AFRICAN leaders are demanding compensation for the crime of colonialism.  They must be listened to.

The African Union agreed this year to push for justice and reparation or colonial-era crimes, and last weekend’s Algiers meeting  amplified the call.

Algerian Foreign Minister Ahmed Attaf said reparations should be seen as “neither a gift nor a favour.” 

Algeria was, of course, under the sabre of French colonial rule for 150 years and had to fight long and hard for liberation.

Attaf said: “Africa is entitled to demand the official and explicit recognition of the crimes committed against its peoples during the colonial period, an indispensable first step toward addressing the consequences of that era, for which African countries and peoples continue to pay a heavy price in terms of exclusion, marginalisation and backwardness.”

The point stands just as strong in relation to the former colonies in Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean and elsewhere.

Nevertheless, the former imperial powers squirm this way and that to avoid facing up to their historic responsibilities.

Yet colonialism was a crime by every standard and measure.

It constituted the violent and unsought intrusion of the imperial powers into the lives and lands of peoples they then subjected to a form of despotic government without any meaningful form of consent.

It was sustained by racist ideology that held the colonised to be at an inferior civilisational level, and buttressed by a continuing regime of state violence.

It disrupted the organic development of indigenous societies and economies, subordinating them to the profit-driven requirements of the imperialist powers.

It constituted a vast transfer of value from the colonised lands to the metropolitan powers, often at an inflated rate of profit.

Frequently, colonialism degenerated into bloodshed on an extraordinary scale and in Congo, under Belgium, Namibia, ruled by Germany, and Tasmania, in the hands of the British, it turned genocidal.

Its apologists, still very much at large in the media, academia and politics, claim that it assisted in the political and economic development of the subjected lands. 

Any progress that did occur was entirely incidental, often a by-product of imperialist strategic or economic needs, as with India’s railways, and bought at an extraordinary price.

Nor was it bought to a peaceful end. The masses in the colonised countries had to fight for their own liberation. 

The British empire, contrary to myth, was no exception, as the peoples of Ireland, Malaysia, Kenya, Yemen, Cyprus, Iraq, Palestine, Zimbabwe and elsewhere could attest.

Computing adequate recompense for these crimes, stretching over generations and sometimes, centuries, is of course a formidable task, as is devising a sustainable plan for compensation.

But it is no less justifiable for that. The labour movement, itself somewhat of an indirect beneficiary of the loot plundered from the colonies, should take the lead in demanding that the British government take it seriously.

Nationalise the lot?

Zarah Sultana has created a stir by calling for the socialisation of the whole economy. Ultimately, that forms part of the socialist and communist vision of society’s future.

However, it must be tempered by an examination of the history of the Soviet Union and China, above all.  That would indicate a gradual approach as more realistic, even in a country as over-ripe for socialism as Britain.

It is also a matter of what is politically possible. Initially, as Sultana told the Your Party conference, the working-class must secure power.

Then, as Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto it should wrest “all capital from the bourgeoisie” and “centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state.” They added two critical words – “by degrees.”