What Form Should Slavery And Colonialism Reparations Take?

This book opens with Olfmi Tw proclaiming that "Trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism built the world we live in... if we want reparations, we should be thinking more broadly about how to remake the world system." And what better place to begin this bold articulation of Tw's views on reparations, now released in paperback, than by analysing the sins of his own institution, the Jesuit-founded Georgetown University, where he is an associate professor of philosophy?

Throughout the 18th century, a Catholic population grew in Maryland following the slave revolution in Haiti and the French Revolution. Even though Catholics remained a minority, at just 12 of the local population, they were highly influential, and through a bundle of land grants from the colonial governor of Maryland, the Society of Jesus the Jesuit order of priests became a significant landowner.

It took possession of seven plantations spanning thousands of acres of land that had originally been the territory of the indigenous Piscataway and Nacostine peoples. In order to finance the building of an academy that was to become Georgetown University, the Society of Jesus began to exploit the lands it had acquired, using the labour of enslaved Africans.

Tw draws on the words of the poet and scholar Mukoma wa Ngugi son of the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o who, speaking in 2020 at the Writers Unlimited International Literature Festival, explained: "That Jesuit priests should own slaves should come as no surprise... every slave castle I visited when travelling to West Africa had a church in its own compound. In Elmina and Cape Coast present day Ghana the church was built directly above slave dungeons. The pious white Christians would pour water through the cracks in the wooden floor to ease the thirst and heat of the enslaved captives. If there is one institution in dire need of decolonisation, it is the church."

Given the global scale of slavery and colonialism, and the number of institutions in which its history is embedded, how can justice begin to be realised, Tw asks.