Caribbean and African leaders of the British Commonwealth, CNN reports, are insistently raising the issue of British reparations for slavery and for Shanghaiing colonial subjects, shipping Indians off to Guyana and Fiji on false pretenses. British ships transported some 3 million Africans to the New World between 1640 and 1807, 400,000 of whom died in transit. The unpaid labor of these enslaved people and their descendants added significantly to Britain’s bottom line. Jamaica, one of London’s most profitable colonies because of the sugarcane trade (produced by slave plantations), figures Britain owes it $9.5 trillion.

Once we see that the Palestinians are a deeply injured party, it becomes clear that they are owed reparations. After World War I, the victors divvied up the defeated empires at Versailles and the satellite conference of San Remo. The League of Nations awarded the great powers “mandates,” giving them charge of territories on the grounds that they would administer them and also prepare them for independent statehood. This was a new form of colonialism, since the freebooters of the 18th century conquered countries like India purely for profit, with no obligation to ready it for independence. If it had been up to Winston Churchill, Britain would still be ruling India and taking money out of it to pay for his brandy and cigars.

As I point out in my new book, Gaza Yet Stands, the British Mandate of Palestine was peculiar compared to all the rest. The British Mandate of Iraq eventuated in an independent Iraq in 1932. Formerly German Tanganyika was a British Mandate and became independent in 1961. It joined with Zanzibar to become Tanzania in 1964. Syria, a French Mandate, became independent in 1946. The French Mandate of Togo became independent in 1961.

The British Mandate of Palestine, however, did not eventuate in an independent Palestine. The other League of Nations members, including France and Italy, remonstrated with Britain that it had to look after the native Palestinians, despite the Balfour Declaration of 1917 in which the British (who did not then rule Palestine) promised a “Jewish national home” there that, they pledged, would in no way disturb the locals.

Lord Curzon wrote in 1920, “As regards the Palestine Mandate, this Mandate also has passed through several revises. When it was first shown to the French Government it at once excited their vehement criticisms on the ground of its almost exclusively Zionist complexion and of the manner in which the interests and rights of the Arab majority (amounting to about nine-tenths of the population) were ignored. The Italian Government expressed similar apprehensions. It was felt that this would constitute a very serious, and possibly a fatal, objection when the Mandate came ultimately before the Council of the League. The Mandate, therefore, was largely rewritten, and finally received their assent.”

“Palestine Reparations,” Digital, Midjourney, 2024.

The League of Nations therefore demanded that the British Mandate of Palestine attend to the “interests and rights” of the 90% of its residents, who were native Palestinians.

When Palestinians revolted in 1936-1939 against the British policy of settling European Jews on their land, the British army brutally crushed them, with the help of Jewish militias like the Haganah. Embarrassed, the British commissioned the MacDonald White Paper of 1939, which pledged an independent Palestinian state by 1949, in which immigrant Jews would form a minority.

The British abruptly departed Palestine in 1948 and they failed to prevent the half-million Jews they had brought to Palestine from expelling 750,000 or so of the 1.3 million Palestinians from their homes and usurping all their property, leaving them stateless, homeless and penniless. Some 250,000 of those refugees were crowded into Gaza, where their descendants are now being genocided by the Netanyahu government.

The value of the land seized from the Palestinians at that time is estimated at over half a billion dollars in 1998 dollars.

But that $500,000,000 worth of property in 1948 is worth way more today.

The total value of Israeli real estate today is roughly $2.5 trillion, and in 1920 when the British accepted the charge of administering the Mandate of Palestine and turning it into and independent country for its citizens, the Palestinians owned virtually all the land in it.

I’d say that $2.5 trillion is a good place to start for British reparations to the Palestinians. That is roughly a year’s worth of the UK GDP. But I’m sure the Palestinians would accept an installment plan.

The survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of whom there are still 106,825, were known as Hibakusha, literally “bombing victims.” They were often stigmatized by other Japanese and sometimes had complicated love lives. Some had disfiguring burns on their bodies or faces. They were thought to be at special risk of dying young from the effects of the nuclear weapons, and so had trouble finding mates. Some Hibakusha hid their past. Some of those willing to come out of the closet formed organizations to lobby for the banning of nuclear weapons.

Friday evening it was announced that Nihon Hidankyo, which Asahi Shimbun glosses as “the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations,” has won the Nobel Peace Prize this year.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza, however, hung over the victory. According to the Irish Times’s David McNeill in Tokyo, when Toshiyuki Mimaki, the co-chair of Nihon Hidankyo, watched the ceremony in Oslo on television and discovered that his organization had won, he said tearfully, “It can’t be real, I felt so sure it would be the people of Gaza.”

Mr. Mimaki’s certainty that the “people of Gaza” would compete successfully for the Nobel with the survivors of a nuclear attack speaks volumes about how the genocide is viewed outside the North Atlantic world. And, to be sure, the sheer tonnage of bombs dropped on Gaza since October 2023 has exceeded that of the two atomic bombs deployed in 1945.

Mimaki accepted the award on behalf of Nihon Hidankyo and gave an acceptance speech in which he pointed out that “nuclear weapons can be used by terrorists. For example, if Russia uses them against Ukraine, Israel against Gaza, it won’t end there. Politicians should know these things.” At the press conference, Mr Mimaki went on to compare the plight of Gazan children to that of Japanese children at the end of the Second World War.

He observed, “In Gaza, bleeding children are being held (by their parents). It’s like in Japan 80 years ago.”

Mimaki added, “When it comes to Israel and the Middle East, regardless of the specifics, the underlying issue is conflict and the act of doing things that people abhor. Firstly, it is about killing people. This idea of killing others before being killed oneself —- that is essentially what war is. Also, war involves destroying homes, demolishing buildings, and taking down bridges. These actions constitute war. Japan, too, fought a major war 80 years ago, and it is said that 3 million people lost their lives. Since then, we have upheld our constitution, aiming for a world without war. I hope Japan can become a leader in promoting peace globally.” (- ChatGPT translation of the computer-generated YouTube transcript.)

He also said, “nuclear weapons can be used by terrorists . . . For example, if Russia uses them against Ukraine, Israel against Gaza, it won’t end there. Politicians should know these things.”

The situation in Gaza is therefore very much on Mr. Mimaki’s mind, and on the minds of other Japanese pacifists. They see civilian cities reduced to rubble from the sky and bleeding children in the arms of their parents, and it takes them right back to August 6, 1945.

