Simukai Chigudu, African politics professor: I support reparations

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2:04Amol Rajan:Hello, I'm BBC presenter Amol Rajan, and this is the interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC, people shaping our world from all over the world. If you're not a little bit afraid, then you're not paying attention. We have never seen a people so united. Do not make that boat crossing. Do not make that journey. Being born in America, feeling American, having people treat me like I'm not. We're more popular than populism. For this interview, I met Simakai Chiguru, an associate professor of African politics at the University of Oxford. A member of the first generation born after the end of colonial rule in Zimbabwe, Simukai Chiguru came to the UK as a teenager and later became one of the founding members of a campaign to try to get the statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes moved from Oriel College in Oxford.

3:01Amol Rajan:Last month, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly backed a resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity, opening up discussions about reparations. You're going to hear from Simukai about why he thinks it's important to decolonize the curriculum and where he stands on the case for paying reparations for slavery. The European empires are guilty of a great many sins and horrors and actually think they should all be taking on a very serious project of decolonization and reparative justice. But first, Simukai told me about his experience growing up in Zimbabwe and how this informed his understanding of colonialism and the role Cecil Rhodes played.

3:48Amol Rajan:Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Simukai Chigunu. I was born in 1986, only six years after my home country, Zimbabwe, gained independence from white settler minority rule. The country was called Rhodesia. Rhodesia was an apartheid state for close to a century. It was governed by a hardline white supremacist government, a government that, as I'm sure we'll discuss, was responsible for all manner of atrocities, including those that directly affected my family. My father was twice a political prisoner. Most of his siblings and my grandparents were all arrested. He fought in the liberation struggle for Zimbabwean freedom.

4:32And I was born as part of the first generation that came after independence, the so-called born free generation. Now, to be born into this generation was to inherit a heavy mantle and a promise, the promise that we were now living in independent Africa, whose sovereignty, independence, right to self-determination was ours to make the world. And at the same time, it was being born into a world draped or drenched in colonialism. Colonialism was not an event. It was an atmosphere. It was the water that we swam in. And so as a child growing up in Zimbabwe, colonialism left its imprint in everything I encountered.

5:19It was in the language we used. It was in the schools I went to. It was in my very, very early encounters with racism at age four years old. And so in a sense, for as long as I've been alive, I've somehow been aware of this long shadow cast by colonialism. And much of it is kind of distilled or embodied in the figure of Cecil Rhodes.

5:39Amol Rajan:The Rhodes Must Fall campaign is about a statue of Cecil Rhodes, which is outside Oriel College, which is one of the ancient colleges of Oxford University. Cecil Rhodes, a sort of mid-19th century British figure born in Hertfordshire. He only lived till I think he was about 49 or 50 or pretty young 48 yeah 48 so he didn't even make it to 50 but in that time he led a very eventful life i'm pretty sure he was sent away i'm not looking at notes so this is no no go for it yeah he was he was sent he was sent um he was not very well as a kid and they wanted to send him to south africa or southern africa as it then was um to uh because they thought the climate would improve his health and he basically became one of the most powerful figures in not just africa but the world through mining.

6:19Amol Rajan:He set up a very famous company called the De Beers Company. And then his name was given to not one, but two countries split by the Zambezi River. That's right. The north of which was Zambia. Yeah. So northern Rhodesia is what we today know as Zambia. And then southern Rhodesia, which then became Rhodesia and then later became Zimbabwe. So that's Cecil Rhodes' biography. What was Cecil Rhodes, the kind of idea that you grew up with? Yeah. So and I'd also just add one other thing. So you've got these two countries that are named Rhodesia. And you're talking about over 400 ,000 square kilometers of land mass.

6:53But he had also colonized large chunks of what is today South Africa. So his dominion extended over a much, much larger swathe of the continent than those to which he bequeathed his name. And so to grow up in Zimbabwe was just to see all of these things named after Rhodes or named after Cecil. My very first day of high school in Zimbabwe, I walked into this neoclassical, cavernous hall with all the new pupils. And in the hall on an interior balcony were a series of polished mahogany panels with gilt lettering that bore the names of all the old pupils from the school that had won something called the Rhodes Scholarship.

7:33Now, all of this clashed with what my father had told me when I was growing up.

7:37Amol Rajan:Rhodes Scholarship, I should say, is very famous. People like Bill Clinton, many, many people have gone on to great things, have had the Rhodes Scholarship. Yeah, I mean, it's an international postgraduate scholarship to Oxford. It's now, as you say, associated very heavily with being, I guess, the open sesame to a long and successful life, whether in politics, finance, the media, you name it. But when I was growing up, you know, my father was keen to impress upon me that this was a country born of violence and that men like Cecil Rhodes were responsible for the mass dispossession, displacement and violent slaughter of our ancestors.

