Romy Opperman, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research, interviews Esther Stanford-Xosei, renowned international legal expert in reparations, a Motherist, educator, historian, and Co-Founder of the  S  t o p  t h e   M  a a n g a m I z I  :   W  e   C  h a r g e   G  e n o c I d e /  E  c o cid e  Campaign   XR Internationalist Solidarity Network supporting the frontline activists of the Global South. Esther has been called a Modern Day Abolitionist and Freedom Fighter. This interview is a conversational dialogue about law, history, resistance, and reparations.

     Interview Part 1

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Liberation Law and Philosophy 

Romy: In a recent keynote you gave, you discussed history as a record of resistance, which I thought was important since it underlines the stakes of resurrecting and telling counter-memories and (historical) narratives. Please talk about your professional movement from law to history and your understanding of the role of both for reparations. 

My foundation is law, but law being a tool to realise justice.  I wanted to be a barrister from when I was a child. And so everything I did in terms of my legal education was with that in mind. I did do the bar vocational course, I did a law degree. But to qualify as a barrister, you had to have pupillage. I didn't get pupillage. Even though I wanted to be getting more involved in the legal profession in different ways, I realised that my real passion was to educate people about the law and how law is something that whilst it has been used against us as a tool of oppression, that it's also a tool of resistance. And so that is really the legal tradition that I come from. I went to a critical law school at Kent University, and law as resistance is really an approach to law that they taught, that was really based on looking at how different peoples who had been engaged in liberation struggles had used law to further their group rights. 

But law still, I think, underpins everything I do, even in terms of my reparations advocacy, my reparations education and training, how I try and help equip grassroots communities who have often been locked out of power from exercising their rights to be heard, their rights to be consulted, their rights to be informed, and their rights to shape actual processes to do with their repair. Now, I came to history accidentally in the sense that I was going through a really hard time around 2010, which was my last full-time job working for the National Women's Resource Centre. It was obviously a women's organisation, women led, there was no men staff and a feminist organisation, but I had calls to actually take them to Employment Tribunal for multiple discrimination. 

The Women's Resource Centre, had a value of feminism, but they meant white women's feminism. Now, I don't self-define as a feminist, I would say more, I'm a womanist, but I still embrace a lot of the perspectives and the knowledge that has been created by women who do self-define as feminist.

At that time, I was making these arguments around Black feminisms in the workplace, which were resisted. The leadership was white women who were mainly in terms of the senior leadership team, lesbian feminist, feminist, lesbian separatists. I get the impression that (1) they saw me as too Black, (2) too empowered and too challenging because they didn't recognise race within the context of the Women's Resource Centre. And they didn't recognise racisms for women. And when the majority of their funding was obtained to work with non-white women, especially from the global south and Afrikan women, and these women were just referred to as genitally mutilated and all of these kind of very dehumanising, pejorative terms that really didn't recognise that the full personhood of women who had undergone particular procedures, some of which was forced and some of which wasn't. I didn't go around preaching my beliefs, but it was people's perceptions of me. Anyway, that harrowing experience and whole process led me to really question a lot of what I was doing.

Anyway, after that experience, I felt I couldn't work for an organisation again, because it really devastated me. And psychologically I found it very hard because three of us brought cases. There was me, there was a sister who was mixed heritage, and then there was a woman racialized as white, and we all brought similar cases to expose the racism in the organisation. My white colleague began to be persecuted because she was hanging out with the Black women and being a bit too cool in terms of recognising race and the impact of race. I found it difficult because I just wasn't prepared. When you are working with men, you're just used to having your defences, but I didn't have that for women. I decided I would never work for anyone again.

So, I was in a hard spot, and I was doing this reparations work. I needed a lifeline, and a lifeline came for me in the thought that I'm going to try and do a PhD, and I wanted to do it in law because that's my natural home and discipline, but I couldn't find a PhD in law that I wanted to do. A lot of the advice you get is when you're doing the PhD is the supervisors are actually the most important people. So, I found a supervisor that I thought could supervise my research on reparations, but he was a history professor, so that's how I came to history. And I was one of two people who received a bursary to do the PhD research in history. I didn't have a master's because after the bar vocational course, I decided I wouldn't do any formal education. But I had the experience, I had the passion, I had the knowledge about the movement, and I had archives to show that well, we've done this, we've done that. And they were just bowled, bowled over. They were like, we never knew that this movement existed here and that you are a keeper of the history. So that's how I came to start my PhD journey. And I struggled quite a bit because I didn't do academic history in my A levels. I didn't do a degree in history. I literally came to history as an activist who knew a lot about the history because of my organising. And I knew a lot about the key players who were marginalised in that history. And I continued the works of some of them, or certainly picked up where some of them left off. And so that's how I came to embrace history. But I did feel like a bit of a fish out of water for the first few years because I was trying to learn what history is at an academic level. How do I actually capture it? What methodologies do I use? 

And it took a little while to settle in, but the more and more I got into my PhD and the more interviews I did  (there's an oral history component to my research where I've interviewed activists, 35 reparations activists) I realised how important a working knowledge of history is to articulating arguments for repair and to advocating for the longevity of this movement. Because a lot of what people were doing was just starting from scratch as though nothing had happened before. And I kept finding myself in spaces having to bring up historical facts and arguments and information about things that people had tried to do before and maybe haven't worked or were just being totally ignored and excluded.

II Groundings

Romy: The concept of groundings is rooted in a practice adapted from Rastafari and then taken up Walter Rodney. How has groundings as a conceptual yet concrete practice, understood as a non-hierarchical participatory mode of reasoning from multiple kinds of people, factored into your work?

The groundings methodology for me has very much been inspired by Walter Rodney. But in truth, even before I knew about Walter Rodney's groundings, I was engaged in that as a practise just through organising from early on in my reparations activism. I've been organising for about 23 years now directly in the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations. I've always worked predominantly in my community in Black communities, but I've always done cross community work as well because I feel it's important. So then, we called it cross community dialogues, but they were really groundings with different stakeholders who were connected to this issue of addressing legacies of enslavement and colonialism, maybe because they worked in museums, galleries or archives. They were dealing with collections that were about this history or because they sent a set had a sense of connection just as human beings and peoples of conscience to these kinds of concerns. And so it's really, really important. And we've tried more and more as activists within the networks that I'm part of which have encountered elitist approaches and very colonial approaches and very paternalistic approaches. Our response to these encounters has created the kind of resistance we need. We need, we would say democratic, participatory democratic spaces of reasoning, engagement, cross-fertilization of ideas, and cross pollination of ideas. And these groundings are not just talk for talk's sake, but really looking at how do we try and put the best of who we can be or who we are in terms of our different knowledges and experiences and skills base to work out what we do about a concern that we have a connection to and the kind of change that we are trying to bring about or that we can bring about, whether we're conscious of it or not. And that's why I think groundings became important, and it's been an essential part of the grassroots organising, the Stop the Maangamizi campaign that I'm part of with the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee, because we recognise that we need to ground with our people. You see a lot of the gains, a lot of the advocacy was happening at the UN and International Forum and at the NGO level, but it was happening above the heads, over the heads of peoples. It's meant to be about them, but they're not centred in the process. And that invalidates or takes away a big part of what a repair process should be about, which is not only to bring about transformation of the group or communities impacted or affected, but also to also try and help restore agency and dignity. We can make changes, we can be the change. We are not just doomed to very pessimistic future and fatalistic future. If we draw from our own archives, our memories, our ancestral archives, some of which we don't even fully understand, but just inhabit us. We have a remembrance, we can be more, and we have been more, even if we don't have the language and we don't yet have the full of cognition of what it is that we are connecting with or what we are feeling is missing.

