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Devastated cultures

Talking about colonialism means talking about devastation, because much was irretrievably lost through colonial rule. And while belated apologies serve to assuage Europe's guilt, compensation has been too long in coming.

The history of colonialism is a long chain of raids and massacres, one which did not even stop short of genocide. In every phase it involved the destruction of unique forms of life, languages and traditions. These are now irretrievably lost, although they were part of our common cultural heritage.

Fish motif on a cloak from an Andes tomb in Paracas, Peru.

Photo: Håkan Berg, Museum of World Culture Göteborg

The atrocities of the Spanish conquistadors, the eradication of the indigenous peoples of America and Australia and the tragedy in the Belgian Congo described by Joseph Conrad as a "Heart of Darkness" all paved the way for the colonial wars of the 20th century in Algeria, Chechnya and Vietnam, to name just a few of the countries where the aftermath of colonialism continues to be felt down to the present day.

Belated apologies

Questioning colonial crimes should be just as unlawful as denying the Holocaust. The parallels stop here, however. Willy Brand's falling to his knees before the monument at the Warsaw Ghetto symbolised feelings of guilt and shame for the crimes of the Nazi regime. Nevertheless a hollow aftertaste accompanies the spate of apologies for injustices lying far in the past, for example when the Catholic Church requests forgiveness for the crimes of the Inquisition or the Crusades. These amount to a self-satisfied ritual with which those who come after the event demonstrate their pure consciences and political correctness as a way of ridding themselves of historical guilt. The proper term for this is "Pharisaic" behaviour. However these belated apologies commit to nothing. On the contrary, they draw a line under a past that otherwise refuses to fade away.

Open wounds

Nevertheless, debts remain unpaid and wounds remain open, like a phantom pain that cannot be assuaged by either money or words of attrition. Yet not all colonial pioneers were criminals like Henry Morton Stanley, whose cruelty knew no bounds, or the German Carl Peters, who had his black lover hanged and was subsequently convicted by the Imperial Colonial Court. The Nazi regime had Carl Peters posthumously rehabilitated, while striking Richard Kandt from the list of African researchers because of his Jewish background. Yet Kandt was the exact opposite of a racist colonial officer. A resident of the German empire in Kigali, he opposed the settlement of white farmers on the grounds that Rwanda was overpopulated and overgrazed as it was, and predicted a violent explosion of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict long before the First World War.

Money is not enough

In conclusion one could question whether the genocide of the Herero people can really be atoned for by financially compensating a regime dominated by Ovambos which oppresses the descendents of the Hereros in modern-day Namibia. Doubts here are just as warranted as the suspicion that the imperial ideology of "divide and rule" is once more at play. The politically correct renaming of erstwhile colonies as "overseas departments" is above all an expression of the bad conscience of the former colonial power. Nevertheless it is better than the overt or latent racism we see in popular images like the Sarotti-Moor, the trademark Moor servant featured on boxes of Sarotti chocolates, or the Lumumba, a long drink named after Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba, not to mention the "Negerkuss" – or negro's kiss – a German name for chocolate marshmallows we are now supposed to call chocolate meringues.

Hans Christoph Buch

Hans Christoph Buch, born in 1944 in Wetzlar, is a writer, critic and professor of literature. He has held teaching posts at universities in Bremen, ...
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