The United Nations designated the years 2015-2024 as the International Decade for People of African Descent.
But the project has not only been neglected, it has also focused on “recognition” instead of “reparations,” reinforcing the structural racism inherent in the liberal capitalist system.
The International Decade for People of African Descent (IDPAD) is coming to an end on December 31, 2024; there are 2.5 years left to bring it out of the invisibility in which those who decided to organize it have kept it. This invisibility can be seen by consulting the website of the decade . Each entry occupies barely a page in the 7.5 years of its existence.
The way it has been treated is a symptom of a structural racism that refuses to tell its name; for this reason, it has not been able to go beyond the boundaries imposed by the international community, some of whose members have shown real opposition to it, on the pretext that their state is free of racism, even if they concede some racial discrimination, but that is where it ends.
The difficulties began at the UN during the negotiations between the International Working Group for People of African Descent (IWGPAD) and the representatives of the states that refused to accept the word ‘reparations’ in the identification of the decade. A wall of refusal was formed, reminiscent of the one that was expressed in Durban during the conference against racism (08/29-09/07) when African States had raised the issue of ‘reparations’. The compromise found, considering the stakes, is distressing: Recognition, Justice, Development. The term “Recognition” will never say what “Reparations” includes, understood as a collective and political process.
If we look at what the concept of “Recognition” means, we can understand why the representatives of the States preferred it to that of Reparations, which would have obliged them to analyze historically, politically and philosophically their relations to the history of enslavement and of colonization, to their colonial relations to black bodies and to Islam, their responsibility in the perpetuation of the capitalist system whose foundations are embedded in white supremacy and unceasingly confirmed by the savage and mortifying liberalism on which this system does not cease to grow to the detriment of the racialized bodies and of the maldevelopment which strikes the formerly enslaved and colonized countries.
What the representatives of the States aimed at by using the term ‘Recognition’ was to have the power to concede it – as a positive acceptance of subjectivity – to those selected by the institutions.
The colonial States do not aim at restoring the dignity of which the racialized, dehumanized and colonized bodies have been deprived since the great catastrophe that was the Discoveries, and especially from 1492, they commit themselves to legitimize a little more visibility if those who benefit from it remain confined within their zone of Non Beings.
Therefore this recognition depends on the generosity of the institution, which acts in a unilateral way; this obliges us to think of the paradox contained in the fact that the institution imposes the terms of this recognition, since there is no reciprocity.
The ambiguity of such an identity for the Decade can be seen. The worm has been in the fruit from the start. The question of the coloniality of power, exercised at the level of the UN and the international community, and which reinforces, through its inertia, the structural racism inherent in the liberal capitalist system, could not be addressed, Nor could the colonial order be questioned in a context where the world is oriented by hegemonic and imperialist models, all of which claim and entrench themselves behind Eurocentric Modernity, in defiance of the negrophobia that ravages black bodies wherever they may be.
The Decade should have opened the way for Afro-descendants and Africans, rather than being a mechanism added to all the others to combat ‘racism’ and which are proving particularly ineffective, to energize a process based on decolonial combativity by giving them back a voice that has been stolen from them, including by international institutions.
The institution of the UN and the international community should have built the conditions for a reciprocal dialogue on the problems that have led to the structural invisibilization of Afro-descendants and Africans in colonial forms that question both the coloniality of power, that of knowledge but also that which keeps all racialized people in a zone of Non-Being, in the periphery of the peripheries.
Rather than encouraging members of the international community to “recognize and deeply regret the unspeakable suffering and evils suffered by millions of men, women and children as a result of slavery, the slave trade, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, apartheid, genocide, and past tragedies, (…) ,” what at the end only serves to offer a good conscience to all those who continue to colonize, in one way or another, the formerly enslaved and colonized countries, this International Decade of People of African Descent should have been an elaborative time of a decolonial political process for reparations, the only way to restore the dignity of the black bodies.
To do this, during its first eight years, the International Decade for People of African Descent should have focused on the inhuman and undignified situation that the Haitian people, for example, are living. The international community should not have renewed the UN mission in Haiti after 18 years of military occupation and the Caricom states should have defended, tooth and nail, the inalienable sovereignty of the Republic of Haiti, a friendly country.
But ‘dominate’ remains the unsurpassable mantra of the ‘unilateral’ system that the UN has become, which has, in a way, given itself the objective of speaking about the peoples while forcing them not to engage in a dialogue for emancipation and liberation. It is clear that the UN system, over the decades, has been responsible for stifling, trivializing and standardizing the voices of the victims, and in this sense, multilateral institutions and States have become part of the problem. It is not from them that the liberation of black bodies through their recovered dignity will come.
In the end, the Decade became what Afro-descendant and African organizations did not want: a sounding board for the liberal aspirations of the dominant ones, where they were consulted from far and wide to give a token of goodwill but also to recover a few ideas without any ambition with regard to the challenges facing black people.
It never became a process that would have been allowed to transcend the obstacles; it was confined to a role of controlled action and limited to the framework set by the structures of the United Nations, at the request and with the consent of the States.
It should have allowed the inauguration of a reflection on a decolonial project in which States and international institutions would have favored exchanges based on dignity and the transfiguration of hatred, out of fear of otherness, into love of the Human. Afro-descendants and Africans claim their Humanity and to make community, among other things, from a historical, political and collective problematization of Reparations as a process of disalienation and epistemological questioning on the maintenance in a zone of Non-Being of Afro-descendants and Africans, even if some of them benefit from the Enlightenment defended by the capitalist system.
This International Decade for People of African Descent should have built the conditions for a commitment against structural racism and should have been the moment of reclaiming their humanity for the millions of Afro-descendants and Africans who are deprived of it.
All in all, these ten years will have been stolen from all those who want to change the inhuman meaning of the world. As have the years since the independence of many decolonized countries. The breathing of the racialized people, after these ten years, has not become lighter; on the contrary, it has become heavier. We can say, without betraying the hope of Africans and Afro-descendants, that the decolonial struggle is to act to reverse the project of misery and death that the capitalist, racist and liberal system carries.We still have the Permanent Forum for People of African Descent which will be officially launched in December 2022. Let’s not let ourselves be dispossessed of it. It must become our voice directed by our decolonial combativity! But already bad signs are coming; this forum was to be launched in New York. However, it will now be launched in Geneva – from December 5 to 8 – where even fewer organizations will have the opportunity to attend. Will Afro-descendant and African organizations be able to speak with one voice, united in a renewed pan-African approach and driven by decolonial combativeness rather than by everyone for themselves?