III Survival, Joy, and Ancestrality 

Romy: And groundings shows that we need each other to bring it out, right? We need each other for that bricolage, that weaving work to share the scraps of ancestral knowledge and counter-memory. We need community both given and created for those seeds to bloom into alternatives. When people ask me about my work on climate change, I insist that it isn't it all just doom and gloom. I don't know if I have the language of solutions that people want, but what really maddens me is not some innate flaw in humanity, but rather the fact that various states and corporate entities are killing and stopping the people who have the seeds of different ways of being that we really, really need. How do we nurture alternatives to corporate control, NGOisation and green capitalist “climate solutions”? 

I think about that Arundhati Roy quote around empire and resistance, when she talks about our strategy not only being to confront empire, but to lay siege to it, to deprive it of its oxygen, to shame it, to mock it. And we do it with our literature, our dances, our joy. And that's really what I hold onto because I think that's my people's story. That's what we've done. Even if you've been really oppressed or impoverished or might have gone through so much, we're still able to find that joy. And that's why many of us are still here because as you know, we were never meant to survive. And we have. We have survived! A lot of what I know is not what I've been taught. A lot of it has come through intuition and not being afraid to question and go beyond what I was taught by my parents or my family members and so forth, because this sense of my identity does not come from my mother or certainly not my father.  There was just so much that my dad didn't have exposure to in terms of knowledge of his own culture and ancestry, and he didn't know much about our Afrikan ancestry. And I remember I used to wear my head wrapped (like Erykah Badu used to wear it)and my dad said to me, you always wrap your hair like that, like an Afrikan. So, I said to him, well, dad, what do you think we are? He responded: I'm not an Afrikan. So, I said, well, what are you then? Well, I'm from Barbados. I was like, okay, how long were your people in Barbados? How did they get there? But these were questions that he never really was encouraged to think about. He said, well, in my day you didn't ask those questions. History didn't matter. Right. Yeah, because I guess they saw history as something negative and painful and wanted to be as far away from it as possible. Whereas my mum is the opposite. My mum knew aspects of the culture, but she never termed it or identified it in the way that I did. She just saw, this is Guyanese stuff, and this is just what my mother did or what my grandmother did. And it's only because I then intellectually was able to do my own kind of research and self-study that I was like, mum, do you realise these are that these are Afrikanisms that have been retained by your family? And in Guyana, and her grandfather came from Brazil, and there was just all kinds of interesting roots and directions that my family had gone in. So I was very blessed to have my mum raise me in that way where there were aspects of the heritage and identity, which I've come on to fully grasp and identify with. But as I said, I've always had a strong sense of connection to ancestors.

And interestingly in my maternal line, even though we've got very few women in our family, the women really rule, the women are the matriarchs.It’s just a natural role I've grown up with. I have older brothers but I’m the only woman . My mum was the only daughter from her mother. Her mother was an only daughter. So I come from this line of strong women who just are centres and pillars of the family and the institution of the family and the teaching, the passing on of the culture and the traditions from our ancestors. So, that's something I think I've had a strong desire with. And partly also in terms of my own sense of self-identification.

When my mum was pregnant with me, she was very religious and in fact, she was a Jehovah's Witness, and she told me that she kept on trying to get a girl, but she kept on having these boys, but she really didn't want boys. She was trying to get another daughter, but she had a vision when she was pregnant with me and she was given the name of Esther. She said that in the vision, she was told not to worry and that she would have a girl. This one will be a girl and you have to call her Esther. So that's a creation/birth story that I've just grown up hearing from my mum. She would always say to me, you were loved, you were wanted before you were even conceived. And I've grown up. It makes such a difference knowing that from birth, hearing that from your mother.

I never liked the name Esther and didn't really have any particular strong affinity with it. And I actually didn't read the book of Esther in the Bible until I was in my twenties because I just used think “Oh God, what an awful, old-fashioned name!” But now I really, really like the name because I understand the story and the teachings, and what that book is trying to convey. And they say that the book of Esther doesn't even belong in the Bible because it's the one book that doesn't mention the name of God and just appears not to fit. But it's essentially the story of a Hebrew woman who has to conceal her identity because her people were being persecuted, and she ends up marrying somebody who is in a position to actually do an act that would save her people. And saving her people was really to be able to allow them to fight a war of resistance, to defend themselves. That’s what happened. And so in essence, Esther was a liberator of her people, but the book is all about divine providence and how sometimes we are placed in circumstances to fulfil a bigger purpose that might not be clear at the time. And that's really how I see my life: how I've come onto the journey of repair, how I've just embraced it, and how I can do it in my sleep. It's the thing I live for, it's the thing that gives me energy, oxygen, and I'm so driven around this agenda because I know it is part of the ancestral work that my foremothers were not able to complete and have equipped me in terms of the memories, the intergenerational memories that we carry. That makes me know that this is work that I have a responsibility to also add my contribution to. 

Romy: Audre Lorde describes this as doing the work that you are here to do, and the great M. Jacqui Alexander takes this up to suggest that what it means to live a good life is cultivating the self-knowledge and spiritual practice required to discover what the work is that you are here to do, and then of course actually doing it.

Esther: My mum even wrote a little book about her life, and she has a little chapter in there on me and my naming story and how the work I've gone on to do was part of the mission that I had in terms of coming here. People have different spiritual systems, but certainly I believe that we have a purpose. We incarnate to fulfil purpose and a mission. Some of us do not become conscious of that in our lifetime, but some do. And I think it makes such a difference when, or you understand why you are here, not just, well, my parents had me like, but why are you here? What is your purpose? What is it you've come to give to the world? What problem have you come to help try and solve? Or to what path is it you've come to help forge, make, create for the upliftment of humanity? It takes some of us a long time. Some people like some children and babies know it, you know, look at the children being born now. Some of them are so sharp and they're just little old people, so opinionated. And some go through their whole life and they are wondering what they should do.

Romy: And I think people run from it as well sometimes, especially if your mission is quite difficult or scary.

Esther: That's right. I've tried to run from mine so many times. I think if somebody had showed me what would've happened, what I would've lost jobs, the attacks, the personal relationships, I would've said: “No way!”

IV Reparation Time

Romy: I heard you talk about Tikkun Olam which is Hebrew for repairing the world. And I’ve been thinking about messianic time-about a rupture that is also a repair. Can you talk more about the Tikkun Olam framework and do you have any projects in this area?

Esther: I'm quite eclectic in where I draw my influences from. I don't get hung up on who the messenger is so much as what the message is. And if there are things that resonate with me, I would embrace it or internalise it. I think, I'm sure I probably do subscribe to some sort of messianic, what you are referring to as messianic notions of time. But at the same time, I would say the dominant framework for me is the notion of Sankofa, the principle, the tweak on Sankofa. And this idea that the past, present, and the future are all interconnected into one. And that to move forward, we have to look back and we have to retrieve. There's no taboo in going back and fetching those aspects that we need actually to start. Some things, as I've said, we don't need to bring into a future, but there are some things that we have to, and so that's for me how I would classify myself now being conscious in terms of a Sankofa notion. From a philosophical approach or standpoint, recognising that it [time] is cyclical.