“Nuking Gaza,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

About 140,000 people were incinerated when the U.S. deployed an atomic bomb against Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and three days later, some 74,000 more were turned into carbon dust in Nagasaki.

Gilad Cohen, Israel’s ambassador to Japan, criticized Mimaki’s heartfelt sentiments, saying on “X,” that Miyaki’s comparison “is outrageous and baseless.” He added, “Gaza is ruled by Hamas, a murderous terrorist organization committing a double war crime: targeting Israeli civilians, including women and children, while using its own people as human shields.” He accused Miyaki of dishonoring the victims of October 7.

Cohen, however, is the one who misunderstands the similarities here. The Truman administration viewed Imperial Japan and generals such as Hideki Tojo (who also served as prime minister during much of the war) as murderous terrorists who had launched a sneak attack that killed 2,403 Americans at Pearl Harbor, including some 68 civilians.

As for Hamas being responsible for all the Palestinian deaths in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli military (!), that is a similar argument to the one made by Truman regarding Japan. It was necessary to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he said, because the US could lose as many as a quarter of a million troops in an invasion of Japan, since the Japanese would unitedly defend the island. In essence, all the Japanese formed a human shield against any ground incursion. Therefore, it was the refusal to surrender of the former admiral, Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki, that made the US kill those 214,000 civilians.

The devil made me do it, is the refrain of all genocidaires.

Mr. Mimaki will have none of it. He condemns belligerent actions whoever takes them. But most importantly, he knows a crime against humanity when he sees one.

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to lay claim to Angola in the late sixteenth century. For nearly four centuries, they didn’t relent until a bloody, 27-year civil war with anticolonial guerillas (aided by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces) and bolstered by a leftist coup in distant Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, overthrew that colonial regime in 1974.

Lobito’s port was the economic heart of Portugal’s reign in Angola, along with the meandering 1,866-kilometer Benguela Railway, which first became operational in the early 1900s. For much of the twentieth century, Lobito was the hub for exporting to Europe agricultural goods and metals mined in Africa’s Copperbelt. Today, the Copperbelt remains a resource-rich region encompassing much of the Democratic Republic of Congo and northern Zambia.

Perhaps it won’t shock you to learn that, half a century after Portugal’s colonial control of Angola ended, neocolonialism is now sinking its hooks into Lobito. Its port and the Benguela Railway, which travels along what’s known as the Lobito Corridor, have become a key nucleus of China’s and the Western world’s efforts to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources in our hot new world. If capitalist interests continue to drive this crucial transition, which is all too likely, while global energy consumption isn’t scaled back radically, the amount of critical minerals needed to power the global future remains unfathomable. The World Economic Forum estimates that three billion tons of metals will be required. The International Energy Forum estimates that to meet the global goals of radically reducing carbon emissions, we’ll also need between 35 and 194 massive copper mines by 2050.

It should come as no surprise that most of the minerals from copper to cobalt needed for that transition’s machinery (including electric batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels) are located in Latin America and Africa. Worse yet, more than half (54%) of the critical minerals needed are on or near Indigenous lands, which means the most vulnerable populations in the world are at the most significant risk of being impacted in a deeply negative fashion by future mining and related operations.

When you want to understand what the future holds for a country in the “developing” world, as economists still like to call such regions, look no further than the International Monetary Fund (IMF). “With growing demand, proceeds from critical minerals are poised to rise significantly over the next two decades,” reports the IMF. “Global revenues from the extraction of just four key minerals — copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium — are estimated to total $16 trillion over the next 25 years. Sub-Saharan Africa stands to reap over 10 percent of these accumulated revenues, which could correspond to an increase in the region’s GDP by 12 percent or more by 2050.”

Sub-Saharan Africa alone is believed to contain 30% of the world’s total critical mineral reserves. It’s estimated that the Congo is responsible for 70% of global cobalt output and approximately 50% of the globe’s reserves. In fact, the demand for cobalt, a key ingredient in most lithium-ion batteries, is rapidly increasing because of its use in everything from cell phones to electric vehicles. As for copper, Africa has two of the world’s top producers, with Zambia accounting for 70% of the continent’s output. “This transition,” adds the IMF, “if managed properly, has the potential to transform the region.” And, of course, it won’t be pretty.

While such critical minerals might be mined in rural areas of the Congo and Zambia, they must reach the international marketplace to become profitable, which makes Angola and the Lobito Corridor key to Africa’s booming mining industry.

In 2024, China committed $4.5 billion to African lithium mines alone and another $7 billion to investments in copper and cobalt mining infrastructure. In the Congo, for example, China controls 70% of the mining sector.

Having lagged behind that country’s investments in Africa for years, the U.S. is now looking to make up ground.

Zambia’s Copper Colonialism

In September 2023, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in India, Secretary of State Antony Blinken quietly signed an agreement with Angola, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the European Union to launch the Lobito Corridor project. There wasn’t much fanfare or news coverage, but the United States had made a significant move. Almost 50 years after Portugal was forced out of Angola, the West was back, offering a $4 billion commitment and assessing the need to update the infrastructure first built by European colonizers. With a growing need for critical minerals, Western countries are now setting their sights on Africa and its green energy treasures.

Buy the Book

“We meet at a historic moment,” President Joe Biden said as he welcomed Angolan President João Lourenço to Washington last year. Biden then called the Lobito project the “biggest U.S. rail investment in Africa ever” and affirmed the West’s interest in what the region might have to offer in the future. “America,” he added, “is all in on Africa… We’re all in with you and Angola.”

Both Africa and the U.S., Biden was careful to imply, would reap the benefits of such a coalition. Of course, that’s precisely the kind of rhetoric we can expect when Western (or Chinese) interests are intent on acquiring the resources of the Global South. If this were about oil or coal, questions and concerns would undoubtedly be raised regarding America’s regional intentions. Yet, with the fight against climate change providing cover, few are considering the geopolitical ramifications of such a position — and even fewer acknowledging the impacts of massively increased mining on the continent.

In his book Cobalt Red, Siddharth Kara exposes the bloody conditions cobalt miners in the Congo endure, many of them children laboring against their will for days on end, with little sleep and under excruciatingly abusive conditions. The dreadful story is much the same in Zambia, where copper exports account for more than 70% of the country’s total export revenue. A devastating 126-page report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) from 2011 exposed the wretchedness inside Zambia’s Chinese-owned mines: 18-hour work days, unsafe working environments, rampant anti-union activities, and fatal workplace accidents. There is little reason to believe it’s much different in the more recent Western-owned operations.

