Justice in Waiting: Reparation Claims and ‘the Jagged Time of Catastrophe’

Abstract How does a reparation claim intervene in a world order made and unmade by colonialism? This article answers this question by analysing the 2009 reparation case in the British courts that was brought by veterans of the Mau Mau anti-colonialism struggle in Kenya in the 1950s. Colonial rule had been catastrophic, its exploitations and brutalities exemplified by a property law regime that dispossessed the Gĩkũyũ people and emergency laws that licensed torture. Invoking state succession and the statute of limitation, the United Kingdom (UK) sought to place colonialism beyond the temporal reach of reparations claims. However, the presiding judge recognized continuities between the UK and the colonial administration as well as layers of collusion and collaboration between London and Nairobi. The challenge of exercising ethical judgment in an office embedded in an unethical enterprise resonates with that of the Magistrate in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians. He grapples with the temporalities of (in)justice in reaching for a reparative response to colonialism’s catastrophic force. The turn to reparations interrupts law’s space–time continuum by conjoining legal subjects of yesterday and today – here and there – by treating colonial atrocities not as past violations of the rule of law but as symptomatic of the present rules of the game.