And what I know about a lot of Afrikan traditions is that that's how they are. Because we see, and I often sometimes when I'm talking, I'll talk in the collective and it drives my mum mad because she'll say, “What do you mean, you didn't go through that?” And I say, no, but that's just how I think. I don't think in terms of me, just as an individual, and I see myself as part of a community, a part of a community of those who have passed, those that are here and those that are yet to become or that are yet to incarnate. And I see myself as being equally responsible to and accountable to all sections of that time framework. So, a lot of what I do is driven by a sense of ancestral calling and path making. I want to be conscious of obligations that resonate with me intuitively, within my spirit obligations to my foremothers in particular. That's who I feel most connected to.

And that's who I always call upon when I'm in my deepest downest, darkest times and moments when I'm looking for that guidance. I call on my mothers, my ancestral mothers, but I also have this strong connection and sense of duty to the unborn generations. And I see my work as being about this. We inherit not only the assets and the privileges and the gains, but we also inherit some of the obligations and the debts from history. And because I know what I have benefited from in terms of the struggles that have gone of those that have gone before me, I also know that I feel I have a duty and a responsibility to those for whom I want to make the world a better place. And that comes back to the notion of the Tikkun Olam. But also for me, what resonates with me is this notion of serudj ta, (ST) which is similar to Tikkun Olam. And ST is something that actually has been sort of popularised by Maulana Karenga who does a lot of work around Kemetic or Egyptian, what he will call classical Afrikan knowledge systems. He has been able to reinterpret some of the hieroglyphs. He has popularised what some of those who were part of the different dynasties in Kemet taught. And Serudj Ta part of an ethical tradition related to our moral obligation to past, present, and future. And it's often expressed in the following terms to raise up that which is in ruins to repair that which is damaged, to rejoin that which is severed, to replenish that which is depleted, to strengthen that which is weakened, to set which is wrong, and to make flourish that which is insecure and underdeveloped.

The idea is that we are here to elevate and amplify and co-create a flourishing for not only humanity, but for all life forms that we are connected to. In essence, there's a lot of resonances with the Tikkun Olam framework that talks about leaving the world a better place. Maulana Karenga emphasises the Serudj Ta is about the greater good, and it is about us leaving earth more beneficial, more beautiful. It's really about beauty. And that also resonates with many Native Americans, notions of what it means to be human, what it means to be good. What it means to be part of society is to walk in beauty and not to spoil Mother Earth. It is to be part of the stewardship and caretaking of Mother Earth.

I would say this really guides a lot of my reparations work because even the way a lot of reparations, discourses, and analysis are done is not really about repair. If you're going to elevate compensation models, you're not always going to, in fact, you're probably very rarely going to get to a repair. I've been concerned for a long time about the lack of ethics and the lack of real stopping of the harms of the system of today. And the way in which we are advocating approaches to repair that actually are more of the same. It's just that we're differently positioned in the pecking order, but it's essentially a world order that is just going to keep on replicating racial capitalism forms, exclusionary kind of practises that are premised on dehumanisation and separation of us from our environment that sustain a Mother Earth, that in turn sustains all life.

V Cognitive and Epistemic Justice  

Romy: How does this concept of repair inform your reparations work? And how do reparations relate to cognitive and epistemic justice?

Esther: So I think as reparation workers, we have a duty to elevate those longstanding ideas that travel through time that different people have carried. And I do a lot of reparations education and training with different groups. And I remember the last training I did for a racial organization justice networking in Leeds, there was an Indian woman who was on the course, and when I was teaching some of these concepts. She was giving me terminologies from her own culture that meant similar things philosophically, which I didn’t know about. This is obviously where cognitive/epistemic justice is really important, because we're using just very limited and oftentimes very Eurocentric frameworks that have decentered the majority of people in the world. And I think it's time for us to even repair the harms that have been done in terms of the epistemicide. And there can be no global reparatory justice anyway without cognitive justice. Because of these issues related to how we define harm or injury, the damage that has been, and the way I see my situation as being, I'll often say to people that I didn't just lose some money or my people. We lost a world and actually a place in the world.

So for me, reparations is about reclaiming back that world and seeing myself as being not only a citizen of Pan Afrika, which I'm actively championing, but a citizen of the world. This world has to be co-created simultaneously, which we refer to as Ubuntu Dunia, a notion based on an Engunu term, which speaks to a multipolar, pluralist, anti-imperialist world, where many worlds fit. So, this expresses the idea of a world where many worlds fit and fosters a coexistence model. The question is not how I'm imposing my reality on you or how you are imposing your reality on me, but how can we coexist? Actually, if we look higher and beyond ourselves, we know that we are not the height of everything. We're actually just small players in a big orchestra of different instruments. And if we need to recognise that and recognise that we all have to find ways to share, not only to share the space, but to share the resources, to share not only the assets and the bounty, but to also share the challenges that we are facing as members of the human family who are going through poly crisis on so many levels.

Romy: I'm glad you mentioned the anti-imperialist dimension, because it is crucial and difficult to navigate and deeply wedded to topics we are interested in – such as climate change, environment, sovereignty, non-territorial autonomy, and the deep need for internationalist networks and movements. In a quick anecdote, I walked into the launderette in Brooklyn and this woman had on the back of her hoodie, in red capitals, “GO BACK AND FETCH IT.” And I was like, oh my, that woke me up! Can you explain what we lost and how we must go back and take it back? 

Esther: That's right. Take back. But what did we lose? We lost the things that people focus on, the material things, the buildings, the artefacts, the sculptures, the this, but the material or tangible, but it's also the intangible and so much that is even hard to properly quantify in economic terms that we've actually lost the biodiversity and species lost. These include obviously, loss of human life, human mobility, culture, traditions, heritage, the dignity, even our sense of personhood and what is it that makes us human and who we are, our sense of identity and purpose, the habitats, our ways of knowing and our ways of being. We lost all those components that contribute to our sense of mental and emotional wellbeing, our sense of place and how we fit or where we fit in the world, and the ecosystem. We also lost our connection to land and stewardship of land, and our sense of self-determination, power influence, our sense of place, our sense of connection, our sense of belonging, the social fabric in terms of community loss, breakdown, sovereignty and territory. You can't just take a euros, pounds or dollars approach and say “Okay, it's just about resources.” Currency is a very finite thing and very short term in terms of the different ways in which we've been using modern money and the different types of exchange that we have to kind of fight for.This is especially important in a world where traditional currency like money is being phased out and moved toward crypto and other digital currencies.

Romy: Yes. Let's not forget what happened with Cowrie shells. People sold other people for them and then the currency was devalued. We should keep that in mind. 

Interview Part 2

Pan-Afrikan Perspective on Environment, Sentience, and Indigenous Philosophies 

Romy: In terms of the themes of Turn 4 such as philosophies of the Indigenous peoples of northern America, environment, and sentience, can you talk about these themes and indigeneity from a pan-Afrikan reparationist and abolitionist perspective? And can you explain how people, mostly white people, but not exclusively, are much happier to talk about Indigenous thought and environmental perspectives, but that comes at the cost of further displacing or erasing, particularly Black diasporic, Afrikan continental insights and perspectives, and indigeneity? So, there's a kind of curtailing of the scope of what injustice means that also goes hand in hand with anti-Blackness. I think this tendency does some damage, particularly around environmental issues and climate change, since it occludes the insights and perspectives of Afrikan descendant peoples. Would you agree? 