8:12So there was Rhodes, the businessman in one guise, who consolidated mining industries in South Africa, who played politics, who became the first governor of the Cape Colony in the late 1800s. And then there was Rhodes, the warmongering imperialist, the man who raised through his own pocket a private army that ransacked village after village, community after community throughout southern africa who's you know the cumulative death toll under rhodes's watch in the wars that he fought in what is today zimbabwe accounted to about three to four percent of the population slaughtered was there a moment when all this history all this

8:57Amol Rajan:all these threads of all this complicated inheritance going back decades and centuries um alighted upon this strange little figure outside oriel college and you thought actually this is what it's about. I've got to do something here. There were several moments, partly because there was a part of me that desperately wanted to go to Oxford, that, you know, had fully internalised everything I had grown up with, and that believed that to prove myself a worthy heir of this grand inheritance that had been given to me, I needed to achieve at the highest echelons of education. And then when I got to Oxford, I would say that my first year there was kind of magical.

9:41It's a bit of an academic Disneyland. And I guess a little bit like the real Disneyland, there is this kind of behind the scenes hinterland that is not so pretty, that the fancy dinners and the college balls, the kind of seminars and the way people speak can be enchanting. But it incubates all of these ideas that you begin to encounter that can be quite sort of steeped in a prejudicial history. So there was like this slow buildup, you know, to give you a few concrete examples. There's a moment early on in my education at Oxford where I'm told by a fellow at one of the colleges, you know, I tell him that I'm studying African politics and he kind of scoffs and is just like, ooh, you know, how could you possibly fix that?

10:27And I was a bit like, excuse me? I mean, what a weird question to put to me that African politics is not a phenomenon to be understood and to be treated as a serious academic matter, but a problem to be solved because of its, you know, dysfunction and corruption. Or, you know, learning about a famous historian at Oxford called Hugh Trevor Roper, who once wrote that there is no history in Africa. There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest are the unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe. So there were all of these like repeated encounters where my continent, my subject matter, where I come from was kind of subtly denigrated.

11:10And then in 2015, at the University of Cape Town, students there had been campaigning for the removal of a statue of Cecil John Rhodes that has pride of place outside its convocation hall, the main bit of the university's campus. And by 2015, one student in particular, sick of the slow traction around, you know, this protracted campaign, takes a bucket of human waste and chucks it at the statue. And that is often treated as the kind of the trigger point for what became the Roads Must Fall movement. But, you know, it distilled and captured so much because this was the unleashing, the eruption of generational anger of a South African born free generation, which is very similar to the Zimbabwean born free generation, saying, hey, we were promised an independent, liberated Africa.

12:04Why are we still living with the residues of colonialism and white supremacy? You know, this also coincided with Black Lives Matter. So it felt like the Black Atlantic world, if you like, was saying, hey, you know, we want to fundamentally change the terms of engagement and how we talk about race. And so I became very activated and interested in this. But I was deeply ambivalent myself when we started campaigning in Oxford about taking down the Rhodes statue.

12:30Amol Rajan:What was that ambivalence? Why were you ambivalent? I was ambivalent because partly for intellectual reasons that I cared deeply about how do we decolonize the curriculum. That's a shorthand way of saying, you know, how do we, for example, deliver an undergraduate history curriculum in Africa in sorry, in Oxford that includes histories from outside the North Atlantic world. You know, at that time, you could get a BA in history without ever having to think about South Asia, Africa, Latin America, you name it. You know, which seems to me pretty archaic and limited as a way of understanding the world.

13:06So my initial campaign was like, look, how do we decolonize the curriculum? How do we pluralize and diversify the faculty body? How do we engender a genuine diversity of thought? the iconography stuff i recognized as important but i was nervous that like you know we would be branded very quickly as much ado about a statue and that would you know um attract all the heat and attention away uh from the substantive campaign what's your assessment of how the roads

13:37Amol Rajan:must fall campaign fared did it win did it lose is it a work in progress um all three um i say all three because, okay, you know, there's a very literal fact that the statue of Rhodes did not fall. But I think, you know, it's kind of fascinating that like before Rhodes must fall, before 2015, no one had given that statue much thought in contemporary history. People had actually talked about it over time. And when you dig into the history at Oxford, there were loads of Oxford dons in the early 1900s who were opposed to the erection of the statue in the first place. who thought that it was an unconscionable thing to be associated with and that they were creating propaganda that was distorting the true record of who Rhodes was.

14:27And there were petitions written opposing putting up the statue. And that's all sort of been forgotten. And so by the time you get to 2015, it reignited this debate. And I think it invited a lot of deliberation, as you say, about the symbolic valence of public memorials. Now, on one level, this is intuitive, right? In the sense, we also Saddam Hussein statue coming down in Iraq. Statues like come and go all the time. We are frequently rewriting our physical environment to pay tribute to people or because we recognize certain forms of memorial are not consistent with the values of what an institution is in the present.

15:08And so I think statues are not really about the past. They're about the story we tell about who we are.

15:14Amol Rajan:The people who don't like statues being taken down are often, not always, but often people who feel that they belong in countries and cultures where the majority culture is not being, A, shown the respect it deserves. And B, they feel that their culture is somehow being erased. What do you say to those people who feel Roads Must Fall is part of a campaign to deny majorities in this country, happen to be white, majorities their history? One is that I would say that we need to treat that anxiety seriously and with respect. So the idea of feeling that one's culture is under assault and the disorientation of, you know, being in a world where you think that your very being, your existence, everything that you are brought up with is now somehow morally wrong through no fault of your own.

