Unresolved issues from the past are like buried land mines waiting to be triggered. They are not made inactive by the passage of time, there is no statute of limitations – ask companies who did business with the Nazis or banks who hold holocaust survivor money. Unless past issues have been faced honestly, and unless there is a willingness to face them again for the sake of people alive today, they have not been defused. Indeed, some of the resentment increases rather than diminishes over the passage of time. Particularly if a more recent abuse that brings it all up again. I have found that with Irish in the United States.

To suggest this is so is not political correctness but a recognition, as a friend of mine put it, that the bottom has a longer memory than the boot. It would be nice if we could say, let bygones be bygones, but we can’t individually or as countries.

The great hope is that our pasts, faced honestly, can become a distinct asset.

A former British diplomat Archie Mackenzie, led a British group on a mission of friendship to China. He told his Chinese hosts that he wanted the group first to be taken to the old ruined summer palace of the Emperor. This was a palace outside the city which a British and French force looted and destroyed in 1860 as the final act of humiliation of China at the end of the second Opium War. His hosts protested that there was nothing to see, it was just a park. Mackenzie persisted and the British group went and stood for some minutes recalling what had happened. A man who was with them told me afterwards that the whole atmosphere between hosts and guests altered from that moment. It did not even need an apology. The Chinese knew that the British knew what had happened nearly 150 years before. “We only learned later,” he said, “that the Chinese often find spoken apologies embarrassing because they then feel they owe something in return. The simple gesture of acknowledgment is very much appreciated and heals the past.”

Sometimes the need for apologies and restitution is clearcut. The US Government took bold and appropriate action in 1990 when it acknowledged that the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War 11 had been unconstitutional and paid $1.25 billion in reparations to surviving internees their descendants. President George Bush said, “We can never fully right the wrongs of the past. But we can take a clear stand for justice and recognize that serious injustices were done to Japanese Americans during World War 11.”

Last month, to take the latest example that has come to my attention, officials from Illinois went to Salt Lake City to express “official regret” for the violence and state-sponsored condemnation that caused Mormons to leave in 1846 on the trek that led them to Utah. An earlier draft of Illinois House Resolution 793 had asked for forgiveness but had been taken out by lawmakers who felt they could not ask forgiveness for acts they had not personally committed.

In the issue of restitution for slavery which is slowly making its way into public consciousness and serious debate the right course to take becomes more complicated. Among black Americans there are some who push for a significant sum to be paid to individuals as compensation for lost dignity and earning capacity to their forbears. Others ask that reparations should take the form of major social and economic programs in the inner cities where the structural costs of black disadvantage are greatest.

What is needed now is a greater level of “honest conversation” between the races in the way pioneered by Hope in the Cities in Richmond, Virginia. Ten years ago a coalition of Richmond citizens began the process with a walk through its history, not as a guilt trip, but as an acknowledgement together of their common history, things they were proud of honoured by statues and things that they were ashamed of and swept under carpets. They devised a way of holding unthreatening conversations between the races, where everyone has a place at the table and where finger-pointing gives way to seeing where you and your own people needed to be different. Forgiveness rather than demand for change becomes the emphasis.

Now other communities in the US as well as other countries are following their lead.

A three-way axis is developing, for instance, between Richmond, Benin in West Africa and Liverpool, England. This once historic triangle of slavery is now even furthering a Reconciliation Triangle Project, the next phase being an exchange of young people between schools in the three countries.

In December 1999, a Reconciliation Conference was held in Benin, whose President took the bold step of apologising for his country’s role in selling millions of Africans to white slave traders. That same month the Liverpool City Council as a last act before the advent of the new millennium, adopted a unanimous resolution expressing regret for the City’s role in the slave trade, on which it grew rich. It was linked in the minds of its sponsors to a commitment to deal with slavery’s legacy in terms of overcoming racial discrimination and stereotyping that prevail even to today.

The Hope in the Cities model is being used in Liverpool for multi-faith, multi-racial dialogues. It is based on:

1) Listening carefully and respectfully to each other.

2) Bringing people together, not in confrontation but to find a basis of trust to tackle the most urgent needs of the community.

3) Searching for solutions, focusing on what is right rather than who is right.

4) Building lasting relationships outside our comfort zone.

5) Seeking to mirror in ourselves the changes that are required in the wider community.

This sort of approach may be the most healthy way of approaching the slavery issue, a debate that is neither defensive nor aggressive but brings communities together rather than splitting them further apart.

The Rev. B. Herbert Martin, from Chicago, one of the organizers of the Million Man march ten years ago, says that the present government and present day white people in America are not guilty of the institution of slavery and that present day Africans are not guilty of selling their brothers to Europeans. But each has to accept responsibility to repair the damage that that has been passed on to the present generation. “It is only in the act of repair and healing by the present generation and present government,” he believes, “that forgiveness can come.”

A good starting point for dialogue

Articles Archive of Michael Henderson