Esther: I totally agree about that. And we should think about the way in which a lot of people of Afrikan heritage and in the diaspora are not really recognised as being indigenous. The indigenous are specific populations, say in Afrika, the San, the Kikuyu, the Maasai, sort of what might be seen as exoticized groups and communities that are often presented as being stagnated in time in terms of what might be seen as traditional culture or traditional Afrika. But I know in my work, it is something that has been actively challenged and countered because a lot of the work that I do is really based on the premise of Afrikan people, whether we call ourselves Afrikan or not, but people that emanated from today what we would call the continent of Afrika. Our bloodlines run throughout human beings, all human beings, as long as they have come from this planet and recognise that this is their home. And so indigeneity is a really important concept in issues of repair, because how myself and many of those I work with, how we see indigeneity is that it's really about the place that you are supposedly native to in terms of your lineage. Maybe not you directly, because we've travelled with diasporas, we are not necessarily living in original homelands or certainly where people from our groups or group came from. So, it is about being that part of the Earth, that part of Mother Earth, planet Earth that we call home, or that our people have come to call home or create or know as home. In that sense, with indigeneity, you've got people who are racialized as white who would be recognised obviously as indigenous to certain parts of Europe in particular. And so, there is a recognition of that, but it's really about where we feel that sense of connection and those ties are past, present, and future.

Indigeneity is about returning or regenerating, or restituting. Indigeneity is a key process within what some of us refer to as rematriation, which is also a term that I know that many people in so called North America who would be recognised, classified or self-defined as indigenous or natives also use. So, yes, there's a lot of cross fertilization of concepts of ideas, of philosophies around which all speak to returning to being back in relationship with that part of the land, that part of the Earth that we and our people have made the most footprints as it were, in terms of our origin stories. 

Non-territorial forms of Autonomy and Mother Earth

Romy: There's so much in your response. We need to explore ways of recovering or at least regenerating those aspects of ourselves, even if we can't be in our ancestral lands. So, I’m thinking about ways of creating a specific kind of relations, deep relations with the land that we can't even return to. I’m thinking about (re)creating this land and these relational ties with Mother Earth as diasporic people, as displaced people, as migrants. Can you talk about our ties to land and Mother Earth?

Absolutely. I think being on the land, having a relationship with land is key wherever we are. So these ideas that I'm talking about are not just about Indigenous land relations. And I've got many colleagues that I work with and friends and family members who are returning, they're returning somewhere, whether it's some part of Afrika or maybe some part of the Caribbean. But even so, the reality is I think the majority of people who might have settled here [in the UK] or have citizenship or might have built connections here – who have families, relationships, and employment - they're probably going to be here for a while. This principle of returning to land and rematriation is also just as relevant to those who are here and therefore part of diaspora sites of engagement and community and nation building. But we are doing it within a specific context of the British Isles, which isn't about trying to assert forms of territorial sovereignty, but is really about non territorial forms of autonomy in relation to the institutions of culture, of heritage, governance, community governance, healthcare, education, and wealth creation that are important to help empower groups and communities.

R. Oh, I love that. Non territorial forms of autonomy! Has there been any social movements based on this idea?

In fact, that's a model that in the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations, and a lot of the organising groups that I’m part of are working with. It’s a terminology that I’ve come up with to differentiate our approach, because a lot of the time people talk about a reparations movement, and there isn't one reparations movement. And I think the most common or popular one might get classified as reparations for slavery or slave trade. They might use that term or colonialism, but it's still, I think the group that is seen as the foundation of that is people of Afrikan heritage and ancestry. But it's also the case that other peoples who've experienced, especially Europeans, settler colonialism and other forms of colonialism and other types of dispossession have also to different degrees embraced reparations or reparatory justice, although some may not use that term. So, for some Native American and Indigenous people, they might refer to sovereignty for instance, or land back, which becomes a way of describing types of repair and restituting to those communities aspects of themselves and their relationship with their environment. It includes land, which is essential for their being able to build institutions to address the injustices that they have faced as peoples.

R: I was listening to a recent keynote you gave on reparations. I thought it was interesting that you suggested there’s also a need for reparatory work to be done or there is a reparatory dimension when it comes to say, European people who were classified as witches. Can you explain what you meant and its relevance for environment and sentience? 

Yeah, absolutely. Essentially, repair is something that has different dimensions and obviously different levels. Certainly, that group of women mainly who were persecuted, a lot of them as we know were wise women, were medicine women, women were healers, were earth workers, were nature lovers. This was deemed to be threatening. And these women were persecuted and demonised. And so in terms of the harm and that persecution of women, the repair is also required of them because these women were persecuted for actually being holistic and maintaining knowledge systems that were more in harmony with mother earth, with nature, with the environment, with the cosmos. This knowledge was deemed to be threatening, especially with institutionalised Christendom that has promoted so much sort of separation and division, along with this notion of superiority that we as humans supposedly have over the rest of nature and environment. Those arguments are there in terms of people who today we can recognise. These women were often ahead of their time and they were actually very, very in tune with nature and the power of nature. This is what made them probably so threatening to others, especially the men folk, in terms of institutionalised patriarchy.

R: We need to consider how that violent persecution of  these women was bound up with institutionalisation of knowledge, particularly medical knowledge in the then nascent disciplines of medicine and science. It’s also significant because it pushes back against the preconception that something like indigeneity or those kind of relations with the earth are restricted just to one particular population. Are reparations exclusive to one population?

No, it's a global phenomena, and if we think about it properly, we're all indigenous to somewhere. And in that sense, we all have a sense of, should have a sense of belonging and stewardship. Not ownership, but stewardship, dependency, care and connection in terms of our families, our lineages, and bloodlines.

Rematriation

Romy: Can you explain rematriation and how it is used in international activist organizations? (Note that this section turns more into a dialogue between Romy and Esther).

The rematriation is a piece that I think needs proper explanation. Within a lot of Indigenous self-defined thought, or those who might in the literature be classified as Indigenous, rematriation is seen as a returning of the sacred to the mother. That is like mother land, which is how we identify traditionally to land. There exists the notion of the patria, which is the Fatherland, the Germanic kind of concept. But that has been a distortion because even within Europe there was notions of mother land or mother earth, and it's about returning to the ways of Mother Earth. So rather than seeing ourselves as separate from or above or superior to and disconnected from, we see that we are part of mother Earth. And this is obviously something that many Indigenous peoples, especially in Abya Yala (so-called south America) that they've held onto in terms of notions of Pachamama and that Pachamama is living, is sentient, has rights, and hence the rights of Mother Earth sort of convention that they've been sort of trying to popularise promote and have implemented to various degrees in particular countries such as Bolivia and Ecuador, and certain parts of Peru, for instance.

Rematriation is also about restoring balance, restoring a sense of equilibrium, when the world has been unbalanced. And there are a lot of various phases or epochs and certainly the beginning of chattel enslavement and the colonial dispossession of peoples in the global south, especially Afrika, the so-called Americas, including the Caribbean and Asia, that has brought about this huge imbalance that can be felt in so many ways in the very polar fields of Mother Earth. Rematriation also speaks to this notion of restoring a people to their rightful place in sacred relationship with their ancestral lands. So that's epitomised by a term called restitution, which is recognised as being one of the five principles of reparations under international law. Some interpret rematriation to also refer to returning to a spiritual way of life. Whereby we live with reverence for nature.

