes' interest, has become something much larger, more ambitious, more inclusive, still faulty in various ways. But more to the point, I think the focusing narrowly on like, you know, you take down the statue and it disappears is a misreading in substance of what Roads Must Fall and such campaigns were trying to do.

4:51Amol Rajan:Yeah, Mike, you say that the Roads Must Fall campaign was trying to sort of put things away because they offend. And just so you know, the argument that you've advanced, I don't know if this is true of the whole campaign, but the argument that you've advanced is that that statue should be moved. You know, it's not, you know, I mean, fall is a pretty provocative word, but Rhodes must fall comes from, that is a phrase, a slogan that has a long history going back to 20th century Africa. But what you really want to do with this particular statue of Rhodes is move him to somewhere very public, you know, a museum in Oxford, part of a much more contextualised exhibition where people can see the statue, but understand it is part of a kind of an argument within history.

5:30Amol Rajan:Absolutely. And I think in some ways it's more productive to think about the substance, right? Because, you know, once we get into the particular statue, there's the question of, well, what does visibility look like? I mean, it's pretty high up on Oriole's front-facing edifice on the high street in Oxford, that it's actually, as it currently exists, has no pedagogical value, you know, because it's really now just a piece of stone propaganda when you see it in situ. And I think if it were taken down, it can be relocated in ways that are more substantively interesting and able to engage with. I guess the real question then becomes, how do we use or mobilize forms of public memorialization to talk about the complex or ugly sides of the history of an institution, a country, whatever it might be?

6:22And in a sense, that's what I'm taking away from Mike's question, right? That if we're sincerely committed to this idea of telling a history warts and all, how do you do that in a form of public pedagogy that is constructive and engaged, that's lively and animated?

6:36Amol Rajan:And just in practical terms, what does that mean? What does that mean? Is it the selection of people that you do memorialise through statues, but also when you do memorialise them, you maybe have an accompanying note, sort of an explanation, which is kind of comprehensive and says, you know, does the warts and the all, you know? Yeah, I mean, I think there are different examples I've seen of this being done. You know, so something that's happened in the university is they've changed a lot of the portraiture. So for a long time, you'd walk through different Oxford colleges, and you'd basically see old white men from the 17th and 18th century.

7:11And increasingly, colleges are like, well, we're not getting rid of all of those. We're putting some down, we're rotating them. And we're introducing and painting portraits of maybe more contemporary figures or people who have been overlooked for their contributions to academia, to intellectual advancement in the university. And that doesn't, you know, it can be people like, OK, the first Black Rhodes scholar, for instance, has a portrait put up to him. It might be the first woman or the first cohort of scholars from a particular background. But there are other ways that we can celebrate unsung heroes because they all kind of enrich our sense of what is this institution?

7:54Who are we and what does it mean to live and study and work here together?

7:57Amol Rajan:So in pedagogical terms or epistemological terms, your kind of principle is show more, not less. It's show more, not less. And I would say one other thing, which is to say that I think we need to think of visual culture as dynamic rather than static. So some of the arguments about keeping a statue in place sort of hinge on this idea that like taking it down is to erase history. What I would say is that statues are constantly being taken down all of the time and being put up in new places, that we're constantly changing our memorials and our kind of visual landscape of like what we put up and what we take down.

8:34And I think embracing that, not being afraid of it, to say that, like, yeah, this is, we are communities as human beings that are constantly in conversation with ourselves and revisiting, you know, categories that were once anathema to the identity of an institution, like having a black person at Oxford, are now actually inject a vitality into that. And there will be other identities and issues that maybe are not forefront on people's minds in 2026 that will gain significance, you know. I also think that something like the Rhodes Must Fall movement, because it gave rise to such activism, distills a particular moment in early 21st century history about the nature of protest and institutions and about why history becomes the battleground for discussions about multiculturalism.

9:21I think that, too, can be memorialized, you know. And so I think let's just be more imaginative about this.

9:26Amol Rajan:This is a busy memorial. Yeah, indeed, indeed, indeed. There's a lot going on, but what a great thing to visit. Mike, thank you very much indeed for that question. Wonderful to know that you're listening to Radical in Belgium. We're honoured to have your time and company. Thank you so much. Ashley sent us this question on WhatsApp. I happen to know who Ashley is and she's an amazing human being. Here she is. This is Ashley Hodges. Hi, Amal. This is Ashley Hodges, the CEO of Young Citizens. We love the pod. My question for Professor Chigudu would be, what can schools do, teachers do, if they can only do one thing that would lead towards decolonising the curriculum?

10:01Amol Rajan:He might be aware there's a big curriculum change coming in 2028, thanks to this government. And there's lots on and there's lots that teachers are overwhelmed with with those changes. So if he could choose one thing, what would it be? Ashley thank you so much let me just give a quick response and shout out to Ashley Hodges who has done incredible work in the domain of social mobility for decades really in this country which is why I know her and it's wonderful to know Ashley that you and your comrades at Young Citizens are listening to the podcast and enjoying it thank you so much As you gave us that question, Ashley, I heard a sort of mm-hmm coming out from Simaclite.