“Friends tell you that there’s a danger as they’re coming out of shift,” a miner who was injured while working for a Chinese company told HRW. “You’ll be fired if you refuse, they threaten this all the time… The main accidents are from rock falls, but you also have electrical shocks, people hit by mining trucks underground, people falling from platforms that aren’t stable… In my accident, I was in a loading box. The mine captain… didn’t put a platform. So when we were working, a rock fell down and hit my arm. It broke to the extent that the bone was coming out of the arm.”

An explosion at one mine killed 51 workers in 2005 and things have only devolved since then. Ten workers died in 2018 at an illegal copper extraction site. In 2019, three mineworkers were burned to death in an underground shaft fire and a landslide at an open-pit copper mine in Zambia killed more than 30 miners in 2023. Despite such horrors, there’s a rush to extract ever more copper in Zambia. As of 2022, five gigantic open-pit copper mines were operating in the country, and eight more underground mines were in production, many of which are to be further expanded in the years ahead. With new U.S.-backed mines in the works, Washington believes the Lobito Corridor may prove to be the missing link needed to ensure Zambian copper will end up in green energy goods consumed in the West.

AI Mining for AI Energy

The office of KoBold Metals in quaint downtown Berkeley, California, is about as far away from Zambia’s dirty mines as you can get. Yet, at KoBold’s nondescript headquarters, which sits above a row of trendy bars and restaurants, a team of tech entrepreneurs diligently work to locate the next big mine operation in Zambia using proprietary Artificial Intelligence (AI). Backed by billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, KoBold bills itself as a green Silicon Valley machine, committed to the world’s green energy transition (while turning a nice profit).

It is in KoBold’s interest, of course, to secure the energy deposits of the future because it will take an immense amount of energy to support their artificially intelligent world. A recent report by the International Energy Agency estimates that, in the near future, electricity usage by AI data centers will increase significantly. As of 2022, such data centers were already utilizing 460 terawatt hours (TWh) but are on pace to increase to 1,050 TWh by the middle of the decade. To put that in perspective, Europe’s total energy consumption in 2023 was around 2,700 TWh.

“Anyone who’s in the renewable space in the western world… is looking for copper and cobalt, which are fundamental to making electric vehicles,” Mfikeyi Makayi, chief executive of KoBold in Zambia, explained to the Financial Times in 2024. “That is going to come from this part of the world and the shortest route to take them out is Lobito.”

Makayi wasn’t beating around the bush. The critical minerals in KoBold mines won’t end up in the possession of Zambia or any other African country. They are bound for Western consumers alone. KoBold’s CEO Kurt House is also honest about his intentions: “I don’t need to be reminded again that I’m a capitalist,” he’s been known to quip.

In July 2024, House rang his company’s investors with great news: KoBold had just hit the jackpot in Zambia. Its novel AI tech had located the largest copper find in more than a decade. Once running, it could produce upwards of 300,000 tons of copper annually — or, in the language investors understand, the cash will soon flow. As of late summer 2024, one ton of copper on the international market cost more than $9,600. Of course, KoBold has gone all in, spending $2.3 billion to get the Zambian mine operable by 2030. Surely, KoBold’s investors were excited by the prospect, but not everyone was as thrilled as them.

“The value of copper that has left Zambia is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Hold that figure in your mind, and then look around yourself in Zambia,” says Zambian economist Grieve Chelwa. “The link between resource and benefit is severed.”

Not only has Zambia relinquished the benefits of such mineral exploitation, but — consider it a guarantee — its people will be left to suffer the local mess that will result.

The Poisoned River

Konkola Copper Mines (KCM) is today the largest ore producer in Zambia, ripping out a combined two million tons of copper a year. It’s one of the nation’s largest employers, with a brutally long record of worker and environmental abuses. KCM runs Zambia’s largest open-pit mine, which stretches for seven miles. In 2019, the British-based Vedanta Resources acquired an 80% stake in KCM by covering $250 million of that company’s debt. Vedanta has deep pockets and is run by Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal, affectionately known in the mining world as “the Metal King.”

One thing should be taken for granted: You don’t become the Metal King without leaving entrails of toxic waste on your coattails. In India, Agarwal’s alumina mines have polluted the lands of the Indigenous Kondh tribes in Orissa Province. In Zambia, his copper mines have wrecked farmlands and waterways that once supplied fish and drinking water to thousands of villagers.

The Kafue River runs for more than 1,500 kilometers, making it Zambia’s longest river and now probably its most polluted as well. Going north to south, its waters flow through the Copperbelt, carrying with them cadmium, lead, and mercury from KCM’s mine. In 2019, thousands of Zambian villagers sued Vedanta, claiming its subsidiary KCM had poisoned the Kafue River and caused insurmountable damage to their lands.

The British Supreme Court then found Vedanta liable, and the company was forced to pay an undisclosed settlement, likely in the millions of dollars. Such a landmark victory for those Zambian villagers couldn’t have happened without the work of Chilekwa Mumba, who organized communities and convinced an international law firm to take up the case. Mumba grew up in the Chingola region of Zambia, where his father worked in the mines.

“[T]here was some environmental degradation going on as a result of the mining activities. As we found, there were times when the acid levels of water was so high,” explained Mumba, the 2023 African recipient of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. “So there were very specific complaints about stomach issues from children. Children just really wander around the villages and if they are thirsty, they don’t think about what’s happening, they’ll just get a cup and take their drink of water from the river. That’s how they live. So they’ll usually get diseases. It’s hard to quantify, but clearly the impact was there.”

Sadly enough, though, despite that important legal victory, little has changed in Zambia, where environmental regulations remain weak and nearly impossible to enforce, which leaves mining companies like KCM to regulate themselves. A 2024 Zambian legislative bill seeks to create a regulatory body to oversee mining operations, but the industry has pushed back, making it unclear if it will ever be signed into law. Even if the law does pass, it may have little real-world impact on mining practices there.

The warming climate, at least to the billionaire mine owners and their Western accomplices, will remain an afterthought, as well as a justification to exploit more of Africa’s critical minerals. Consider it a new type of colonialism, this time with a green capitalist veneer. There are just too many AI programs to run, too many tech gadgets to manufacture, and too much money to be made.