We don't see nature as harmful, as threatening. Instead, we are in balance and while we know that nature can heal, we know that nature can also be violent at the same time. It is really about how we relate to the laws of nature, the laws of the cosmos, and restoring right relationships. This refers to relationships that are based on justice, that are based on the best principles that people have championed. In the context of the international social movement for Afrikan reparations, we emphasise notions of Ma’at as being part of that restoring of the balance, that we need to restore Ma’at on planet earth. And Ma’at being this ethical ideal that was really championed by the peoples of ancient Kemit or so-called Egypt today. They recognised that human beings had an obligation not only to each other as human beings respectively, but in terms of an obligation to the earth and to the cosmos, to live and act in balance and not to do things that created that imbalance, which really has an impact on the whole.

So yeah, that is really the thinking about rematriation. And within the International Network of Scholars and Activists for Afrikan Reparations that I'm a member of and co-founder of, we have, we're in the process of finalising a research project looking at efforts of rematriation on the continent of Afrika which includes people of Afrikan descent, so-called where the return is not just about a physical return, but about a reintegration into societies, into communities, and in particular to reintegrate into communities that are indigenous and that see themselves as indigenous. So that's part of the kind of returning ourselves to our people or to ourselves. We've been separated for hundreds of years. We now go by different names and identities, and many of us don't even remember who we were. But this idea that we can be, again, part of our lost kind of families and our lineages is a key aspect of rematriation from an Afrikan standpoint. It's also about returning or restoring a sacred relationship with the lands that we are stewarding, that we have the responsibility to take good care of, not only for the benefit of ourselves, but also for the benefit of future generations.

Romy: I know about some efforts with rematriation in North America by Indigenous womxn that involve land back, but also the restitution of traditional birthing practices. Are there other practices relevant to rematriation or reparations?

Ceremonies. It's not just the land, it's our culture, it's our teachings, it's our ceremonies, it's our life ways, it's our relationship with water, our relationship with land, our relationship with each other, with the cosmos. All of it back.

Romy: Yes, because those practices and ceremonies require actually being on and in some relation with the land. And then also I want to underscore the ways in which if we are out of balance with the earth, with land (and obviously many indigenous lands have been struck particularly hard intentionally by a lot of extractivist projects, a lot of dumping). But when it's so out of balance, then it comes back. For instance, in mother's breast milk that becomes poisoned - PCBs are an important example since they can only leave the human body through breast milk or making a baby. The imbalance with the earth then reverberates in very clear ways that also then disrupts, say, traditional cultural practices. 

Note: I am grateful to Dr. Hollie Kulago (Dine) at Penn State for letting me audit her transformative “Decolonizing and Indigenizing pedagogy” class and helping me to grasp this and many other important points. The visits of Bear Clan mother Louise Herne of Mohawk Nation and Hayley Cavino (Mauri) deeply informed the way that I think about reciprocal violence against Mother Earth and mothers/womxn more generally, and the need for what Louise Herne calls “Mother Law” as a way to redress environmental and reproductive injustice.

Esther: A lot of the time, (especially in Britain) we’re often the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren of people who came as economic migrants and who never really saw this land as their own or their home. And they’ve stayed and had children and gone on to have grandchildren, et cetera, and we're here. But even so, (unless you live in outside of London sometimes and in certain areas), we don't necessarily have that connection. So it means that the repair cannot really fully happen because we haven't got that connection. But as our people always are, we are resilient and we recreate what we can in the best way that we can with the circumstances and the environment that we have. So, there are models that are being developed now, even within the UK, by people racialized as Black or some other kind of Afrikan diasporic identity. They are making demands, certainly at the level of regional governance and structures, but even at the state level, for access to land. For many people, this is their home now.

They're not going anywhere else necessarily. They might go and travel and visit, but they've made this, they've tried to make home here. So it's about what we are pushing for and advocating for and are making demands around that we need in order to be whole. We need land to grow off not only to be in relationship, but to grow our food, to feel a sense of rootedness and connection, and to feel that energy of being symbiotic relationship. That happens when a people feel a sense of connection, responsibility, stewardship, and love for that part of the earth that they're standing on and that they maintain a relationship with. 

Romy: I'm thinking of a group like LioN (Land in Our Names). 

Yes, I'm aware of that group. In terms of land, there's a group in Bristol called Afrikan Connections Consortium that, as part of their own local reparations, has been organising as sections of the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations. They have come up with an idea of a village.

It's like an eco village that is called Zenzele Village. And “Zenzele”, I think, is meant to be a Zulu, term for “Do for self.” They've come up with a concept, they've got some architectural plans, and they're in discussions with the local council, with entrepreneurs and businesses around the project. This can not only become a hub for community building and promoting. They're using terms such as Black excellence, whatever that means. But they're getting a lot of support as a legacy project for people of Afrikan Caribbean and other sort of diasporic identities in the city.

Romy: Yeah, that's great. I suppose in the UK there's also less of a history of Black rural life which obviously [due to plantation slavery and its afterlives] is very complex in the United States, parts of the Caribbean and elsewhere. That means that experiments with autonomous land-based Black communities arguably exist there in a different way.  I wanted to highlight something I think you're saying that is important. This is something I've tried to say in different ways in my work. Part of what constitutes the harm and the wrong of racism and colonialism (and in particular chattel slavery) is the rupturing of connections to place and also the kind of attempted erasure and persecution of practices and forms of spirituality and tradition that would maintain kind of earth-based forms of connection and life even while (physically) away from people's (or their ancestor’s) Indigenous land. 

Yeah, absolutely.

Romy: Attending to this (placed-based, earth-spirit dimension) of rematriatrion, and of what needs to be repaired, of what has been ruptured, connects to a point that you insist on so often (and that I agree with so whole wholeheartedly): that reparations is not just about money. 

Esther: I think in terms of the ongoing harms, they are not often seen even by a lot of us. Even if we're broken, we may not show it or look at it. People have perceptions of what it means to be harmed or injured or violated. They also have perceptions of how we inhabit space, how we lack space, or what it means to have space, to be in that space, to try and regenerate, renew, investigate or explore our cultures. But what is it? What aspects of me have been lost or can I try and reconnect with? Because we're not recognised really as, (even though they call us ethnic minorities), we are not really afforded minority rights, which are group and collective rights in the U.K. So the rights that we have are still very much civil rights. And of course there is the human rights stuff as well, but a lot of it is about what this government decides that it will acknowledge and honour.

And the injuries for me that I personally experience and that I am beginning to talk a lot more about is being a survivor of not only genocide, but also ecocide. And for ordinary people, when you use terms like genocide, they think “Oh, stop being so extreme!” Or sometimes they think what's happened to you isn't a genocide because there's a perception that if you are experiencing a genocide that it's just some type of mass extermination. But Raphael Lempkin who coined the term genocide and ethnocide, intended for the two terms to be used interchangeably. Although some of his arguments and thoughts got into the 1948 genocide convention, not all of them did. And he is on record as saying that genocide has two phases: one, the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group, and the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.

So he's really referring to the national pattern as being the national or of the nation: their group, their culture, their heritage, their institutions, their frameworks, and their world views. When you kind of debase, denigrate, and make it difficult for people to access those aspects of their heritage that they continue to be alienated from, then it becomes much easier to then impose your own way of life and modus operandi on that people or group. You force them militarily, through legal structures, through legalised conquest, and legitimization of that fore. You force them into a continued subjugation and force them to accept your will.

I think more commonly ethnocide, which is a less well-known term, speaks to the destruction of the culture and the identity of a group without the physical destruction of the people. And it was coined by Raphael Lempkin as well. So, many of us can definitely claim that, because if we can't really identify beyond grandparents or even great grandparents, which is the case for many of our people, then that means that you have been subjected to ethnocide. You have no knowledge or no remembrance of that past.

