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The Interview
Simukai Chigudu, African politics professor: I support reparations
00:23:01
Amol Rajan speaks to Simukai Chigudu about the legacy of empire
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Transcript50 lines
- [00:00]
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- [01:11]
Interface Podcast Host
Welcome to the Interface, the show that decodes the tech that's rewiring your week and your world. On this week's episode, we'll look at the way that algorithms could change how much you're paying for your groceries, how even astronauts issues with Microsoft Outlook, and whether the next trend in tech is less tech. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:39]
Amal Rajan
Hello, I'm BBC presenter Amal 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.
- [01:52]
Interviewer
If you're not a little bit afraid, then you're not paying attention.
- [01:57]
Simukaye Chiguru
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.
- [02:11]
Amal Rajan
For this interview, I met Simukae 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, said Simukay 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. 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 Simai about why he thinks it's important to decolonize the curriculum and where he stands on the case for paying reparations for slavery.
- [02:57]
Simukaye Chiguru
The European empires are guilty of a great many sins and horrors, and I actually think they should all be taking on a very serious project of decolonization and reparative justice.
- [03:10]
Amal Rajan
But first, Simukhai told me about his experience growing up in Zimbabwe and how this informed his understanding of colonialism and the role Cecil Rhodes played. Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Sibukai Chiguru.
- [03:28]
Simukaye Chiguru
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 my of his siblings and my grandparents were all arrested. He fought in the liberation struggle for Zimbabwean freedom. And 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 and 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. It 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 4 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.
- [05:14]
Interviewer
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 is 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.
- [05:30]
Simukaye Chiguru
48. Yeah, yeah, 48.
- [05:31]
Interviewer
So it 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 here. This is.
- [05:38]
Simukaye Chiguru
No, no, go for it.
- [05:38]
Interviewer
Yeah, he was, he was sent. He was sent. He was not Very well as a kid. And they wanted to send him to South Africa or Southern Africa as it then to, 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. 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.
- [06:03]
Simukaye Chiguru
That's right.
- [06:04]
Interviewer
The north of which was Zambia.
- [06:06]
Simukaye Chiguru
Yeah. So Northern Rhodesia is what we today know as Zambia. And then Southern Rhodesia, which then became Rhodesia and then later became Zimbabwe.
- [06:13]
Interviewer
So that's Cecil Rhodes biography. What was Cecil Rhodes, the kind of idea that you grew up with?
- [06:18]
Simukaye Chiguru
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. But 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 of high school in Zimbabwe, I walked into this, you know, 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. Now, all of this clashed with what my father had told me when I was growing up.
- [07:11]
Interviewer
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.
- [07:17]
Simukaye Chiguru
Yeah, I mean, it's an international postgraduate with 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. So 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 war mongering imperialist, the man who raised through his own pocket a private army that ransacked village after village, community after community throughout southern Africa, whose, you know, the cumulative death toll under Rhodes watch in the wars that he fought in what is today Zimbabwe, accounted to about 3 to 4% of the population slaughtered.
- [08:29]
Interviewer
Was there a moment when all this history, all this, all these threads of all this complicated inheritance going back decades and centuries, 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.
- [08:45]
Simukaye Chiguru
There were several moments, partly because there was a part of me that desperately wanted to go to Oxford that, that, you know, had fully internalized everything I had grown up with and that believed that to prove myself a worthy heir of this grand inheritance that 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. It'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 in 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? And 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 dysfunction and corruption. Or 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 relevant 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. And 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 these were. 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. Why 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 on 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, what was that ambivalence?
- [12:05]
Interviewer
Why were you ambivalent?
- [12:06]
Simukaye Chiguru
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. So 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, attract all the heat and attention away from the substantive campaign.
- [13:10]
Interviewer
What's your assessment of how the Rhodes Must Fall campaign fared? Did it win? Did it lose? Is it a work in progress?
- [13:20]
Simukaye Chiguru
All three? I say all three because, okay, you know, there's a very literal fact that the statue of Rhodes did not. Did not fall. But I think, you know, I'm all. It's. 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. 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. And 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 all saw Saddam Hussein statue coming down in Iraq, in Baghdad. Yeah. 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. And so I think statues are not really about the past. They're about the story we tell about who we are.
- [14:49]
Interviewer
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.
- [15:05]
Simukaye Chiguru
Yeah.
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Interviewer
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?
- [15:16]
Simukaye Chiguru
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. And to see that institutions that stand for continuity and stability capitul. 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, oh, he may have had some odious views, but he was a product of his time. And 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 have. 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.
