Gerald Lenoir
American Friends Service Committee
February 1, 2004

In addressing Africa’s struggle for relief from its onerous external debt, advocates of global justice have raised a critical question: Who owes whom? Millions of people on the continent and throughout the world have concluded that it is the countries of the Global North that are heavily indebted to African countries for over a century of exploitation.

As a result, the call for cancellation of the debt is increasingly being coupled with the demand that governments, corporations and lending institutions of the Global North repair the harm to African nations and peoples of African descent for the effects of slavery, colonialism and neoliberalism. Reparations – in particular, monetary damages for past wrongs – has been posed as a moral and legal obligation.

History of the African reparations movement

For over a decade, African scholars, activists and leaders have discussed and debated the issue of reparations. In the early 1990s, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) formally endorsed the idea of making claims for slavery and colonialism. African heads of state appointed the late Nigerian pro-democracy leader Chief Moshood Abiola and former UNESCO Director-General Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow as co-chairs of an eminent persons group to explore the issue. The group sponsored a pan-African conference on reparations in 1993.

The conference, held in Abuja, Nigeria, spelled out Africa’s case for reparations. The Abuja Proclamation declared that the injury caused by slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism “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.” The proclamation went further to say that a moral debt is owed to African peoples and called for “full monetary payment through capital transfer and debt cancellation.”

The call for African reparations today

Today, national, regional and international groups supporting debt cancellation are also rallying for African reparations. The Jubilee Movement International, an international anti-debt coalition formed in the mid-1990s as Jubilee 2000, is playing an important role in advancing the movement for debt cancellation as well as reparations.

Jubilee South Africa, has taken the lead in the reparations movement on the African continent. South African victims of violence under successive apartheid regimes have won reparations settlements from the democratically elected government although payments fall far short of the Truth Commission’s recommendations. South Africans are also filing lawsuits against corporations that supported the Apartheid regime.

Across Africa, people who were forcibly removed from their communities and are enduring damage from massive dam and mining projects are also filing claims for reparations. Jubilee Nigeria is demanding that foreign banks return the country’s wealth embezzled by dictators.

Jubilee South Africa and the larger network of Jubilee South, organized a three-day workshop in August 2001 just prior to the UN-sponsored World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. The workshop deliberated on the illegitimacy of the South’s debt to the North and the basis for reparations. The workshop participants committed to take the issues of repudiation and reparations into their communities, organizations and social movements, and link these issues to other demands and campaigns.

Despite a protest and walkout by the U.S. delegation, the final declaration of the World Conference Against Racism proclaimed slavery a “crime against humanity.” While many delegates favored reparations, the gathering’s compromise declaration sidestepped the call for explicit reparations.

In the United States, the Jubilee USA Network has taken the question of debt cancellation and reparations to the White House and the halls of Congress. In its guiding platform, the coalition of over 60 organizations including labor, churches, faith-based organizations, AIDS activists, fair trade campaigners and over 9,000 individuals backs cancellation of the Global South’s “odious and illegitimate” debt and further states:

Jubilee partners in the global South note that a greater debt is owed to the South by Northern nations as a result of slavery, the colonial and neo-colonial extraction of mineral wealth and other resources, and environmental damage resulting from Northern policies and lifestyles. In view of this, Jubilee USA asks, “who truly are the debtors and who the creditors?”

Like the demand for debt cancellation, the campaign for reparations is a cutting edge issue for an international movement committed to the struggle for social and economic justice worldwide. As George Dor, a member of Jubilee South Africa, wrote in a paper titled “Reparations Now,” the struggle for reparations is part of a broader process whose aim must be the dismantling of the neoliberal system of global apartheid and replacing it with an international economic order in which “the lives of the poor take priority over the whims and excess of the rich.”

Given the sordid history of exploitation of Africa’s land, labor and resources by the industrialized nations of the Global North, the issue of who owes whom is indisputable. Reparations in the form of debt cancellation and monetary compensation for the underdeveloped nations of Africa is an indispensable step toward the development of a just world order.