Romy: That resonates very powerfully for me.  In my family my paternal grandfather was the only Black Afrikan – maybe he was from East Afrika, maybe even North (I was always told he/we were Somali). He was adopted and had clearly been harmed. He was isolated and alienated from his land, people, culture, language to the extent that he didn’t even know what or who he had been alienated from and why. It's been interesting living in America: being a foreigner who may settle here but is not fully at home, and leaving the apparent inclusivity of “mixed” “melting pot” of London where I was somewhat insulated from asking myself hard questions, at the same time as I’ve been transformed by my immersion in Black thought. That immersion gave me the tools to understand myself critically and compassionately. It is only very recently that I have begun to realise I need to grieve for parts of myself that I will never fully know or recover. 

Esther: That’s it. And I’ve also gone through similar things, and I continue to grieve for those aspects of myself, some of which could never be restored or repaired. Some things are gone, some things we can try and renew and regenerate and we take bits of, but we have some fragments. It's a very fragmented piecing together, like a bricolage, but some aspects are gone. And for instance, when I hear people talking native languages that I don't understand, I become conscious of that, of how much has been lost. Because it's like this sort of lifelong question: Who am I? Where do I come from? Even though you are part of home, you've made home, you create home and maybe you've got several homes as I do, you are still not feeling at peace. I still feel like there are aspects that still need to be discovered that are not known. You don't sometimes know what it is that you don't know or what you've missed or what's been taken, but you feel the absence of it. Even though you don't know what it is yet fully in its entirety.

Romy: I feel that very profoundly. So I'm laughing, I just laugh. It's just a release valve for me. 

E: I hear you. No, I hear you. I do it as well. Sometimes people ask: “Why are you laughing?” Because sometimes I'll be laughing at things that people think are not very funny. I laugh sometimes, I laugh because if I don't laugh, I'll cry. And there's sometimes I feel like I've run out of tears, so I laugh and that makes me feel a lot better. But if I cry and it's a release cry, it makes you feel good too.

Non-Territorial Autonomy in the U.K. 

Esther: For me all of this is connected to some of the work I'm involved in around trying or make a case for non-territorial autonomy in the U.K. Going back to this point about our rights, and because we're denied minority rights even, we're not really able to exercise our rights as a group very well. Even when it comes to things like educating our children, if you have been going to a school that might be seen as a religious school, it's okay. But if you are trying to take Afrikan Caribbean young people and put them in a school by themselves, that's always frowned upon. It's seen as being racially divisive and exclusive in the context of the British Isles. It might very well be a needed solution in some instances rather than sending children to schools that are going to continue to harm them because they're not getting a curriculum that is edifying.

But anyway, we're not recognised and we don't have group rights. And in fact, the one major group that has been able to make arguments for autonomy have been the Cornish national minority because they've got quite an interesting case. The Cornish people are arguing, that unlike those that have a recognition of some degree of nationhood, say whether it's Welsh or Scots or Irish, that they don't have this degree of recognition, and they are persecuted and marginalised, and they have their own language. They’ve got their own flag. And so they are recognised as being a national minority. That means that you are a nation who is living in another nation, and that you are eclipsed because that other nation exercises domination, control, and power over you. And I think it was on the 8th of July that I was sharing an article in one of the WhatsApp groups that I'm part of for the Stop the Maangamizi campaign. The article was about advertising a march that Cornish people were having because they had won recognition as being a national minority.

And what they've really been trying to argue for is to exercise rights to self-determination and to have devolution, so devolution of power in terms of government and governance. That would mean a certain amount of resources that come to the area. They want to be able to have their own schools and teach their own language. And there was a really interesting article that was on [The] Canary. Some of the arguments that they were making, even though these are people who we would say are racialized as white, I could definitely identify with some of their arguments because they're talking about being people who are conquered. There’s no proper respect for their language in terms of street signs and languages instruction in the schools. And they're arguing they've got a distinct identity, language and heritage, and therefore they have the right to exercise the same rights to self-determination as other constituent parts of the UK such as Scotland and Wales.

They argue that Cornwall is amongst the Celtic nations in the UK which have no effective self-government. They also argue that the government bodies and agencies which do develop strategies and policies for them are located outside of Cornwall, and therefore they fail to recognise the strengths of the people of Cornwall and the special needs of its community. So, they make some really interesting arguments. And as Afrikan heritage organisers who are as a pan-Afrikanist as well, you look to other examples of how other people assert their nationhood. And we felt a kind of common cause even though we've not been able to establish connection with anybody who's making these arguments, who is Cornish. But we can definitely empathise with their arguments and their struggle and their main claim: “We need space. We need access to the resources to develop ourselves because we are being underdeveloped and we are being marginalised.”

And that's why we've come up with concepts that build on this non territorial autonomy and this right to exercise our peoplehood. And so one of the concepts that we use is a term called tuma. The idea of a tuma is a satellite community that is pan-Afrikan, pan-Afrikan diaspora, pan Caribbean, and quite internationalist as well. That is an amalgamation of people that currently would have different identities, but they have a sense of commonality because maybe we're all of Afrikan heritage, we have been displaced to different degrees, and we are all seeking to recover the best parts of who we have been. We're making arguments around having access to land, but not owning land or not saying Britain. This is out. I guess that argument could be made in terms of the original inhabitants of British Isles. But we're sort of saying “As long as we're here and because of the historical realities of how we've come to be here, it's not just a simple matter of just going back home. Some of us don't actually know where that home is.”

Because of what we have contributed along the way, we have a right to belong and we have a right to actually access the resources in this society. We need these resources in order to build ourselves and sustain ourselves and develop institutions. If we just follow some of these statistics, it would take several hundreds of years to actually bring about types of parity if we were to just keep going with things being the way that they are. So we define ourselves as an Afrikan heritage community for national self-determination. So, we're national minorities like the Cornish. We are basically oppressed nations who are outside of our national home land, and we are part of diaspora groups. So our national group is not just about being Black British, because if we were to do the genealogical research, we would find other people like us in other jurisdictions, not only in Europe but across the world.

Non territorial autonomy is really a perfect model of how states that are multi-ethnic and multilingual can incorporate recognition of these different groups, entities, and peoples within a particular jurisdiction. And so the Sami people in Sweden, Norway, and some parts of Denmark are an example of a community that has a form of autonomy, because they certainly have their own parliament and so forth. The idea of non-territorial autonomy is really a sort of collective rights based concept to deal with national diversity within a country. And it grants autonomous decision making to an ethnically, racially, linguistically, or culturally defined national group. This is irrespective of where they live within that particular country or state. All members of such a group are deemed to form a corporate body. The idea is different degrees of autonomy.

For instance, with their schools, their cultural institutions, their kind of community associations and foundations, the emphasis is on affiliating to that group or national affiliation, like what the Cornish people is doing. And this becomes a key indicator, definer, and denominator of autonomous rights. It is another model, but obviously this current government and probably many to come would be very resistant to formally recognising non-territorial autonomy. That said, it doesn't mean that communities can't organise within the borders of the UK along these lines. This is actually already beginning to happen for specific groups. You see it with eastern European communities. So they have their own shops businesses, they have their own kind of social networks. You see it with many Muslim communities, Jewish communities, different Asian populations, and so forth, who exercise forms of non-territorial autonomy. Just to give you an indication, if you look at Jewish people, there is a recognition of the Jewish Board of Deputies. With Muslim people, there's the Muslim Council of Britain, and then there's also a Hindu council. Although these examples do not necessarily amount to non-territorial autonomy, these are certainly steps or building blocks into achieving that.

