This week (29 April) marks the 30th anniversary of the Abuja Proclamation agreed during the First Pan-African Conference on Reparations in Abuja in April 1993. The meeting was organised by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) under its Nigerian chair.
The proclamation noted that “the damage sustained by the African peoples is not a ‘thing of the past’ but is painfully manifest in the damaged lives of contemporary Africans from Harlem to Harare, in the damaged economies of the black world from Guinea to Guyana, from Somalia to Surinam.”
It argued the case of African reparations by observing that other groups like Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust and Japanese-American victims of American internment during the Second World War had received monetary compensation ($60 billion; and $1.2 million respectively).
The document stressed that Western countries that had benefitted from four centuries of free slave labour and a century of colonial exploitation must repair this damage. It advocated cash transfers and debt annulment for African countries and diaspora states and communities across the Caribbean and the Americas.
Abuja further called for greater African representation in institutions of global governance like the World Bank and IMF, and a permanent seat for Africa on the United Nations (UN) Security Council.
Prophets of Abuja: Ali Mazrui, Ade Ajayi, and Moshood Abiola
Many of these were ideas that Kenyan intellectual, Ali Mazrui – one of five African prophets of reparations – had consistently championed.
He had also proposed four concrete acts of restitution: first, Western material and moral support to democracy in Africa and reduction of support to tyrants; second, Western reduction or elimination of economic impediments to Africa’s development by, for example, annulling Africa’s external debt (which stood at $644 billion in 2021); third, assisting Africa to overcome socio-cultural obstacles to democratization through such actions as backing women empowerment programmes; fourth, capital transfers from the West to Africa – “the Middle Passage Plan” – similar to the $12 billion Marshall Plan through which the US had enabled European reconstruction between 1948 and 1952.
Mazrui was part of the OAU Eminent Persons Group established in Dakar in June 1992, along with Nigerian historian, Jacob Ade Ajayi, and Jamaican scholar-diplomat, Dudley Thompson. The group pushed for reparations for the damage done to Africa and its diaspora for slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism.
It was co-chaired by Nigerian multi-millionaire philanthropist, Moshood Abiola, who had sponsored the First Reparations Conference in Lagos in December 1990. The group met again in Abuja in September 1992 and April 1993, but was sadly discontinued after Nigeria ended its chairing of the OAU in 1993, and the movement’s main financier, Moshood Abiola – presumed winner of the June 1993 presidential elections in Nigeria – was jailed by military autocrat, General Sani Abacha, in June 1994 while trying to claim his mandate, and died four years later. Two more low-key Reparations conferences were held in Benin and Missouri in 1999.
Ade Ajayi argued for a central focus on the Transatlantic slave trade due to its links with colonialism and neo-colonialism. He regretted that discussions about the contributions of the slave trade to the West’s industrialisation have been neglected, and criticised the indifferent attitude of many African scholars to this issue.
He observed that a major motive of European colonial rule was to keep African labour in a cheap state akin to slavery, using methods perfected during two centuries of Caribbean colonialism. Ajayi further explained that about one million Africans had died defending their European colonial masters during two World Wars.
He thus advocated four key measures to achieve reparations: domestic education and mobilisation of African societies; documentation and research (through national documentation centres) on the costs of slavery and colonialism; arguing a cogent case for African reparations; and making detailed calculations of the costs of reparations, before placing the issue on the agenda of the United Nations.
The 1993 Abuja proclamation was visionary in calling for the return of looted African artefacts to their rightful owners, which French, German, and British governments have recently started to do. Clearly influenced by Ajayi, the document called on African governments to establish national committees to study the damage of slavery and colonialism, while promoting dissemination and education.
The proclamation further called on the OAU to grant observer status to diaspora groups working on restitution. Abuja, finally, requested African states to accede to the “right of return” of all diaspora citizens wanting to resettle in their ancestral homelands.
Prophet of Accra: Wole Soyinka
The African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission held in Accra in August 1999, made similar demands as Abuja, and was attended by civil society representatives of 15 African and Caribbean states, as well as diaspora delegates from the United States and Britain.
It called specifically for compensation of $777 trillion as reparations from the West for slavery and colonialism, and for African traditional leaders to make land available for diaspora returnees.
Though not a delegate in Accra, Nigerian Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka’s book, The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness, appeared in the same year as the conference, and tackled similar issues. Soyinka stressed the importance of truth in rebuilding nations, and noted that truth commissions in Africa are similar to the reparations movement in demanding restitution to exorcise the past in order to achieve cathartic healing.
He argued that the crimes of the post-colonial African elite against African populations have echoes of colonial crimes, and that such human rights violations weaken the OAU’s crusade for reparations for Western slavery and colonialism. Citing the case of post-apartheid South Africa and jihadist Sudan, Soyinka noted that contemporary crimes demand more urgent reparations, as the victims and perpetrators are still alive.
He further insisted that the looted wealth of African autocrats like Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and Nigeria’s Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha, must be returned to the continent as a form of “internal moral cleansing” in order to strengthen the African case for global reparations.
Like Ade Ajayi, Soyinka argued that the slave trade dislocated much of Africa’s organic economic systems, resulting in many of the continent’s contemporary economic challenges. Similar to Ali Mazrui, the Nobel laureate called for the annulment of Africa’s debt in exchange for the continent annulling Europe’s historical injustices on the continent.
Prophet of Durban: Thabo Mbeki
The UN World Conference against Racism took place in South Africa’s port city of Durban in August/September 2001. The summit was hosted by then president, Thabo Mbeki, the apostle of Africa’s 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. Like Mazrui, Mbeki, as president, consistently urged the reform of institutions of global governance such as the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO in order to give Africa greater voice in them.
An important achievement of Durban was to declare slavery to be a crime against humanity. The Transatlantic slave trade was termed an “appalling tragedy” of “abhorrent barbarism” that “should always have been” a crime against humanity. Durban also argued that colonialism had resulted in racism and suffering that has endured into the contemporary age.
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” in countries like the US and Brazil. While Durban did not change the world, it helped lay the foundation for contemporary Black Lives Matter-led racial struggles which culminated in global anti-racism protests in 2020.
Whither Africa’s Struggle for Reparations?
In concluding this journey that has stretched from Abuja to Durban, it is important to pose the question: How can European nations who enslaved and colonised African people for nearly five centuries repair this pernicious damage that has left Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas with the triple burdens of a lack of development and crippling debt; diseases; and deadly conflicts? As has often been noted, the movement to abolish slavery took generations to succeed, and so also will the contemporary movement for restitution for slavery and colonialism.
The African Union must, however, help to drive this issue, as the OAU energetically did under Nigerian leadership three decades ago.
One of the most important recent developments is the agreement by the German government, in May 2021, to pay Є1.1 billion in compensation, over 30 years, for the genocide in its then colony of Southwest Africa (Namibia) between 1904 and 1908.
In December 2022, the Netherlands government apologised for Dutch slavery globally, and established a €200 million fund to raise consciousness and address the lingering impacts of slavery. Will the more egregious abusers of France, Britain, Belgium, and Portugal follow suit, and start to atone for their historical crimes against humanity?
Professor Adebajo is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa.