From recognition to responsibility: Africa’s next steps on reparations

THERE are moments in global politics when what is possible shifts without immediately resolving longstanding injustices.

- RATIDZO MAKOMBE

Ghana’s recent success at the UN, where 123 countries voted in favour of a resolution on the “Declaration of the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and Racialised Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime Against Humanity’, is one such moment. With only three votes against and 52 abstentions, the resolution affirms what Africa and its diaspora have always known: the transatlantic slave trade was a crime against humanity requiring redress. More importantly, it signals a growing global willingness to engage seriously with the question of reparations.

For many Africans, the violence of slavery and colonialism has never been distant history. It is a living structure shaping inequality, development trajectories, and global power relations. Between 12 and 15 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic, with roughly two million dying during the Middle Passage. These are not abstract figures. They are the foundations of a global economic order that continues to shape Africa’s position in the world.

What is new about this moment is not the recognition of harm, but the willingness of the international community to formally acknowledge it in multilateral spaces, even amid opposition from powerful states. Yet recognition alone cannot transform material conditions. It is an opening. What Africa chooses to do next will determine whether this moment becomes symbolic or structural.

The most compelling shift revealed by Ghana's diplomatic success is that reparations are no longer viewed solely as matters of historical justice. They are a present-day economic question. The systems that extracted African labour and resources through slavery and colonialism continue, in modified forms, to shape global trade, finance, and development.