10:37Amol Rajan:And I'm just trying to remember where it was. I think it was the big curriculum change coming in 2028. And yeah, what's the answer? If there was one thing, only one thing they could do. It was decolonizing the curriculum. I almost feel like, so I just need to contextualize one thing for you, Amor. What you're, mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, it's that, so I, as a professor, I only teach postgraduate students. So I only teach masters and PhD students. So one effect of that is for somebody in academia, I know scandalously little about what happens in high schools. Because unlike my colleagues who teach undergrads, I don't look at GCSE and A-level results.

11:16Somebody the other day told me that GCSEs no longer have grades attached to them, that they're now numbers. Oh, yeah, the numbers. Yeah, that like blew my mind. I still call them O-levels.

11:26Amol Rajan:I think it's like the 10 and then we sound so old, man. I know, I know, it's embarrassing. I remember fondly the days of the A star to C. Yeah, exactly. So I think all of that to say that, you know, what I would suggest is probably less to do with, you know, a specific policy prescription and more like an ethos. And I don't know the content of the curriculum redesign. But what I can see is, you know, if you look at the world today and the kinds of questions that relate to the discussion we're having that I think preoccupy a lot of young people, right? Whether that's multiculturalism in Britain, whether that's the war in Gaza and now expanding throughout the Middle East in Iran, whether that's migration and travel, whether that's the resurgence of a kind of chest-thumping nationalism.

12:23individualism. I think all of those in different ways have this history and a politics behind it, a way that like, you know, none of this stuff comes from nowhere. It's rooted in a history, but it's also about how that history is translated into people's lives, right? So it's about the past and the present. And I think that trying to equip young people with a curriculum that can effectively contextualize the world for them much more capably, but also can start to give the skills of why thinking about how the world came to be is relevant to their lives and how they're going to negotiate and carry themselves within it, you know?

13:07And so I guess I would be, you know, really, I think the value of what we are calling by shorthand a decolonized curriculum is that, is that it's giving a richer, more dynamic view of the world. I mean, obviously, it's got to be tailored to where children are at in their educational journey and what they're able to take in. But something that I think equips them just with a degree of context and something I guess that maybe worries me in a broader sense in my interactions with younger people is that so much of the, like, they're inundated with information and not necessarily with knowledge, as sort of the cliche goes.

13:47Yeah, most information is junk, yeah. It's junk and it also comes fast and fragmented.

13:53Amol Rajan:Yeah. That the experience of being online has become the pervasive idiom for how people encounter knowledge, that it's, you know, it's coming this thing, then that thing, and it's not connected or woven into any narrative. It's not telling the story. Ashley, thank you so much for your question. Hugely appreciate it and hugely appreciate all the work you've done in your terrain for a long time. Now, the next question is from Dan. And it's about an idea we discussed on the main podcast, which is the idea of reparations and indeed the UK specifically paying reparations. Here we go. This is from Dan.

14:21Amol Rajan:As a society, we've got to move on. We could be charging Italy for what the Romans did, the Nordic countries for what the Vikings did. But at the end of the day, history is unfair, but we've got to move on. We've got to look to the future. and I feel that that would hold us back and lead to more division with people who, families, who weren't rich, which is most of the people, having nothing to do, no benefits, nothing to do with slavery, would lead to more division. So my question would be, is reparations really something to focus on or is it time to sort of learn the lessons of slavery but as a society move forward?

15:07Amol Rajan:Thank you. Dan, thank you so much for that question. That's really good of you to do that. So that comparison is one you often hear. Should we be charging Italy for what the Romans did, the Nordics for what the Vikings did, and so on? History is unfair. We've got to move on. You know, I understand and shared Dan's intuition and anxieties. And, you know, there was something that he said in that message that was really crucial. He talked about, you know, the sheer poverty that exists in this country, the number of people who are struggling through a cost of living crisis that's, you know, affecting the nation in just really hard hitting ways.

15:46I mean, the UK has an unacceptable, egregious level of childhood poverty for a Western industrialized country, to say nothing of the housing crisis, the lack of jobs for young people. And so it can feel very strange to be having an abstract debate about now paying out, you know, vast tranches of money to societies over historic crimes.

16:07Amol Rajan:And it's worth saying, it's a hell of a tough political sell. I mean, you imagine being the Labour politician that comes on the Today programme and says, yeah, sure, we're going to do X and Y in this country, but by the way, we're also going to give some money to Jamaica. We're also going to give some money. That's a tough argument to make. It is a tough argument to make. I guess what I would say is that I think that there are very concrete things, including as we discussed vis-a-vis, you know, the Zimbabwean example that I gave. I think that there are very, very concrete examples from very recent history where we can trace and specify the debts that Britain owes.