Copyright 2024 Joshua Frank

Tomdispatch.com

(The Conversation) – In 2016, British photographer James Morris published Time and Remains of Palestine. The images in this book bear witness to an absence of architectural monuments, and to the invisible moments of history buried in the rubble and wastelands of Palestine.

Situated at the crossroads between Asia and Africa, Palestine has always been an area of great strategic importance, and it has been populated by various civilisations throughout history. Its emptiness can therefore only be explained by a false history, one that stems directly from the Israeli settler movement, which seeks to destroy the material traces of other cultures that point to a much more complex past than they would like to admit.

St. Porphyrios Church, Gaza: Photo by form PxHere

This complexity has been painstakingly proven in a Forensic Architecture report on an archaeological site known as Anthedon Harbour, Gaza’s old maritime port, which was first inhabited somewhere between 1100BC and 800BC.

October 2023: human cost takes precedence over cultural losses

On 7 October 2023, the day after the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war, Israelis celebrated the Simchat Torah holiday. While this was happening, the wall built by Israel inside the Gaza Strip was breached by more than 1,200 Hamas members in a surprise attack. They kidnapped more than 200 people, and left at least 1,200 dead and almost 3,500 injured.

Israel swiftly declared a state of war for the first time since 1973. The conflict, which has just passed its one year mark, has become an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe for 2.3 million Palestinians. The numbers are appalling: over 41,000 dead, including more than 14,000 children, almost 100,000 wounded and more than two million displaced.

A month after the outbreak of the war, UNESCO, at its 42nd General Conference, stated that “the current destruction and eradication of culture and heritage in Gaza is yet to be determined, since all efforts are now being concentrated on saving human lives in Gaza.”

Monitoring the disaster

The scale of Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe has meant that the extensive destruction of significant elements of Palestinian history and identity could easily be overlooked. However, in April 2024, the United Nations Mine Action Service estimated that “every square metre in Gaza impacted by the conflict contains some 200 kilogrammes of rubble.”

Cultural property has been a target of the Israeli offensive since the beginning of the conflict and, as early as November, the devastation of the cities of northern Gaza far exceeded that caused in the infamous bombing of Dresden in 1945. We cannot forget that the Gaza Strip is just a narrow area of coastal land measuring some 365 km², rich in archaeological and historical sites, that the international community has recognised as occupied territory since 1967.

Research over the last century has counted at least 130 sites in Gaza that Israel, as an occupying power, is obligated to protect under international law along with the rest of the area’s cultural and natural heritage. These obligations are laid out in the following conventions: Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948); the Geneva Conventions (1949) and their annexes, and the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954).

As of 17 September 2024, UNESCO has verified damage to 69 sites: 10 religious sites, 43 buildings of historical and artistic interest, two repositories of movable cultural property, six monuments, one museum and seven archaeological sites. Other reports give a much higher number of affected sites. These assessments are made in very difficult situations, in the midst of constant bombardment, thanks to testimonies and studies on the ground and supported by satellite images.

One especially striking example of a site reduced to rubble is the Great Mosque of Gaza, considered by many to be the oldest mosque in the territory and a symbol of resilience. The Church of Saint Porphyrius – the oldest Christian church in Gaza, built by the Crusaders in 1150 – has also been hit by Israeli airstrikes.

While Israel is not a member of UNESCO – it left in 2018, when the Trump administration pulled the US out – it is still obligated under the 1954 Hague Convention to preserve cultural property. Article 4 of the Convention states that:

“The High Contracting Parties undertake to respect cultural property situated within their own territory as well as within the territory of other High Contracting Parties by refraining from any use of the property and its immediate surroundings or of the appliances in use for its protection for purposes which are likely to expose it to destruction or damage in the event of armed conflict; and by refraining from any act of hostility, directed against such property. ”

The Hague Convention turned 70 in 2024, but cultural heritage sites are still woefully underprotected from armed conflict around the world.

Humanitarian and cultural genocide

The destruction of Gaza’s cultural heritage is intertwined with the ongoing humanitarian crisis. This link is recognised by the International Criminal Court, which states that:

“Crimes against or affecting cultural heritage often
touch upon the very notion of what it means to be human, sometimes eroding
entire swaths of human history, ingenuity, and artistic creation.”

Many independent reports and articles have begun to break down specific elements of the destruction in Gaza, speaking not just of genocide, but also of cultural genocide, urbicide, ecocide, domicide and scholasticide.

On 29 December 2023, the Republic of South Africa brought a case before the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of violating its obligations under the 1948 Convention on Genocide with regard to Palestinians in Gaza.

Among the evidence supporting South Africa’s claim, Israel is accused of attacking infrastructure to bring about the physical destruction of the Palestinian people, with their attacks leaving some 318 Muslim and Christian places of worship in ruins, along with numerous archives, libraries, museums, universities and archaeological sites. This is all in addition to destroying the very people who created Palestine’s heritage.

Gaza: one big military target

In her report, published on 1 July 2024, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, highlights how Israel has turned Gaza in its entirety into a “military target”. The Israeli military arbitrarily links mosques, schools, UN facilities, universities and hospitals to Hamas, thus justifying their indiscriminate destruction. By declaring these buildings legitimate targets, it does away with any distinction between civilian and military targets.

Although Israel’s attacks against the cultural heritage of Palestine are not a new phenomenon, the current destruction in Gaza’s city centres is unprecedented.

As far as Albanese is concerned, Israel is trying to mask its intentions by using the terminology of international humanitarian law. In doing so, it justifies the systematic use of lethal violence against any and all Palestinian civilians, while simultaneously pursuing policies aimed at the widespread destruction of Palestinian cultural heritage and identity.

Her report unequivocally concludes that the Israeli regime’s actions are driven by a genocidal logic, a logic that forms an intrinsic part of its colonisation project. Its ultimate aim is to expel the Palestinian people from their land, and to wipe away any trace of their culture and history.

Pilar Montero Vilar, Profesora Titular, investigadora principal del Observatorio de Emergencias en Patrimonio Cultural www.oepac.es, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Douglass dedicated his life and work to celebrating and explaining freedom, equality, and justice for all while exposing the fundamental threat to the fulfillment of the American experiment: racism and its institutional arms, slavery and discrimination. He warned in a speech, “Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”

Called a prophet of freedom, Frederick Douglass both challenges and inspires us to think and feel more deeply about the issues that absorbed him. He remains relevant for the twenty-first century, and the debates of his time are the debates of our political season.

Douglass asked: What is the purpose of America? How do we fulfill the hopes and aspirations of its citizens? What are the best tactics to make the claims of the U.S. Constitution real for all Americans?