16:03and to see that institutions that stand for continuity and stability capitulating to what feel like or what look like the demands of the moment from groups of people that one doesn't identify with. I mean, of course, that's unsettling, you know. And I have enough respect for people who take a different side of this to see that. Where I would maybe complicate that argument is to say, for a start, I think the legacy of who Rhodes was is very poorly understood in the first instance, that most people know a very sanitized and... Whitewashed. Yeah, whitewashed version of the history, right? They know about the Rhodes Scholarship, and they know, and this came out, you know, during the Rhodes Must Fall period, people kept saying, well, he may have had some odious views, but he was a product of his time.

16:55And I think, hang on, the moment you get into a little bit of the historical record, you begin to, you know, tell a different story. For one, you know, I'm indifferent to his views. I mean, his views concretize or, you know, they make explicit certain things, but it was what he did.

17:12Amol Rajan:You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service.

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18:39Amol Rajan:Simokai Achiguru is a quite remarkable man with a remarkable intellect and backstory. They're reading his book, as I did in preparation for this interview. you realize that Simokai is someone who's very steeped, not just in 20th century Zimbabwean history, but also 21st century Oxford life. And by that, I mean specifically the culture wars that have raged in British academia since 2010, and the way in which social media and the death of George Floyd has accelerated the demand for recognition, for rights, and indeed for reparations, particularly among some parts of the black community, but not just among them, for the wrongs done during the Atlantic slave trade.

19:20Amol Rajan:And that is why in this conversation with Simukai Chigudu from Oxford University, I asked him what he makes of the case for reparations. Okay, let's return to my conversation with Simukai Chigudu. Where I stand on it is in favor for two big reasons. One is that historic wrongs, just as a form of moral injury, you know, warrant our attention and warrant our sense of like, you know, how do we heal from harm? But the other is also about how historic wrongs live on today, how they have a kind of, how they create certain path dependencies and contingencies, that this thing happened then, and it's easy to dismiss it as having happened a long time ago, colonialism, slave trade.

20:03But, you know, one of the things that I try to show in the book, because the book takes this really broad time scale, you know, and it does these sort of cross chronological leaps going as far back as 1874, right up to the present moment. But through my family's life, you know, you start to see a historic process of colonization that are like distant and abstract, working their way into our lives through things like education, through things like the crisis that gripped Zimbabwe, through things like the violence, and then the trauma that follows and how that poisons from one generation to the next.

20:42And I think a model or a version of reparative justice is partly material, but then I think there's also just the ethos of it, a reparative justice in educational institutions and how we teach about the past, reparative justice in terms of our public memorials, reparative justice in terms of acknowledging wrongs and harm done.

21:02Amol Rajan:People listening to this who are against reparations or who might even think of themselves as kind of moderates or conservatives, might be interested to read a piece in the New York Times by, in fact, he's just left the New York Times, but he's called David Brooks, really acclaimed, thoughtful, brilliant writer. And he's a small C conservative. And he said that he'd become a reluctant convert to the case for reparations. But one of the arguments that he kind of entertains, having been against reparations instinctively, is, I think, the one used by your fellow Oxford professor, Nigel Bigger, who's written about this at length.

21:36Amol Rajan:And they say, first of all, the British Empire ruled the world in an age of empires. And compared to other empires, it did less harm and more good. That's one argument. So, British Empire wasn't as bad as others. I mean, I... Give it where we started out. That's really a mad place for you to be invited to go. I just, I mean, it's sort of like, you know, weird flex, but okay. Like, it... It is a very popular... It's worth saying, a lot of people use that argument. Neil Ferguson wrote an entire book called Empire. Of course, yeah. And it was one of his central points. Yeah, yeah. If you're going to be colonized by someone historically, and this is literally their argument, it would have been useful to be colonized by the Brits.

22:16Amol Rajan:Yeah. I mean, there are so many different ways of countering that. I mean, one is to say that, like, something being wrong but not being as bad as other things that were wrong doesn't take away from the thing that was wrong in the first place, right? Like, that may be the case. Like, I mean, I think, you know, you look at the Belgians' heinous record. To King Leopold II. Exactly. In the Congo. I mean, the pogroms that they waged and they staged, you think about the French in Algeria, the Portuguese in Mozambique and Angola. You know, the European empires are guilty of a great many sins and horrors.

22:51And I actually think they should all be taking on a very serious project of decolonization and reparative justice.

22:58Amol Rajan:What would you like to see happen now to redress some of these historical injustices and to set us all on a common path to a better future? For one, I mean, we were discussing statues and iconography and so on. One of the things that frustrated me about the Roads Must Fall debacle and responses to it is that I just thought, you know, so many people were just showing a very limited imagination of what's possible. Right. Like, my position was, you know, if you take down the statue, for instance, and put it in one of Oxford's storied museums, but create a really interesting exhibition that is at once about the history of Rhodes and Rhodesia, but that is also an exhibition about Rhodes Must Fall.