- [16:47]
Amal Rajan
You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service.
- [16:56]
Interface Podcast Host
Welcome to the Interface, the show that decodes the tech that's rewiring your week and your world. On this week's episode, we'll look at the way that algorithms could change how much you're paying for your groceries, how even astronauts have issues with Microsoft Outlook, and whether the next trend in tech is less tech. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [17:24]
Amal Rajan
Simil Kayachiguru 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 Simukhai is someone who is 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. And that is why in this conversation with Simai Chuguru from Oxford University, I asked him what he makes of the case for reparations. Okay, let's return to my conversation with Simukaya Chiguru.
- [18:18]
Simukaye Chiguru
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. Our attention and warrant our sense of like, you know, how do we heal from harm. But the other is also about show 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. But you know, one of the things that I tried to show in the book, because the book takes this really broad time scale, you know, and it does these sort of cross chronological. 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 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. And 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 reparative justice in terms of our public memorials, reparative justice in terms of acknowledging. Acknowledging wrongs and harm done.
- [19:47]
Interviewer
People listening to this who are against reparations or who you 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 this is 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.
- [20:22]
Simukaye Chiguru
Length.
- [20:22]
Interviewer
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.
- [20:32]
Simukaye Chiguru
So British Empire wasn't as bad as others. I mean, I.
- [20:39]
Interviewer
Given where we started out, that's really a mad place for you to be invited to go.
- [20:43]
Simukaye Chiguru
I just. I mean, it's sort of like, you know, weird flex, but okay. Like, it is a very popular.
- [20:50]
Interviewer
I suppose a lot of people use that argument. Niall Ferguson wrote an entire book called Empire, and it was one of his central points.
- [20:56]
Simukaye Chiguru
Yeah, yeah.
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Interviewer
And if you're gonna be colonized by someone historically, and this is literally their argument, that it would have been useful to be colonized by the Brits.
- [21:02]
Simukaye Chiguru
Yeah. I mean, there's 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. That may be the case. Like, I mean, I think, you know, you look at the Belgian's heinous record to King ii. Exactly. In the Congo. I mean, the pogroms that they. 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 and actually think they should all be taking on a very serious project of decolonization and reparative justice.
- [21:44]
Interviewer
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.
- [21:55]
Simukaye Chiguru
I mean, we were discussing statues and iconography and so on. One of the things that frustrated me about the Rhodes Must Fall debacle and responses to it and 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 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, you're telling this wider complicated story of how do people kind of relate. How did colonialism unfold and how do people relate to the colonial past? You know, it can be this argument is what history is, and that is what. Yeah, exactly. And I'm like. And that can be really fascinating because you can have all sorts of different artifacts to that end. You can have the statue itself, you can have the placards and the protests that people held up, because that's a moment in time that tracks, you know, what is the conversation that the world and this university, this community is having. And you can bring all, all of these into. Into a broader discussion about, you know, what is it that brings about social change. I think there's, you know, we've kind of been talking about reparations. I mean, one area in which we see this happening is about, you know, returning artifacts from, let's say, the British Museum or elsewhere to their places of origin. And I think, again, there's imaginative work to be done about custodianship and capacity and institution building, you know, to keep the focus on Africa for a moment. There so many African curators, custodians, academics, scholars who would love to be able to showcase and display the riches of their history. You know, on the continent, as forms of public pedagogy, there are exchange programs one can do. I mean, I just think that we just need a little bit more positive energy and imagination about this. Same thing goes for the curriculum. I mean, I think we need to be decolonizing the curriculum, not only university level, but right down to primary and secondary school, that the British story is a fascinating one. And what makes it most compelling is not a kind of stylized or static account of, you know, people in kind of with wig hair and that sort of thing who, you know, had multiple wives, but really saying, well, what, what, what, what is it that's made global Britain the good and the bad and how do we come to understand what the society is now and all of its fractures and frictions?
- [24:40]
Amal Rajan
Thank you for listening to the interview. For more compelling conversations, search for the interview. Wherever you get your podcasts, you'll find episodes from Helen Thompson, professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University, and acclaimed author Sir Salman Rushdie. Until the next time. Bye for now.
- [24:57]
Interviewer
Now,
- [25:13]
Interface Podcast Host
Welcome to the Interface, the show that decodes the tech that's rewiring your week and your world. On this week's episode, we'll look at the way that algorithms are could change how much you're paying for your groceries, how even astronauts have issues with Microsoft Outlook, and whether the next trend in tech is less tech. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.