This passionate and stubborn man offered unequivocal answers. He asserted as the motto for his first newspaper, The North Star, “Right is no sex. Truth is of no color. God is the Father of all, and we are all brethren.”

Millions still dispute these assertions, agitated and energized by the ascendancy of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris whose careers are mocked and derided by politicians and pundits using slurs and tropes all too familiar to Douglass.

If you think viciousness and cruelty are unique to our time, you should explore the political cartoons and commentary of the ninteenth century. Racial fear predominates, the fear of social equality and the presumed inevitable result: interracial sex denounced as “amalgamation,” that telling confluence of disgust and envy.

The language of racism and caste has a universal vocabulary; it targets those who are different: them, the other. And according to our past and present fearmongers, they will come after you; take what is yours; rape your wives; kill your children; eat your pets.

Douglass dedicated his life to exposing these perpetrators, becoming their worst nightmare: the supremely gifted black gentleman.

Sydney Morrison, Frederick Douglass: A Novel. (Portland, Or.: Hawthorne Books, 2024). Click here to buy.

  In 1869, when Southern states were systematically removing rights from black people granted by new amendments to the U.S. Constitution and using the KKK as an unofficial arm of local and state governments to terrorize people, Douglass offered an alternative, a grander vision of America and humanity. Douglass’ rhetoric is founded on the celebration of difference, a rejection of racial supremacy. He said, “The mission of America seems plain and unmistakable. Our geographical position, our relation to the outside world, our fundamental principles of government, world-embracing in their scope and character, our vast resources, requiring all manner of labor to develop them, all conspire to one grand end, and that is, to make us the perfect national illustration of unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen.”

Immigration is good.

Difference will save us.

Unity is inevitable.

Douglass was not naïve; he knew the work of his career would never be easy. He famously observed, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will.”

This comment might suggest a grim, joyless tenacity that belies the essential optimism of the man, who said while slavery survived in 1855, “I long to have a future—a future with hope in it.”

And after the abolition of slavery, Douglass summarized one of the most valuable lessons learned by the struggle. It was “faith in man, faith in the rectitude of humanity, and faith in the all-conquering power of truth.”

This is my faith, my highest hope, and my novel is dedicated to the great possibilities within us all and our beloved land.

Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– How did Ottoman Damascus descend into violence and looting in July 1860? Why did the Damascene masses fall upon the Christians, leaving around 5,000 of them dead? These are some of the questions that Eugene Rogan seeks to answer in his book “The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East.” Rogan, a Professor at the University of Oxford, has written some of the go-to books for students and scholars of the Middle East, such as “The Arabs: A History.”

His latest book is motivated by a finding he made more than three decades ago when researching for another project in the National Archives, in Washington, DC. While exploring the archives, Rogan discovered the consular dispatches of Mikhayil Mishaka, the US consul in Damascus when the 1860 Massacre shocked the Ottoman Empire.

In “The Damascus Events”, Rogan contextualizes Mishaka’s first-hand account, as well as other contemporary sources, in the broader historical setting. The result is a gripping and vivid portrait of one of the worst episodes of intercommunal violence in the Ottoman Empire.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the once mighty Ottoman Empire was severely weakened. The empire had initially granted, from a position of strength, extraterritorial rights to foreigners to facilitate trade with Europe. This set of rights, detailed in what was known as the Capitulations, allowed protected foreigners to enjoy preferential terms of trade and taxation and the right to be judged by their consuls.

As the balance of power between the Ottoman Empire and Europe shifted to the latter’s benefit, and Europe gained a stronger economic presence in Ottoman lands, the Capitulations became increasingly problematic. Foreign diplomats and merchants in the Ottoman Empire enrolled in their service a growing number of local Christians and Jews, who in turn profited from the same extraterritorial benefits. Mishaka’s case represented a step further. He was not a foreigner, but an Ottoman Christian born in Lebanon. Even so, he worked as a diplomat for a foreign country, the US.

The Damascus Events have their roots in the destabilization of Greater Syria (which roughly included present-day Palestine, Israel, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon) in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1831, the armies of Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali rolled into Greater Syria. The Ottomans could not repel the occupation forces by themselves, and it was thanks to the European powers’ military help that Egypt’s presence in Greater Syria came to an end in 1840. This display of weakness opened new avenues for European powers to intervene economically and politically in the Ottoman Empire.

In 1843, the Ottoman Empire and the European powers established a new system of rule in Mount Lebanon that undermined the privileges of the local elites by giving more power to local councils. Commoners in Mount Lebanon all suffered under the quasi-feudal rule of the region’s notables but were divided along religious lines, mainly between Christian Maronites and Druzes. The Druzes profess a faith that originated as a schism of Shia Islam but became a distinct religious tradition.

The local elites in Mount Lebanon, intent on stopping their loss of power, succeeded in thwarting inter-religious cooperation. Resentments were largely articulated along sectarian lines instead of class. Intercommunal tensions grew increasingly violent, with both Maronites and Druzes establishing armed groups.

The Druzes, being numerically inferior and lacking the kind of foreign patron the Maronites had in France, went on the offensive in May 1860. They burnt down Christian villages and killed the men who crossed their path, before moving to mixed towns and villages. It is estimated that eleven thousand Christians died and around one hundred thousand became homeless.

After the Mount Lebanon massacres, large flows of Christian refugees moved to Damascus and the areas surrounding the city. Tensions were high in the Syrian capital. Local Christians feared they would be killed like their Mount Lebanon co-religionists. Meanwhile, Damascene Muslims were worried that the local Christians, together with the newly arrived Christian refugees, would seek revenge for the massacres they had suffered at the hands of the Druzes. It was tragically unfortunate that Damascus happened to have a deeply incompetent Ottoman governor, Ahmad Pasha, at a time of major crisis. In front of the governor’s erratic behavior, writes Rogan, “Muslims and Christians, notables and commoners alike, were left perplexed.”[1]

Around the Feast of the Sacrifice, when Muslims traditionally assemble in the mosques, there were unfounded rumors that Christians would use the festive opportunity to attack Muslims. The governor sent soldiers to protect the mosques but the faithful, afraid of the Christians, did not turn up – neither did the governor himself. Later on, young Muslim men went through the Christian quarters of Damascus drawing crosses on the floor and upsetting the neighbors, who did not want to step on the symbol of their faith.

Eugene Rogan, The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2024). Click here to Buy .

