Chains used during the Slave trade. Slave Relics Museum, Badagry. Image bySamuel Tobbytex007, viaWikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
The African Union has dubbed 2025 theYear of Reparations with the theme “Building a United Front to Advance the Cause of Justice and the Payment of Reparations to Africans.”But what do reparations truly mean, andhow do you apologise for some of the worst and most prolonged crimes against humanity?
Following the abolishment of thetransatlantic slave trade, which lasted for over 400 years, European powers went on tocarve up Africa in a process known as colonialism. The Portuguese, who werethe first to transport slaves across the Atlantic, completed their first transatlantic voyage to Brazil in 1526. Other Europeans followed and would go on to build colonial empires across80 percent of planet Earth, withPortugal,Britain,Spain,France,the Netherlands, the United States and Denmark topping the list in terms of trade volume. They plundered and domesticated the extracted wealth, including the labour of enslaved men and women, for national economic and social prosperity.
The nuanced definition of reparations
Reparations are often understood as compensation for historical injustices. For two centuries, emancipatedBlack people have been calling for reparations for the crimes committed against them. However, the dominant language used in the rejection of these claims was that it was a way ofpassively calling for undeserved cash handouts from white people.
But to get through this article, readers first have to understand reparatory justice in similar situations likeThe Holocaust andJapanese-American internment. Germany, in trying to confront its role as the perpetrator of the Holocaust, has paid reparations in a variety of ways: paying Holocaust survivors and their heirsbillions of dollars in restitution and compensation: USD100 million in individual reparations paid by West Germany over a 14 year period; Monthly payments of USD290 per month approved in 1988 for the rest of Holocaust survivors’ lives; and a one-time paymentannounced in 2023 by the German government to pay survivors approximately USD 1.4 billion in direct compensation and social welfare services.
Yet, while reparations may include monetary payments or symbolic acts of apology, it means something deeper for Africa: the acknowledgement of harm, the rewriting of erased histories, and the rebalancing of inequities entrenched by colonialism.
The reparation debate
Africa’s reparations debate is not new. However, the call for accountability over slavery and colonization has largely beenignored or dismissed in global politics.
In June 1992, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which today is known as theAfrican Union (AU), inaugurated the12-member Group of Eminent Persons (GEP) at a meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, to review the issue of reparations in relation to the damage done to Africa and its diaspora by the transatlantic slave trade, slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism.
The outcome of that meeting led to theAbuja Proclamation on Reparations, a common position that was a first for the political leadership of Africa. This proclamation hinges on the reality that people of African descent were not only victims of these inhumane acts but continue to be victims of their consequences.
The historical context of these demands is well articulated in works likeWalter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”. Rodney’s analysis laid bare how European colonial powers exploited Africa’s resources and its people and how they shaped policies to keep the continent underdeveloped. According toRodney, colonialism wasn’t just about wealth extraction, it was a deliberate engineering of a cycle of dependency that stunted Africa’s growth long after independence was declared on paper.
To fully understand the depth of harm caused by slavery, turn toLawrence Hill's “The Book of Negroes” (2007), a deeply affecting historical fiction that reimagines the life of an enslaved African in America. Through these books and many others that have been written, readers are reminded of the weight of history and its consequences, which are still felt today across the African continent and the diaspora.
Many critics havearguedthat no one currently living was responsible for slavery and, therefore, they shouldn’t have to compensate for it. However,Africa continues to grapple with the systemic effects of slavery — which ended only about150 years ago, and colonialism, which only departed from the continent as recently as45 years ago.
In 2019,Stuart E. Eizenstat a former US senator who also served as special adviser for Holocaust issues in hisarticle titled “What Holocaust Restitution Taught me about Slavery Reparations” estimated thepotential economic cost of reparations for distant heirs of slaves to range from about USD 500 billion to as high as USD 17 trillion.However, many other studies, including thereport on reparations for transatlantic chattel slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean, put the figure at USD 131 trillion (EUR 120 trillion), both for harm perpetrated during the slave era and damages caused post-enslavement.
How much was stolen?
Human and material resources that were taken from Africacontributed to the capitalist development and wealth of Europe and other parts of the world.More than 15 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic, with an estimated 20 percent perishing during the harrowing journey. Slavery fuelled shipbuilding, banking, insurance, and many other industries laying the foundation for immense wealth in theGlobal North. Without the African slaves,Sampie Terreblanche opined that Europecould not have conducted its profitable trade with the East in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Twelve to fifteen generations of Africanslived as slaves in the Americas from 1520 to 1888. With an additional 9.4 million to 14 million Africansestimated to have been enslaved in the Arab world.
In December 2024, while filming a documentary on African women inPrecolonialandColonial history, I visited theManhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi, Ghana, and was led into one of the rooms that housedrepatriated items from the United Kingdom. Among them were some of the purest gold artefacts once looted from theAsante Kingdom in the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana),returned on a six-year loan. Many more such artefacts and rare gemslie scattered in museums across the world. To date, Europe holds thelargest collection of ancient African artefacts.
Royal stool ornament of the Asante peoples, from Kumasi, Ghana, at the Fowler Museum, University of California. Image byDaderot fromWikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Even though Africa is often told to move on, the legacy of colonialism continues to shape its struggles of external debt crises, extractive economies, political instability, and cultural erasure. For example, the forcedamalgamation of the northern and southern protectorates of Nigeria by colonial powers isoften cited as a root cause of the country’s challenges. Similarly, post-independent conflicts and ethnic tensions in countries like Somalia, Cameroon, Sudan, and Uganda are reflective of thearbitrary borders created by colonialism.
With the declaration of 2025 as the Year of Reparations by the African Union, it remains to be seen whether the world’s economic and political powers will finally confront their role in perpetuating Africa’s suffering. Or whether reparation will begin at home as Africa addresses the wealth siphoned by corrupt leaders — much of which still lines the pockets of their families.