Free the Land!? 

Romy: I was thinking about what you’ve been saying about non-territorial autonomy in Britain in comparison with the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) and I was curious to hear your thoughts on this comparison.

This is a great example and a problematic example at the same time. I am actually very close to them. They have a provisional government of the R N A. I'm a co-chair of the International Affairs Commission for NCoBRA, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. And the R N A has been a key kind of movement that has underpinned the development of in NCoBRA as the most well-known coalition, grassroots kind of coalition in America for Black reparations, as they would say. I work very closely and we have R n A members in our commission, and the culture of the R N A does kind of seep through NCoBRA a lot  because, for instance, there are certain greetings that they say, which one of the common greetings is “free the land”. So, in our meetings, it will be common for people to begin speaking by saying “free the land”.

But I have had problems with that because of the way I think especially about rematriation. For me, freeing of the land takes on a much deeper, less chauvinistic, nationally chauvinistic spirit.  My view, on freeing the land, is that the land has been captured, and maybe that view was there in the conceptualization of some of the foremothers and fathers of the R N A. You see what's happened across the board is that, from the sixties to the nineties, there was a lot of cross-fertilization of movements, even different racial movements. So, there was a link between say, Black power movements and American Indian movement, American Indian sovereignty movements and so forth. I think a lot of divisions have entered these spaces because communities and groups have also been pulverised and destroyed. And they've experienced a lot of counterinsurgency, imprisonment of their leaders, and persecution. So, groups become far more precious and sensitive and closed around their visions of freedom. I think the idea about ceding five states to Afrikan Americans is very problematic within the context of the US Empire and the dispossession of Native American nations. I mean, they refer to themselves as tribal nations. It's not my terminology but those of the various tribal nations who have never regained sovereignty and actually want their land back. They're still colonised people. These are still the conditions of many of these people on the reservations. The injustices they face like the wealth gaps, the sexual violence, and the impact of intergenerational trauma, are huge. But what you find is that, especially at this time, a lot of the discourses on reparations tend to centre people of Afrikan heritage, and they tend to happen in an exclusionary or exclusive way that doesn't look at the situation simultaneously between Native American so-called nations and Afrikan descended people.

So there's a need to develop common cause. And there are people like Andrea Smith, who wrote the book Conquest, who I know was meant to be somebody that was claiming native ancestry. And then it was discovered that she wasn’t really.

Romy: It’s such a shame, her work is great. Why did she have to do that? 

I know exactly. I felt that that didn't invalidate her great work because I've learned a lot from her. And she's one of the people that has written about this in relation to the end of her book. It talks about some of the arguments that were coming up around the world conference against racism and this kind of reasserting of this notion of 40 acres and a mule that was a promise and was never realised. People understand it conceptually, and she was challenging that by saying “Hang on a minute. If it wasn’t their land even, then whose land is it? It wasn’t their land to triumph to promise it to you.” And I think that’s a fundamental question of reparations ethics. A lot of the discourses on reparations now lack an ethical basis because it’s about “My group suffered this, we’ve been harmed.” And it becomes almost like an oppression Olympics because groups feel they have to elevate our own narrative. Otherwise, they are just going to get lost and missed out. I’m always condemning and decrying those very sort of lazy arguments and narrow views that, well, “the Native Americans got reparations.” I'll always challenge people in my community by asking what they understand reparations to be. How can being colonised in your own land or homeland be reparations just because they might have got some compensation? How has that changed the overall condition of Native Nations? It hasn't, right. Not when you've got doctrine of discovery, which I know that the Pope, the Catholic church rescinded supposedly, whose real legal impact is still there. That's the whole basis for the occupation of these Europeans in those lands. 

Romy: Exactly. And the continued use of native land as whenever the powers that be see fit.

Yeah, that's right. The misuse of the land, the pollution, the testing of harmful chemicals and weapons of mass destruction and just the way in which (nuclear) weapons are dropped on native lands globally. To return to the point about reparations and Native sovereignty, in my view, we have to keep the best traditions of these movements alive. They did promote solidarity and a mutual sharing of strategies and tactics. We need to recognise that even though we've got differences, we also had a much bigger problem to fight and face, which was who was exercising the power to divide and rule us or misrule us, and how they've still managed to maintain that and so be denied the restoration, the true restoration of sovereignty. But I think there's been a lot of progress in that a lot of institutions and even families who have illegally acquired lands and resources that have been dispossessed of Native Nations are feeling compelled to restitute those resources and titles and pay rents. There's all kinds of interventions that are being made at present that I think show promise. It's not happening at the state level yet, but I think those ripples will have an impact because that's happening globally.

Romy: I hope so. And it's so right, what you said about the way in which various liberation movements that were not in fact closed even if they were centred on a particular positionality, aim or struggle. 

Exactly. We need to get back to that sense of ubuntism: recognising our interconnected humanity, the fact that we have our national struggles or our nationhood struggles, but that we also have a bigger struggle that connects all of us. Essentially if I take an Earth sovereignty kind of lens, national sovereignty is premised or has to be premised on earth's sovereignty. That is because if earth is not sovereign (and Earth has not regained her sovereignty), if it has been captured and polluted, and if it continues to be pillaged, plundered, cut up, owned, and territorialized, then how can we as people who are living on parts of that earth, really expect to assert a sovereignty that is just based on our peoplehood or our nationhood?

Romy: Yeah, absolutely.  Free the land! I'd always actually thought that the need for a different, it's such a great slogan, but…

It is, but we have to give it a bolder, a bigger, a more transformative meaning.

Romy: Right.

Of what it means to free the land. I used to feel really uncomfortable saying it, but as I said, now I don't because I really know what that means. I have a better idea now of what that truly means to say free the land.

Romy: Because we can't be free without freeing the land. It's a reciprocal process. 

references

1. Regarding Esther’s use of the terms womanist and motherist, Romy asked a follow up question about how we guard against transexclusionary tendencies. This was a question motivated by Alice Walker’s (the writer who coined the term womanist and an influential figure for Romy) alleged transexclusionary turn. 

   Esther: Motherist is a term developed from Afrikan framework in which motherhood refers to recognition of our responsibility and that we embrace all creation. I don’t think that equates to trans-exclusionary ideas.  Again, the issue/question is due in part to the limitations of English and the need for cognitive justice and pluriversality. There is something very dichotomous about the English language. The assumption is that if you advocate for one thing you are against everything else. Whereas I am working with Afrikan worldviews that embrace complementarity, duality, and reciprocity – so to advocate for one thing doesn’t mean you’re against something else. And a pluriverse is a world in which many worlds fit. I find something troubling in taking diaspora terms, Indigenous terms, and so on, and applying them to pre-existing world views and cosmologies, I find that very problematic. I also find it equally problematic even that notions of womanhood have been limited and coopted in these ways.” 

2.  Many in Pan-Afrikan and related Black nationalist traditions (Esther included) spell Afrika with a k. Consequently, with some exceptions such as book titles we intentionally use Afrika throughout the interview. For more information on this topic see Haki R. Madhubuti, “Four Reasons for Using ‘K’ in Afrika,” The State of History, January 27, 1994, https://soh.omeka.chass.ncsu.edu/items/show/692; Asino I. tutaleni, “Why I Write Afrika with a K – Tutaleni I. Asino,” Tutaleniasino.Com (blog), accessed January 13, 2024, https://tutaleniasino.com/why-i-write-afrika-with-a-k/.