Ahmad Pasha overreacted once again. He arrested young Muslim men suspected of having drawn the crosses and put them in chains. He then forced the men to sweep the streets for everyone to see them. Muslims perceived the governor’s measure as a great humiliation and relatives of the young men shattered their chains.

Soon, false news of Christians having killed a group of Muslims spread. A perfect storm had gathered. Damascene Muslims had long resented the Christians’ growing economic prosperity, facilitated by Europe’s interference in the Ottoman Empire. The massacres in Mount Lebanon had put everyone on edge, and the Ottoman governor had increased the fears of both Christians and Muslims.

When the storm broke, it did so with unprecedented violence and went on for a week. Groups of armed Muslims attacked the Christian neighborhoods, killing and looting. Men were forced to convert, although this did not necessarily save their lives, or directly killed. Women were generally not murdered, but there were many cases of rape.

When US consul Mishaqa realized what was happening, he understood his life, as well as his family’s, were on the line. He decided to abandon his house, located in a Muslim quarter. According to his account, Mishaqa twice had to throw coins at marauders to escape before and he and his family came across a heavily armed mob. The mob spared the rest of the family but severely injured Mishaqa. Only by paying the mob a fortune did he save his life.

Mishaqa and his family would eventually find refuge in the house of Emir Abd al-Qadir, a former Algerian revolutionary. Al-Qadir, who had fought against France’s occupation of Algeria, was forced into exile after being captured by the French in 1847. He had finally settled in Damascus with fellow Algerian veterans, making up more than one thousand armed men. During the Damascus Events, Al-Qadir and his men saved the lives of many Christians. They looked for those who were hiding from the mob and rescued them. Once Al-Qadir’s house was full, they accompanied the Christians to the Damascus Citadel, where they suffered hunger and deprivation but were safe from the attacks.

The Damascus governor, and the small contingent of soldiers he commanded, did not intervene. The pleas of the British consul, the only diplomat who continued to enjoy freedom of movement during the massacre, were in vain. According to Mishaqa’s estimates, around 5,000 Christians had been killed during a week of uncontrolled violence in Damascus.

Rogan notes that “the Damascus massacre was a genocidal moment, but it was not a genocide.”[2] He substantiates this claim by noting that outside the Damascus city walls, Christians had been protected by their Muslim neighbors and no violent events had occurred. Within the walls, not only Al-Qadir and his men but also a small group of influential Muslim notables had prevented even larger carnage.

As the violence subsided and the Sultan was informed of the events in Damascus, the Ottoman ruler knew that he had to act decisively. The priority was to recover the trust of his Christian population and avoid a military intervention of the European powers in Syria under the guise of protecting the Christians. Fuad Pasha, a former foreign minister, was chosen by the Sultan to restore order. The contrast between Fuad Pasha and Ahmad Pasha, whose incompetence as a governor had proven deadly during the Damascus Events, was striking.

Fuad Pasha first traveled to Beirut, where he negotiated a truce between the Maronite Christians and the Druzes and consulted with European diplomats. He promised them that those responsible for the Damascus Massacre would be severely punished. He marched into Damascus with a strong military detachment and visited the survivors of the massacre. A group of fifty-seven Muslim notables who had stood by during the killing, or even incited it, were hung after a rushed trial. More than one hundred irregular soldiers and policemen, negligent at best and complicit at worst, were killed by a firing squad. Former governor Ahmad Pasha was also executed.

Fuad Pasha had to balance competing interests. On the one hand, he had to reassure the Damascene Christians that they were safe and convince the European powers that the Ottomans had the situation under control. On the other hand, Fuad Pasha could not alienate the majority Muslim population to the point that they would rise against him or return to violence against Christians. The situation was further complicated by the need to provide temporal accommodation to the Christians who had lost their homes while beginning the construction of new houses and providing compensation for the lost goods.

The budgetary crisis of the Ottoman Empire hardly allowed this. Fuad Pasha forced some Muslims to vacate their houses to make room for Christians and imposed a new tax to collect money for reparations. Only a fraction of what was owed to the Christians was finally paid, but Christians with fewer possessions were prioritized. Mishaqa complained for years that he had not been properly compensated, but this had much to do with his wealth, far above the average.

Fuad Pasha’s reaction would be alien to any current notion of the rule of law or human rights. Still, it was overall effective. Re-construction is always far more complicated than destruction, but Damascus progressively recovered both socially and economically from the 1860 massacre.

The Damascus Events are far removed from our times, but they have more modern echoes. Some of these are found in Syria, where the civil war that started in 2011 has left many episodes of killing along religious lines (most clearly, but not only, by the so-called Islamic State). Still, the potential for false rumors to circulate and de-generate in violence that we observe in the Damascus Events is universal.

After three young girls were mortally stabbed in the English town of Southport, online misinformation spread that the attacker was a Muslim migrant who had recently arrived in England. This resulted in thousands of right-wing extremists flooding the streets of different towns and cities across the United Kingdom, attacking those they perceived to be foreign and engaging in looting.

In the English town of Rotherham, for instance, a hotel hosting asylum seekers was surrounded by 400 people and set on fire before the flames could be put down. “The Damascus Events” is a story of how a society breaks apart and the long and complicated way to societal recovery. In this sense, it is also a story about our present day.

[1] Eugene Rogan, The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2024), p. 129.

[2] Ibid., p. 163.

(The Conversation) – Amitav Ghosh is an internationally celebrated author of 20 historical fiction and non-fiction books. The Indian thinker and writer has written extensively on the legacies of colonialism, violence and extractivism. His most famous works explore migration, globalisation and commercial violence and conquest during the colonial period, against the backdrop of the opium trade in the 1800s.

Caroline Southey, from The Conversation Africa, asked economics professor Imraan Valodia and climate and inequality researcher Julia Taylor about the significance of his work.

What has Ghosh contributed to our understanding about the root causes of climate change?

Julia Taylor: In Ghosh’s recent non-fiction book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, he used his storytelling prowess to outline the roots of climate change within two systems of power and oppression: imperialism and capitalism.

Imperialism is the expansion of influence over other countries through military force and colonisation. It usually entails the destruction of the environment to support imperial interests.

Capitalism is the dominant economic system where ownership of the means of production (industry) is private. Private actors are driven by profit and growth, which has relied on combustion of fossil fuels.

What Ghosh makes clear is that violence and destruction of the environment are key to capitalism, as they were to colonialism.