16:42And I think that's qualitatively different to saying, let's, you know, lock ourselves up in a library for the next 12 months and find out every possible instance of historic atrocity and see how we can pay, you know, that would, I think, be absurd. But I think that taking the argument to its absurd extreme should not distract us from thinking about, you know, practically and concretely? What are the things that we can identify that Britain owes? What are the, you know, the specific instances that we can trace the harm that they're doing at present? Okay, that's one thing. The other thing, though, as we discussed in the main podcast, is that reparations is not just about paying money.

17:16Like, I tend to think about, I mean, I use the phrase reparative justice, but let's say reparations, in a very broad sense that it's partly material, it's in terms of financial, but it's also about, you know, artifacts in museums. It's also about investment in certain types of opportunities. I mean, I'd also say that in many ways, the long history that Britain has of giving foreign aid is tied up in its kind of reparative duties, but it's just not used in that language, right? Like, I think a lot of people over time have argued that overseas development assistance to try to end poverty in many parts of Africa.

17:56Poverty that Britain is heavily implicated in creating is an important thing that needs to be earmarked, right? And we don't necessarily use the term reparations in part because it's incendiary for so many different people. So I think that reparations is not as alien an idea when you start to go through its different dimensions, ways that it resembles things that Britain already does.

18:21Amol Rajan:But it's so interesting when you say the phrase people might recognize is, you know, don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. You know, just because in America there'll be a practical objection, which is, you know, what do reparations go to all black people? Well, what about the poor white people? What about the rich black people? Is Oprah and LeBron James going to? You could actually, you could sort of say, hang on a second. Is there a principle here that we believe in, which is sustained moral injury, which has a lasting effect, is worth acknowledging and in some way correcting? And as you say, on the point about cultural exchanges, I mean, there's lots of innovative stuff has been done.

18:53Amol Rajan:Most recently on the Bayeux Tapestry, Elgin Marbles, the Benin Bronzes and so on. You know, reparations doesn't have to mean we're going to give 2 % of our budget to this country forever. If there's a thread to some of what you're saying, I'd suggest it's a sort of, it's a fuller, more kind of evolved, more comprehensive picture of the way in which history has an ongoing impact on today. Yeah. And, you know, I think there's one other thing I would say, you know, just to round out the picture for me, which is that, you know, when I grew up in Zimbabwe, and as I read about in the book, like, we were, my primary school didn't teach us the local language until we were in our third year.

19:32And even then it was just done sort of tokenistically. Like, you'll have half an hour to sing songs in the Shana language. And that's about it. That you're repeatedly told that the curriculum that matters here in Zimbabwe is the one that's going to get you to the Western world and particularly to the UK by the time you come to university. That your culture, your history doesn't matter. What matters is the history of the former colonizer. My high school in Zimbabwe had a history of the school test in which, amongst other things, we had to learn how many of our former pupils died in the First and Second World War.

20:08So all of that to say that part of what Global Britain has done is kind of, you know, tell us that like your culture doesn't matter. Britain is what matters. Then we move and migrate to this country. And everyone's like, whoa, hang on a minute. What are you doing here? Will you go back where you came from? And so I think that there is a reparative act in coming to understand the harm done to culture, language, histories and politics of other places that were colonized and where all of that was displaced with the kind of injunction or the belief that British culture was somehow superior. And I think that that can be done in multiple different ways.

20:50Part of it is how we're training and teaching young people today about what Britain is and about why so many people migrate to this country and how they've come to understand their sense of self. Part of it is also how are we supporting, how is this country supporting, let's say, a country like Zimbabwe in things like educational initiatives, given the crucial role that Britain played in shaping Zimbabwe's educational system. And that might be a different way of thinking about it, too. I can understand from Dan's point of view, and I mean this out of sort of respect, I hope it doesn't come across as patronising, but I can understand why a lot of people may not realise that, you know, growing up in the late 80s or 90s in Zimbabwe, you know, you were told that the only history that

21:30Amol Rajan:mattered was English history. You know, there's, there's, it's a sort of, you know, I can see why, you know, there's a lot of people that don't just actually don't quite know the way in which empire and colonialism is still kind of enacted in many parts of the play in many parts of the world where it was still there. But what's really interesting to me is the way in which across different generations and different countries, there are different attitudes. So I mentioned in the main podcast, you know, my dad revered the English language because he was told that, you know, to be, you know, to make it to England, to study Shakespeare was a kind of absolutely wonderful thing.

22:04Amol Rajan:I think with, there's a, these are all particular histories. And in your case, Simakai, in your family's case, there was such violence, you know, and there's such oppression, frankly, which my family in India, you know, my forefathers didn't go, forefathers and my mother's family didn't go through at all. that in your case, I can see that the case for reputative justice might feel much stronger, even though I can trace my roots through the bloody amputation that was partitioned. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I remember when we started the Rose Muscle Movement in Oxford, I was in the midway through my PhD and I was back in Zimbabwe doing my research.

22:38And I remember talking to my dad about it. And to him, it was just inconceivable that you could possibly have a statue of Rose. like he just couldn't really you know it was like this is such an assault on our history and on our dignity that uh you know it was a form of moral injury that you're like you know to move past this we cannot just have this guy in place i think that's been lost in the debate hasn't it i don't