Aluta Continua

The struggle for African reparations

The theme of the African Union in 2025 was ‘Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations.’ The focus was on revisiting the past, marred by slavery, colonialism and apartheid; achieving truth, justice and reconciliation in race relations; and promoting a future without racial prejudice and where Africans and People of African Descent can prosper by overcoming their historical struggles. I bet there weren’t any news-breaking headlines of Africans being granted the reparations they demand and deserve, but it is an important and relevant discussion to have.

Here is something interesting for us to consider. Germany paid over $89 billion in reparations to Holocaust Survivors. The United States paid $ 1.6 billion to Japanese Americans interned during World War II. Yet, African Americans have received $ 0 for 246 years of slavery. When the African Union agitates for reparations, it is not asking for charity – it is demanding long-overdue justice.

Let’s explore the rationale for the African push for reparations: the trans-Atlantic slavery, colonisation, and apartheid. These are hideous injustices that were perpetrated on Africans and people of African descent for years, characterised by brutality, dehumanisation and racism.

The trans-Atlantic slavery took able-bodied men and women from the shores of Africa, draining the continent of the human resources it needed to grow. It also disrupted pre-colonial African societies by dividing Africans between the societies that raided their neighbours and profited from slavery, and the communities where slaves were captured, which were diminished demographically, psychologically and morally. Kingdoms in Africa that participated in slavery flourished, propped by imperial arms and supplies, incentivising Africans to sell their own, and making them complicit in the most horrendous trading enterprise in history.

Slavery destabilised African societies, reduced their numbers, diversity, strength and unity. On the other hand, slavery enabled the slave-trading nations to grow their labour-intensive economies, whether cotton or sugar. The economies of the countries that used slave labour were built on the backs of African slaves and their descendants. Yet, they have never compensated the descendants of slaves for their toil, sweat and blood, which made their economies grow.

Even after the abolition of slavery, former slaves were not given land or any form of social support. They were not in a position to dictate the conditions they could live and work in, hence slavery ended just in theory, not in practice. The segregation of African descendants in America, their denial of civil liberties and social security, red-lining housing policies, and their disproportionate incarceration and brutal treatment by law enforcement officers are indicators that justice has not yet been served.

One of the outcomes of the slavery era was the invention of racism. Before it existed, white and black people alike were bought and sold as slaves. The creation of a special category of people called ‘negro’, based on physiological characteristics, led to the notion that only these people ought to be slaves, and not just indentured slaves, as white people were, but permanent slaves (they’d become slaves for life, and their generations as well). It started with the dehumanisation – that Africans are impure and inferior morally, intellectually, genetically to white people, white people being considered pure and superior. Therefore, laws were enacted to separate the ‘pure’ whites from the ‘impure negros’ – banning inter-racial marriage; forbidding negros from any activities apart from hard, unpaid labor; and instituting a code of managing the negros (such as giving them un-African names, indoctrinating them with Christianity which taught them to ‘obey their masters’, and the floggings, beatings, raping, maiming and all forms of abuse, to keep them in line).

By the time apartheid was instituted in the Republic of South Africa by the descendants of the Dutch settlers there, racism had been tried and tested, ready to be unleashed on the poor Africans. It proceeded in the same manner – the dehumanisation of Africans, segregation based on racial lines, denying them any opportunities for advancement and restricting them to providing labour to the Afrikaner minority, all forms of abuse, forcing Africans to speak Afrikaans…

Colonisation was a tempered form of slavery, with all the patterns described above. They called Africans ‘backward, primitive’ to justify their mandate to ‘Christianize and civilise’ them. They banned traditional religions, folksongs and customs, replacing them with Christianity, its hymns and theology. They imposed taxes on unwilling Africans, so that Africans would be forced to work in their vast farms (which they had taken by force or deceit) to raise the taxes. They restricted movement and established tribalism by forcing a ‘so-called tribe’ to live in a delineated place, hence limiting interactions with other tribes - whereas in the pre-colonial era, people were free to move, switch, trade and intermarry between tribes. They made tribe a permanent identity, entrenching ethnic divisions that still haunt African states to this day.

The worst consequence of colonisation was how it underdeveloped Africa. It laid the structures for Africa’s exploitation, which have not changed much even after independence. Colonial powers replaced food crops with cash crops to be exported to their countries, with the only infrastructure they deemed fit to build, and captured the market by ensuring that their colonies could only trade with them. To this day, many African countries get most of their revenues from cash crops such as tea, coffee and cocoa, and mostly trade with their former colonial powers.

The issue of reparations is not just about financial compensation for the unpaid labour and stolen resources – it goes much deeper. It must be accompanied by the upholding of the dignity of the African and their descendants, and throwing away all the prejudices that were used to justify their exploitation. It must lead to the repatriation of African art that is still displayed in museums in Europe and other parts of the world, which was gotten through plunder.

Finally, reparations will signify that structures that support the taking away of loads of African resources, and giving back tiny tokens of foreign aid, must come to an end. Africa has enough resources already to be prosperous – it won’t benefit materially from reparations – but it is still constrained by the legacies and neo-forms of colonialism, apartheid and slavery.