Imraan Valodia: Ghosh challenges us to think more deeply about the role of conquest and violence in shaping the planetary crisis we’re facing. And the need to reshape our economic and social relations to address climate change. He does this with remarkable acumen and clarity in another of his works of non-fiction, The Great Derangement. In the book he seeks to explain our failure to address the urgency of climate change. He asks very powerfully whether the current generation is deranged by our inability to grasp the scale, violence and urgency of climate change.

He uses the history of nutmeg to illustrate some of his main points. What does he draw from this history?

Julia Taylor: The story of the nutmeg is one among many of conquest of both people and land during colonisation which led to the industrial revolution and the explosion of greenhouse gas emissions.

In the present day these conquests take different forms. But they continue, particularly in the context of mining and extractivism.

Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. The University of Chicago Press. Click here to Buy.

Imraan Valodia: Ghosh traces the history of the household spice – nutmeg – all the way to its origins in the Banda Islands of Indonesia. He uses the analogy of the nutmeg to explain how colonisation of land and people has led to the climate disaster.

The nutmeg was harvested from trees in the Banda Islands and traded by the Bandanese for centuries. With the growth in value of spices, various European countries sought to claim exclusive rights to the nutmeg trade in the Banda Islands. The local population resisted. However, in 1621, representatives of the Dutch East India Company chose to destroy the settlements of the Bandanese population and massacre or enslave anyone who could not escape, to gain control over the nutmeg trade.

Ghosh explains these horrifying events in the context of Anglo-Dutch tensions and the trend of empire in Europe, sanctioned by religious beliefs of racial superiority.

A major theme of his work is the link between imperialism and the planetary crisis. What’s his main line of argument?

Julia Taylor: Ghosh argues in The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis that

the discussion of climate change, as of every aspect of the planetary crisis, tends to be dominated by the question of capitalism and other economic issues; geopolitics, empire, and questions of power figure in it far less. (p116)

However, he highlights that

the era of Western military conquests predates the emergence of capitalism by centuries. Indeed, it was these conquests, and the imperial systems that arose in their wake, that fostered and made possible the rise to dominance of what we now call capitalism … colonialism, genocide and structures of organised violence were the foundations on which industrial modernity was built. (p116)

Imraan Valodia: This argument forces us to grapple with both capitalism and the dominance of the west in our understanding of climate change. It highlights the power dynamics and violence which enabled the destruction of many lands in the form of deforestation, industrial agriculture, mining and more.

To respond to climate change, we need to rethink these dominant systems and relationships with land and the environment. This can be linked to the need to address inequality and power dynamics if we are to have any hope of addressing climate change.

Professor Valodia will be hosting Amitav Ghosh for a series of events at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa from 10 to 12 September 2024. The university has partnered with the Presidential Climate Commission, the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) and the University of Pretoria to host the sessions.

Julia Taylor, Researcher: Climate and Inequality, University of the Witwatersrand and Imraan Valodia, Pro Vice-Chancellor: Climate, Sustainability and Inequality and Director: Southern Centre for Inequality Studies., University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – The years 2023 and 2024 will certainly be remembered as some of the darkest in the long and often violent history of Gaza.

The recent destruction of schools and universities in the Gaza strip has attracted the attention of the media and concern from the United Nations, which has raised the question of whether the damage may be considered “scholasticide”.

Such reports are cause for reflection on the intellectual history of the city – something rarely discussed outside academic circles. This is a shame, as there was a period in the late Roman Empire (5th and 6th centuries CE) when Gaza was one of the great intellectual centres of the Mediterranean world.

Gaza and the Roman Empire

This history of Gaza under the Roman Empire dates from the re-foundation of the city in the 60s BCE, after it had been destroyed decades earlier by Alexander Jannaeus (the ruler of the neighbouring Kingdom of Judaea), as narrated by the Jewish historian Josephus.

Under the relative peace of the Roman Empire, the city was no longer prey to the imperial attentions of its more powerful neighbours, be they Egyptian, Greek, Judaean, or indeed Roman. Gazans were able to capitalise on their position on one of the great geographical crossroads.

Gaza was positioned on the major route from Egypt to the historic cities of the Levant, which correspond to modern-day Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Syria. It also provided access to the Mediterranean Sea at the end of one of the major trade routes from Arabia, via the city of Petra.

Gaza seems to have primarily been a commercial centre until sometime in the 5th century, at which point it became noteworthy for its schools as well as its trade.

Between pagan and Christian

The Late Roman Middle East was a hotbed of intellectual activity.

During this time the schools of Alexandria (in Egypt), Constantinople (Istanbul), Antioch (Antakya) and Gaza can be thought of as the Ivy League of their day.

Although there were no formal universities as we think of them today, these ancient intellectual centres hosted famous teachers who would attract the best and brightest of the Roman elite.

If you wanted to make it in the Late Roman World (and if you didn’t command an army of Goths), your entry into the civil administration of the newly powerful Christian Church was largely determined by your education.

We know quite a bit about the educational syllabus of the Gazan schools. At the heart of this elite ancient education was the study of literature and rhetoric.

The curriculum focused on Classical Greek texts (as opposed to Latin or Syriac ones). Young men would be taught how to compose speeches on various topics.

In some instances these speeches would address the emperor. But these speeches were not only exercises in flattery; we know of one school teacher, Timothy of Gaza (or grammatikos, to use his Greek title), who wrote a speech addressed to the Emperor Anastasius (who reigned between 491–518 CE) petitioning him to abolish the tax on merchants.

Other examples of Gazan eloquence were less obviously political. The bulk of the curriculum involved writing on themes suggested by ancient Greek literature, mythology or history.

The retention of pagan (in this case non-Christian) elements in the syllabus is important. As a rule, the Later Roman Empire was not noted for its religious tolerance, whether between Christians and non-Christians, or between Christians of differing theological persuasions.

We know from an ancient biography of a 5th-century bishop named Porphyry that this bishop participated in the demolition of the remaining pagan temples in Gaza. Yet, as a whole, Gazan intellectuals were able to balance their Christian beliefs with their love of Classical (pagan) culture.

At least two Christian Gazan intellectuals, whose works survive, explore Biblical accounts of creation written in the style of Plato’s dialogues from the 4th century BCE. These works incorporate predominantly pagan neo-Platonic philosophy with Christian interpretations.

Procopius and the wondrous clock

The greatest, or at any rate the most influential, of the Gazan intelligentsia was Procopius of Gaza. Procopius was a prolific writer and teacher. He is thought to have invented a type of biblical commentary, known as a catena, which linked passages of earlier scholars in a sort of precursor to today’s Bible commentaries.

