Durban conference laid foundations for antiracism struggles

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, which took place in Durban from August 31 to September 8 2001.

The meeting was attended by 2,300 delegates from 163 countries, as well as 4,000 civil society activists and 1,100 journalists. The Durban Declaration and Programme of Action were its key outcomes.

The summit was hosted by then president Thabo Mbeki, the prophet of the African renaissance. More than any other contemporary African leader,

Mbeki had a deep engagement with the “black world”. As a young student he had imbibed the activism of Martin Luther King Jr, the scholarship of Frantz Fanon, and the poetry of Langston Hughes. As president he preached black solidarity from Atlanta to Bahia to Havana to Haiti.

In a stirring opening speech at the Durban conference in 2001, Mbeki unequivocally condemned racism, noting: “We meet here because we are determined to ensure that nobody anywhere should be subjected to the insult and offence of being despised by another or others because of his or her race, colour, nationality or origin … [Some] cultures and traditions are despised as savage and primitive and their identities denied.”

An important achievement in Durban was to declare slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity. The four-and-a-half-century European-led transatlantic slave trade, which resulted in 12-million to 15-million Africans being transported as chattel to the Caribbean and the Americas, was declared an “appalling tragedy” of “abhorrent barbarism” that “should always have been” a crime against humanity. It was argued in Durban that colonialism had resulted in racism and suffering that has endured into the contemporary age.

Many of Durban’s recommendations were, however, quixotic, with little chance of implementation due to the international economic system of “global apartheid” that keeps much of the Third World poor. Woolly national action plans and stronger legislation were advocated, alongside strengthening “national institutions to combat racial discrimination”. More concrete were Durban’s calls for education, research and awareness-raising initiatives to tackle racism, including sensible calls for religious groups to help fight the scourge.

But Durban was, in some ways, also subversive. The declaration pushed for the inclusion of the history and contributions of Africans in educational curricula, as well as fully integrating into public services and increasing social services to “communities of primarily African descent ”— issues of particular sensitivity to

Brazil and the US. Durban also noted disapprovingly that colonial-era theories of racial superiority were still prevalent and easily spread through social media, thus anticipating Donald Trump’s nativist, hatespewing presidency by 15 years.

The declaration further condemned the ubiquitous negative stereotyping of vulnerable groups in parts of the global media.

While Durban did not change the world, it helped lay the foundation for contemporary Black Lives Matter-led racial struggles. Recent antiracism protests around the globe have been more effective than at any time in living memory.

Offensive statues have been toppled. The German government recently announced reparations for a century-old genocide in Namibia. Harvard, Yale and Oxford have established programmes of restitution. Democrats in the US Congress now support the cause of reparations: an issue that will appropriately form the focus of the UN General Assembly debate on the post-Durban conference in September 2021.

Across Africa, technologywielding youths have challenged, and in some cases toppled, regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Algeria, Sudan and Nigeria. Durban rightly called for the youth — 60% of Africa’s population — to be centrally involved in the implementation of its programme of action. SA has itself been criticised for sporadic bouts of xenophobic violence against black African migrants.

However, its glorious antiapartheid struggle, which inspired the Durban conference, could teach the world the true meaning of what Nelson Mandela dubbed ubuntu: the gift of discovering our shared humanity.