The Year of reparations: What does it mean and what should Africa expect?

How do you apologise for one of the worst crimes to humanity?

Originally published on Global Voices

The African Union has dubbed 2025 the Year 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, and how do you apologise for some of the worst and most prolonged crimes against humanity?

Following the abolishment of the transatlantic slave trade, which lasted for over 400 years, European powers went on to carve up Africa in a process known as colonialism. The Portuguese, who were the 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 across 80 percent of planet Earth, with Portugal, 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, emancipated Black 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 of passively calling for undeserved cash handouts from white people. 

But to get through this article, readers first have to understand reparatory justice in similar situations like The Holocaust and Japanese-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 heirs billions of dollars in restitution and compensation: USD 100 million in individual reparations paid by West Germany over a 14 year period; Monthly payments of USD 290 per month approved in 1988 for the rest of Holocaust survivors’ lives; and a one-time payment announced 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 been ignored or dismissed in global politics. 

In June 1992, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which today is known as the African Union (AU), inaugurated the 12-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 the Abuja 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 like Walter 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 to Rodney, 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 to Lawrence 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 have argued that 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 about 150 years ago, and colonialism, which only departed from the continent as recently as 45 years ago.

In 2019, Stuart E. Eizenstat a former US senator who also served as special adviser for Holocaust issues in his article titled “What Holocaust Restitution Taught me about Slavery Reparations” estimated the potential 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 the report 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 Africa contributed 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 the Global North. Without the African slaves, Sampie Terreblanche opined that Europe could not have conducted its profitable trade with the East in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 

Twelve to fifteen generations of Africans lived as slaves in the Americas from 1520 to 1888. With an additional 9.4 million to 14 million Africans estimated to have been enslaved in the Arab world. 

In December 2024, while filming a documentary on African women in Precolonial and Colonial history, I visited the Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi, Ghana, and was led into one of the rooms that housed repatriated items from the United Kingdom. Among them were some of the purest gold artefacts once looted from the Asante Kingdom in the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana), returned on a six-year loan. Many more such artefacts and rare gems lie scattered in museums across the world. To date, Europe holds the largest collection of ancient African artefacts. 

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 forced amalgamation of the northern and southern protectorates of Nigeria by colonial powers is often 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 the arbitrary 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.

Written by Adesewa Olofinko