Sunday Herald, UK
March 3 2007
Why does the state place such a high price on public apologies?
By Ian Bell
EVEN WITH the sound turned down, you could tell that the man being
interviewed by BBC News meant well. He had one of those faces, the
sort puppies grow out of. He had compassion the way other people have
neuralgia. Besides, you didn’t need to hear the earnest white chap
speak. His T-shirt said it all: SO SORRY.
Half-awake, I thought: has there ever been a more stereotypically
English slogan? The shirt was not so much apologising as
supplicating. Presumably only narrow chests prevented the makers from
reaching for the full, abject, 1950s act of Home Counties contrition:
DREADFULLY SORRY.
I turned up the volume and the goodness got worse. Mr Sorry and a few
of his friends intended, it seemed, to set out from a church in Hull
and walk all the way to London. What’s more, they intended to do so
while yoked and manacled. They wanted to say sorry for slavery.
advertisementThey were probably full of regret for the blasted trade
last year, of course, and the year before that. Yet this year, this
month, is their moment: two full centuries since the Slave Trade
Abolition Act came into force, thanks entirely, so the persistent
popular myth maintains, to William Wilberforce, MP for Hull. So Mr S
Sorry and friends donned their chains.
I wondered about that detail. Taking nothing away from the marchers,
I wondered what it was supposed to prove to a young Briton of
Afro-Caribbean descent. That the suffering of slaves was being
answered with a dose of right-minded, wrong-headed empathy? Let’s
hope not. That racism, slavery’s persistent legacy, was being
addressed with a symbolic gesture? I doubt it. Or just that there was
a decent Christian impulse, in the spirit of Wilberforce, to
apologise for the Holocaust inflicted on black Africa?
How does that work? If it does work, why is it so contentious? If it
doesn’t work, is there a point? Nobody can repair the past: that’s
just the truth. But the sense nags that without atonement, in any
sense of the word, the present and the future are precarious and
fragile. It’s why we say that an apology has to mean something. For
an event like the slave trade – even when there has been no event
"like" the slave trade – we have to work out what the meaning, if
any, might be.
Start with particulars, as a sceptic might see them. If the human
race began apologising to itself for every act of barbarism there
would be no end to mutual regret. No nation, no state, no society has
clean hands. In this case, black Africans sold black Africans to the
slave ships. The "subjugated" Scots, Irish and Welsh were deep in the
18th century trade. Arabs who these days indict the Western crusader
were buying and selling flesh long before the Christians arrived. And
those virtuous old Athenians, who gave all of us the rudiments of
democracy, depended on a thriving slave economy.
Historically, this is elementary. Childhood ends when you discover
that human beings do terrible things to one another. The idea of an
apology for atrocities is modern, though, and still contested. The
Romans did not apologise for wiping out Carthage, city, people and
culture: they celebrated for years afterwards. The Zulus who
eradicated their neighbours with awesome efficiency before facing
white competition suffered no pangs of regret. Sentiment, if any, was
beside the point.
We are more civilised now. You can be locked up in Germany for
Holocaust-denial. Yet even now relations between America and Turkey
are tense because a bill before the House of Representatives has
demanded US recognition of the Armenian genocide. Turkey has yet to
accept that 1.5 million Armenians died in Ottoman hands in 1915, far
less apologise for the fact.
For that matter, Tony Blair has not apologised for slavery. Last
November he contributed a signed article to New Nation, one of the
voices of black Britain, in which he described the British role in
the slave trade as "profoundly shameful". He expressed "deep sorrow".
But he took care to say nothing that could be construed as the full
apology, on behalf of the state, that some had demanded.
Why should he? It is a serious question. The prime minister has
enslaved nobody. Like most whites, he might have to search far back
into his ancestry to prove the fact, but the chances are that none of
his forebears played any role whatever in the slave trade. Personal
responsibility, in any reasonable sense, is hard indeed to
demonstrate.
If that’s true – and it seems self-evident – only the notion of
collective responsibility could justify a collective apology. Yet
nobody imposed such a burden on ordinary Germans after the second
world war, despite the Holocaust, despite clear evidence that
knowledge of genocide must have been widespread. A mistake? Or merely
a grisly sort of discretion born of the fact that every nation has
done terrible things? As historians sometimes remind us, it was the
British who invented the concentration camp, killing thousands of
women and children. Have we apologised to the Boers, lately?
Then again, what does an apology cost? Why don’t we – white Britons
or Americans, Turks or Germans, Australians or Belgians – simply
admit that someone has to say sorry, if only to the dead, for some of
the things our ancestors did? We might not mend the past, but we
might convey to the descendants of the victims the sense that we
understand, and do not dismiss, and will not forget. Why not?
For one thing, because the state, wherever it manifests itself, puts
a high price on apologies. Last month, while in New York, the Wales
and Northern Ireland secretary Peter Hain caused what one newspaper
described as "fresh controversy" by appearing to make the sort of
apology Blair had previously failed to make.
At what was described as a "slavery event", Hain said: "I’m here on
behalf of both Northern Ireland and Wales to say we have had a part
to play in the slave trade. We acknowledge that. We take
responsibility for it and we now are going to try and at least say
that historical legacy must be recognised and we are sorry for it."
Some people in Northern Ireland were upset. The province, they
argued, had played no part in slavery and had distinguished itself,
instead, as a centre of abolitionism. Perhaps so. But if Scotland’s
first minister had been with Hain in New York, and had followed his
colleague’s example, Jack McConnell would still be apologising this
morning. Glasgow, and therefore the country, made a lot of money from
the triangular trade.
IN fact, until factories proved themselves to be more efficient
exploiters of humanity, all of Britain prospered from slavery.
America, where black people remain at the bottom of the
socio-economic pile, was founded on slavery: one reason, perhaps, why
thousands of blacks chose to fight for Britain during the American
revolution. Modern governments will never admit the fact, but they
shun even the word "apology" for a simple reason.
If there is a reason to apologise, is there not a reason for
recompense? That would mean hard cash, in recognition both of immense
harm, and of the vast contribution made to our present prosperity.
Why not?
Turkey’s amnesia towards the Armenians springs, in part, from a fear
that the descendants of the victims will demand the sort of
compensation that Germany has paid to Jews. In the US, some black
activists have meanwhile placed a variety of multi-billion dollar
estimates on the money owed, with interest, to their ancestors. For
bureaucrats, this is unthinkable. But a refusal to think is much the
same as a refusal to be rational.
The State General Assembly of Virginia, once the heart of the
Confederacy, has just apologised for slavery, "the most horrendous of
all depredations of human rights and violations of our founding
ideals in our nation’s history". In New York, meanwhile, the city
council has been considering a "symbolic motion" to forbid the use of
the word "nigger", the better to remind young blacks of its slave
history.
There is an irony in that. The council members seek to repair and
redeem history. In the process, they forget the black activists and
comedians of the 1960s and 1970s who took back the word from the
white world and used it among themselves. They did that precisely
because they intended to destroy the meaning of "nigger". And they
did it without apologies.