However, if there is one work that sums up the educational endeavours of the schools of Gaza while also presenting a picture of the city, it is Procopius’ description of Gaza’s clock.

One of the important exercises in Roman education was learning how to describe an object, something called ekphrasis. Procopius’ ekphrasis of the clock became something of a textbook example of this and caught the attention of ancient readers.

The clock itself was a mechanical marvel. Situated in Gaza’s main marketplace, it seems to have been a monumental version of a cuckoo clock with a figure of Hercules appearing on the hour.

Hercules’ appearance at each hour corresponded to one of his mythical labours, whether that be the slaying of the Nemean lion or the clearing of the Augean stables.

Procopius likens the (otherwise unknown) inventor of this clock to a latter-day Hephaestus – the Greek god of craft. The clock’s mechanism was driven by water power.

This clock, like the famous schools of Late Roman Gaza, eventually disappeared. We don’t know when this occurred, but the centuries after Gaza’s intellectual golden age saw a return of conflict.

Almost 1,500 years have passed since the days of Procopius, his students and the engineer who designed the clock. Yet Gaza remains a living city, with poets and teachers.

One may hope that in the near future the modern schools of Gaza will reopen and intellectual life will once more be allowed to flourish.

Christopher Mallan, Associate Professor in Classics and Ancient History, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured Image: The ‘Medaba Map’ (6th century CE) is part of a floor mosaic in the church of Saint George in Madaba, Jordan, containing the oldest surviving cartographic depiction of Jerusalem.
Wikimedia/Paul Palmer

(The Conversation) – Germany was a significant – and often brutal – colonial power in Africa. But this colonial history is not told as often as that of other imperialist nations. A new book called The Long Shadow of German Colonialism: Amnesia, Denialism and Revisionism aims to bring the past into the light. It explores not just the history of German colonialism, but also how its legacy has played out in German society, politics and the media. We asked Henning Melber about his book.

What is the history of German colonialism in Africa?

Imperial Germany was a latecomer in the scramble for Africa. Shady deals marked the pseudo-legal entry point. South West Africa (today Namibia), Cameroon and Togo were euphemistically proclaimed to be possessions under “German protection” in 1884. East Africa (today’s Tanzania and parts of Rwanda and Burundi) followed in 1886.

German rule left a trail of destruction. The war against the Hehe people in east Africa (1890-1898) signalled what would come. It was the training ground for a generation of colonial German army officers. They would apply their merciless skills in other locations too. The mindset was one of extermination.

The war against the Ovaherero and Nama people in South West Africa (1904-1908) culminated in the first genocide of the 20th century. The warfare against the Maji Maji in east Africa (1905-1907) applied a scorched earth policy. In each case, the African fatalities amounted to an estimated 75,000.

“Punitive expeditions” were the order of the day in Cameroon and Togo too. The inhuman treatment included corporal punishment and executions, sexual abuse and forced labour as forms of “white violence”.

During a colonial rule of 30 years (1884-1914), Germans in the colonies numbered fewer than 50,000 – even at the peak of military deployment. But several hundred thousand Africans died as a direct consequence of German colonial violence.

Why do you think German debate is slow around this?

After its defeat in the first world war (1914-1918), the German empire was declared unfit to colonise. In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles allocated Germany’s territories to allied states (Great Britain, France and others). The colonial cake was redistributed, so to speak.

This did not end a humiliated Germany’s colonial ambitions. In the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) colonial propaganda flourished. It took new turns under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime (1933-1945). Lebensraum (living space) as a colonial project shifted towards eastern Europe.

The Aryan obsession of being a master race culminated in the Holocaust as mass extermination of the Jewish people. But victims were also Sinti and Roma people and other groups (Africans, gays, communists). The Holocaust has overshadowed earlier German crimes against humanity of the colonial era.

After the second world war (1939-1945), German colonialism became a footnote in history. Repression turned into colonial amnesia. But, as Jewish German-US historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt suggested in 1951 already, German colonial rule was a precursor to the Nazi regime. Such claims are often discredited as antisemitism for downplaying the singularity of the Holocaust. Such gatekeeping prevents exploration of how German colonialism marked the beginning of a trajectory of mass violence.

How does this colonial history manifest today in Germany?

Until the turn of the century, colonial relics such as monuments and names of buildings, places and streets were hardly questioned. Thanks to a new generation of scholars, local postcolonial agencies, and not least an active Afro-German community, public awareness is starting to change.

Various initiatives challenge colonial memory in the public sphere. The re-contextualisation of the Bremen elephant, a colonial monument, is a good example. What was once a tribute to fallen colonial German soldiers became an anticolonial monument memorialising the Namibian victims of the genocide. Colonial street names are today increasingly replaced with names of Africans resisting colonial rule.

Numerous skulls – including those of decapitated African leaders – were taken to Germany during colonialism. These were for pseudo scientific anthropological research that was obsessed with white and Aryan superiority. Descendants of the affected African communities are still in search of the remains of their ancestors and demand their restitution.

Similarly, cultural artefacts were looted. They have remained in the possession of German museums and private collections. Systematic provenance research to identify the origins of these objects has only just begun. Transactions such as the return of Benin bronzes in Germany remain a matter of negotiations.

The German government admitted, in 2015, that the war against the Ovaherero and Nama in today’s Namibia was tantamount to genocide. Since then, German-Namibian negotiations have been taking place, but Germany’s limited atonement is a matter of contestation and controversy.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

The pain and exploitation of colonialism lives on in African societies today in many ways. I hope that the descendants of colonisers take away an awareness that we are products of a past that remains alive in the present. That decolonisation is also a personal matter. That we, as the offspring of colonisers, need to critically scrutinise our mindset, our attitudes, and should not assume that colonial relations had no effect on us.

Remorse and atonement require more than symbolic gestures and tokenism. In official relations with formerly colonised societies, uneven power relations continue. This borders on a perpetuation of colonial mindsets and supremacist hierarchies.

No former colonial power is willing to compensate in any significant way for its exploitation, atrocities and injustices. There are no meaningful material reparations as credible efforts of apology.

The colonial era is not a closed chapter in history. It remains an unresolved present. As the US novelist William Faulkner wrote:

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Henning Melber, Extraordinary Professor, Department of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “Namibia: The Price of Genocide | People and Power”