3.  After the interview, Romy posed the following question, “Is the antagonistic relation between man and nature that is in Rodney’s work (for instance, in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa) in tension with the sense of planet repairs (that Esther is advocating)?”

   Esther: What Rodney stood for is that we don’t know everyone and everything. We need to go back and reeducate ourselves in dialogue with all. And Rodney never held himself as a know it all. So he didn’t have the final way. And that’s built into the groundings methodology. And so, I think this [referring to Romy’s question around man dominating nature] is a misreading of Rodney, there is always the letter of the word, and there is always the spirit of the word. I think Rodney was on the path to what [Amilcar] Cabral would call returning to the source, so he was in the process, in the evolutionary process. Why is why he advocated for the groundings. With Rodney, and his intellectual development, and being a product of his times, like many of the Afrikan nationalist men that I support and subscribe to, they didn’t speak in all embracing inclusive language that we would use today. I think we must recognize the importance of a groundings methodology because Walter Rodney himself was on a journey, as we all are, and he didn’t have the last word, but the groundings idea in neocolonial elitist Jamaica at that time when he went out amongst the most oppressed in society and recognized that he wasn’t the fount of all knowledge. He was very much about promoting knowledge co-creation with the most oppressed in society. Now we today would extend that analysis to include other groupings of people but I don’t think that would invalidate the arguments around the groundings which is a deep reasoning, deep discourse, a battle of ideas that would take place between different classes in society, and also one that recognizes intersectionality.

4.  Roy, Arundhati. War talk. South End Press, 2003.

5.  Lorde, Audre. "A litany for survival." The Black unicorn (1978): 31-32.

6.  “Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself -a Black woman warrior poet doing my work -come to ask you, are you doing yours?” Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” in Sister Outsider (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 41–42.

7.  “What I know is that I am doing the work that I am charged to do. Spirit gave me this work to do and that’s what I’m doing. I didn’t say this publicly, but it was the truth behind the force driving me. But it’s all spiritual work. If we did not hold to these binaries between sacred and secular, then we would know that all of what we do can be constituted as sacred and spiritual since it concerns the deepest dimensions of our lives that are themselves linked to the subtle rhythms of the universe.” Alexander, M. Jacqui, and G. Ulysse. "Groundings on Rasanblaj with M. Jacqui Alexander." Gina Athena Ulysse, special issue, Emisférica 12 (2015).

8.  Note from Romy: The “Theses on the philosophy of history” feels very relevant to Esther’s work. I hope in a future project to reflect on the fact that a surprising amount of amount of Black feminist thinkers, like Saidiya Hartman, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Sylvia Wynter, engage with Adorno and Benjamin’s critiques of progress and history. All these Black feminist thinkers (albeit in different ways) are interested in a messianic idea of time, as a rupture that is beyond or in contradiction with linear progressive time that opens onto a radically different horizon of Black freedom. 

9.  Temple, Christel N. "The emergence of Sankofa practice in the United States: A modern history." Journal of Black Studies 41, no. 1 (2010): 127-150.

10.  “the Kemetic concept of serudj ta, repairing and transforming the world, points toward the self-understanding of Africana Studies as a world-encompassing project whose central ground of concern and engagement is the world African community. However, as Africana Studies scholar-activists, our focus on the world African community compels us to deal with the world as a whole, as it impacts us and we impact it in our ongoing efforts to know the past and honor it, engage the present and improve it, and imagine the future and forge it.” Maulana Karenga, “AFRICANA STUDIES AND THE PROJECT OF ‘SERUDJ’: REAFFIRMATION AND RENEWAL OF THE DISCIPLINE,” International Journal of Africana Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring/summer 2008), https://iopn.library.illinois.edu/pressbooks/iBlackstudies/chapter/africana-studies-and-the-project-of-serudj/#:~:text=As%20noted%20above%2C%20the%20Kemetic,is%20the%20world%20African%20community.

11.  It is important to note that there is some controversy over Karenga’s conviction and misogyny. It seems that his own and his organizations views did change substantially Kirsten Savali West, “Kwanzaa: Revisiting Maulana Karenga’s Legacy,” The Root, December 28, 2017, https://www.theroot.com/kwanzaa-revisiting-maulana-karenga-s-legacy-1821579446; Joshua Clark Davis, “The Women at the Heart of Black Power - AAIHS,” Black Perspectives (blog), April 25, 2018, https://www.aaihs.org/the-women-at-the-heart-of-Black-power.

12.  Since our conversation in July 2023, the long-term Palestinian struggle against settler colonial occupation and violence erupted and resulted in a new genocidal assault focused on Gaza. We do not mention Palestine in our original conversation, but it is relevant to much of what we discuss such as the need for interconnected struggles for planet repairs in the face of imperial, colonial, racist systems. Like many radical Black thinkers, writers, and movements past and present, we stand in solidarity with the people, water, and land of Palestine. We cannot have a just and flourishing climate until they are free.

13.  Gregory, Chris A. "Cowries and conquest: towards a subalternate quality theory of money." Comparative studies in society and history 38, no. 2 (1996): 195-217.

14.  Wynter, Sylvia. "The ceremony must be found: After humanism." Boundary 2 (1984): 19-70.

15.  Romy asked a follow up question about Esther’s use of the terms Land, nature, and Mother Earth. Esther responded: Land = vitality, life, culture, ancestry (is part of our reciprocal relationship with Mother Earth), similarly with nature. We are part of nature, we’re not separate to it, we’re not superior to it. So, I think a lot of these issues coming up are cognitive justice issues, since they are due to the way that other people are using the term nature, and it’s not the way that I use it.

16.  Nick Estes, “‘The Only Way to Save the Land Is to Give It Back’: A Critique of Settler Conservationism - The Red Nation,” The Red Nation, July 23, 2018, https://therednation.org/the-only-way-to-save-the-land-is-to-give-it-back-a-critique-of-settler-conservationism

17.  “And this also happened to certain categories of people racialized as white as we know in Europe, especially women, women who were in touch with Mother Earth, who were the healers who were actually making remedies that came from Mother Earth, that were classified as witches, demonized and also burnt at the stake. So, there’s a reparations dimensions there too.” Studium Generale. 2022. “Esther Stanford-Xosei: Reparations; A Praxis for Ecological Restoration and Repair.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgGrVGqV9jI.

18.  Esther notes “I know today it's actually amongst many a term of empowerment to be called a witch. But certainly, different iterations of that word were often seen as quite pejorative”.

19.  McWhorter, Ladelle. "Sodomites, witches, and Indians: Another look at Foucault’s history of sexuality, volume one." Philosophy & Social Criticism 47, no. 8 (2021): 907-920.

20.  https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml

21. I (Romy) have one set of white settler South African grandparents who moved to London in the 60’s.

22.  Esther continues: “Some would want self-government and their own parliament, but for others it might mean having a council of representatives who can represent them substantively, not just descriptive representation in terms of people who might have been born in the same place or have the same ethnic origin or identity. But the substantive representation is really about representation of values, of ideas, of culture, of all the things. And in non-territorial autonomy, you often have different forms of self-government or governance. It might be people's assemblies. So, for instance, they have it where they have different types of people's assemblies and so forth. And the idea is that representatives of the community, however they self define, elect their representatives to autonomously manage defined areas of their national life.”

23.  Onaci, Edward. Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State. UNC Press Books, 2020.

24.  Smith, Andrea. Conquest: Sexual violence and American Indian genocide. Duke University Press, 2015.