The African Union (AU) has dubbed 2025 as its year of reparations, centering on “AU’s commitment to addressing historical injustices, including the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.”
According to various reports, European actors have criticized this for being a “backward-looking” theme that’s prone to stirring up “further discontent in Africa-Europe relations.” This reaction is expected since Europe has never been a fan of reparations when it comes to African people; this is because part of reparations means coming to terms with the behemoth of a world economic system that the West benefits from today because of enslavement, genocide, and land exploitation.
Some have been surprised by this move, since the AU is known to theme its years with developmentalist language that emphasizes a capitalist mode of production. In 2023, the theme was the “Acceleration of AfCFTA Implementation.” This meant “creating a single African market for goods and services facilitated by free movement [of] persons, capital, investment to deepen economic integration.”
What’s left unsaid in this understanding, of course, is that free movement of capital and investment is within the framework of the colonial capitalist system; it does not deal with the relations of production that lock Africans into being the undervalued laborers of raw materials, while at the same time making the Continent reliant on Europe for finished goods and necessities like medicine, mechanized technology, and infrastructure.
In 2024, the theme was “Educate and Skill Africa for the 21st Century.” Here, again, maintaining the developmentalist language that positions Africa as needing to “catch up” with the West without raising the question of neocolonial power: who owns and controls the mines in the Congo or Namibia? Who is benefiting from all the oil that makes up almost all of Nigeria’s exports? Who is valuing the labor of African workers who make the processing of these goods possible to begin with? Not the African working class.
Though the AU is the successor of the earlier Organization of African Unity (OAU) established in 1963, the question of reparations was not addressed until 1993 at the first Pan-African Conference on Reparations in Nigeria, from which the Abuja Proclamation stems.
But the question of reparations was undertaken much earlier by The First World Tribunal on Reparations for African People, organized by the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), held in Brooklyn in 1982, eleven years before the Abuja Pan-African Conference.
It was at this World Tribunal that the APSP’s leadership on reparations was felt in full force. It was here that African people, the world over, gathered to put the U.S. government on trial for the centuries of exploitation of African labor that has kept the engine of colonialism running.
Convened by Chairman Omali, who served as the People’s Advocate, and using the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the human rights conventions of the United Nations, the International Panel of judges found the U.S. guilty, owing $4.1 trillion in reparations. A quantity not adjusted for inflation, and is in reality incalculable, since the wealth produced kick-started the machinations of industrialization for the West at the expense of Africa and Africans. The proceedings of this gathering are now chronicled in the 2023 book, “The Verdict Is In: Reparations Now!”
A day after the November 13-14, 1982 Tribunal, the APSP held the founding conference of the African National Reparations Organization (ANRO). This conference inaugurated the on-the-ground work of organizing black people to fight for reparations, putting Point 11 of the Working Platform of the APSP into practice (see page 10).
In the February 1983 issue of The Spear, the necessity of the reparations front of the African Liberation Movement was elucidated:
“Black people have long ago rejected the pseudo solutions for our problems put forth by the white left in the wake of the U.S. State attack on our liberation movement through COINTELPRO. The majority of us have also rejected the leadership of black petty bourgeois forces whose self-interest is manifest and are therefore incapable of leading our people anywhere except deeper into the dependent colonial relationship to the U.S. that gave us all these problems in the first place…Conditions are ripe for the reparations demand to ignite black communities from one end of this continent to the other, and ANRO is organizing to be in place to lead the struggle.”
And lead the struggle they did. By 1983, there were active reparations work being done in California, New York, Washington State and D.C., and plans to export the work to Europe and indirectly, to Africa. All throughout the 80s, ANRO held its conventions throughout the U.S., bringing forward the internal and external petty bourgeois contradictions plaguing the work, as well as the way forward.
In 1985, ANRO held its overdue second convention, re-emphasizing the leadership of the African worker in the reparations struggle. The December 1985 issue of The Spear reports, “Because of the historical struggle to consolidate the leadership of ANRO, the period between the first and second convention is particularly notable for the fact that the National Coordinating Committee succeeded in unearthing and neutralizing the class forces which have historically, and particularly within the last period, sought to divert and destroy the independent struggle of black workers for power.”
What the existence and work of ANRO demonstrates, despite the many internal class contradictions and external counterinsurgent attacks, is the Party’s long history of leading the reparations struggle as a necessary part of the African Liberation Movement. This is also despite the great disruption that was dealt to the Uhuru Movement by the 2022 FBI raid on the homes and offices of the leaders within the movement.
As stated in Point 11 of our Working Platform, the call for reparations, rather than a call of charity, is a recognition that the “U.S. and European civilization were born from, and are presently maintained by, the horrendous theft of human and material resources from Africa and its people.” This kind of devastation does not happen in a vacuum, and neither are its effects separate from the contradictions African people and the African continent face daily.
That the AU is now joining others in the struggle for reparations in 2025 is itself the result of decades of African workers organizing for reparations; the popular recognition of this demand has reached the point that even a petty-bourgeois, neocolonial institution like the AU cannot ignore.
Today, winning reparations for African Liberation is taken up by the Uhuru Solidarity Movement (USM), a membership organization of white people, working under the leadership of the APSP. On September 13, USM held its annual March of Reparations to African People to support the ongoing work of the Reparations Legacy Project. A project aimed to “organize white people with access to financial wealth to take a stand in repairing the economic and social damage of enslavement and ongoing exploitation of African people through the redistribution of resources toward the Black self-determination programs of the Uhuru Movement.”
Through the work of the APSP, the reparations work for the African working masses of the world is alive and well today.
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