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A Response to Tadesse Simie Metekia's article, AU ‘Year of Reparations’ should look to the future and the past
A Response to Tadesse Simie Metekia,
Senior Researcher, Rule of law, ISS Addis Ababa
AU ‘Year of Reparations’ should look to the future and the past
27 February 2025
Elizabeth LaPensée, Our Grandmothers Carry Water from the Other World (2016). - https://mnartists.walkerart.org/afro-indigenous-futurisms-and-decolonizing-our-minds
“Others contend that development aid, debt relief and foreign investment function as reparations, negating the need for further redress. . . . One way to address these challenges is by expanding the AU theme’s focus, which currently emphasises justice and healing for Africans and Afro-descendants. During implementation, the AU could approach reparations as a forward-looking global agenda aimed at repairing both victims and perpetrators. . . . Former colonial powers that profited from Africa’s suffering carry unresolved moral wounds. Societies built on slavery and colonial exploitation continue to grapple with racism, economic inequality and historical amnesia. Reparative justice offers these nations an opportunity to heal, confront their pasts, and rebuild relationships with African and Afro-descendants.”
- Tadesse Simie Metekia
I recently met Tadesse Metekia during pre-summit events ahead of the 38th Ordinary Session of the African Union Assembly of Heads of States and Government. In fact, it was during a breakout session at the Continental Strategy Conference on Justice Through Reparations where we began a discussion on reparations and I introduced the Dum Diversas War Reparations Claim as the holy grail in the Global Afrikan Reparatory Justice Movement’s search for “Africa’s Reparation Claim” and a United African Reparations Front.
The Dum Diversas War Reparations Claim identifies the Apostolic Edict issued by Pope Nicholas V on June 18, 1452 that gave authority to the King of Portugal to “to invade, conquer, fight, and subjugate” the people living on the Africa continent deemed “enemies of Christ” as the start of what has erroneously been named the “Trans Atlantic Slave Trade”. I say this because, as José Lingna Nafafé's details in his book Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century,
“most West Central African historians have taken it as accepted wisdom that slavery was an African practice, and the idea that Africans colluded in Atlantic slavery has never been challenged. Generations of scholars have studied systems of ‘taxation’, ‘wars’, ‘debt’ and ‘legal practices’ without interrogating the Portuguese institution of baculamento, which overrode local practices; instead, blame has been placed on the Angolan institutions. All Angolan soba allies of the Portuguese conquest were obliged to make a payment of 100 enslaved people annually to Portugal. This Portuguese taxation, which was named after the local baculamento practice - a tribute system- profoundly disrupted the Angolan socio-political and legal system and resulted in social upheaval. Communities and their rulers were turned against each other, a new local judicial procedure was imposed that served the interests of the Atlantic slave trade, putting judicial officers in local courts in Angola to adjudicate local cases in their own interest - what Kimbwandende K.B. Fu-Kiau called a turning point in African governance and leadership in West Central Africa. Conquered, and subjected to Portuguese rule, Angolan kings and sobas loyal to the king of Portugal were made subject to annual tax payment in human beings in 1626, thus turning people into a currency. This was particularly the case for Angolan kings, because ‘native’ soldiers were recruited directly from the region where the Portuguese had established control and maintained fairs (markets).
The Portuguese did not come to Africa and find “slave markets”. That was a Portuguese creation. Thus, the idea that some Africans were willy-nilly complicit in the warfare that resulted in the trafficking of prisoners of war misnamed “slaves” is false. Rather, it was a fact of compelled performance and duress.
The Dum Diversas Apostolic Edict launched the military invasion and occupation of the African continent by the monopoly war contract holders - private merchants from 1518 to 1595, Portugal from 1595 to 1640, the Genoese (Italy) from 1662 to 1671, the Dutch and Portuguese from 1671 to 1701, then France 1701-1713, the British 1713 to 1750 (including her 13 colonies in America), and the Spanish 1765 to 1779 - and resulted in 100 million dead and 12 million trafficked as prisoners-of-war and enslaved in the Americas. The war was concluded by the General Act of the Berlin Conference on West Africa, 26 February 1885.
That’s 158,038 days or 432 years, 8 months and 8 days of war. That was then followed by colonization which lasted until the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (General Assembly resolution 1514 (XV) granted on December 14, 1960, another 75 years, 9 months and 18 days. This was followed by neo-colonialism which continues until this day, another 64 years, 2 months and 14 days. In total, that’s 572 years, 8 months and 10 days of war damage since the Dum Diversas declaration of war.
It should be noted that during the war, the dehumanization process that was used to create human products known by the trademarks “chattel”, “negros”, “blacks” and “slaves” that resulted in ethnocide - the deliberate and systematic destruction of the identity and culture of an ethnic group. This ethnocide continues to this day as evidenced by the fact that with the exception of 800,000 people that have taken the African Ancestry dna test, nearly every descendant of the prisoners of war that were trafficked still do not know their original maternal or paternal ancestral lineage and where they come from on the African continent. Thus the original harm of enslavement, graphically depicted in the movie Roots when Kunte Kinte was whipped into submitting to ethnocide - accepting a “slave” identity and name - continues to the present.
I say all of this in order to make the counterpoint to my new colleague and friend Tadesse Simie Metekia, that when Africa’s Reparation claim is properly framed as War Reparations, or compensation payments made after a war by one side to the other that are intended to cover damage or injury inflicted during a war, then we need not subject ourselves to manipulation by the successor regimes of the enslaving nations who wish to capture the reparations movement, redefine it in the form as debt restructuring, development aid and climate justice which suits their interests. Such a capitulation would shift the burden of paying for those damages to the victims of the Dum Diversas War. Our reparations are not to be used to cover other problems that the international community is responsible for.
We do not need to acquiesce to such a misstatement of reparations. If reparations is intended as compensation after the war with an aim to repair the dignity of the victims, then reframing reparations in a way that considers, even elevates, the interests and sensitivities of the enslavers continues the very indignity of the victims!
Is “expanding the AU theme’s focus, which currently emphasises justice and healing for Africans and Afro-descendants” to cater to the “unresolved moral wounds” of the enslaving and colonial powers to heal THEM while absolving and relieving them of the responsibility to pay for both the Dum Diversas War damage and such issues as structural underdevelopment and climate change justice the objective of the major funders of the African Union? After all, those imperialist powers who used slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism as tools of domination do, in fact, want global development to make it easier for them to freely enjoy the planet. They just want it on their terms, and paying compensation directly to the victims of the Dum Diversas War so that they can exercise self determination, is inimical to the imperialists agenda. Thus, there is an effort, through philanthropy and the use of scientific colonialism, to reframe the reparations narrative and agenda.
The Ashkenazic victims of genocide were not forced to reframe their reparations in order to heal the Nazi perpetrators. Neither were the Japanese victims of America required to take into consideration the development plans and other responsibilities of the United States government. It is an offense to suggest, once again, that the burden of healing others falls on African people at the expense of their own direct interests. Yes, we want the end of the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior. Yes we want the end of white supremacy. Yes we want a global order where the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes. Yes, we want better race relations. But it is not OUR responsibility to pay for it.
Yet, the Dum Diversas War Reparations Claim is forward looking. The Apostolic Edict gave the monopoly Asiento war contract holders the right to seize “lands, places, estates, camps and any other possessions, mobile and immobile goods found in all these places and held in whatever name, and held and possessed by the same”. Reparations would therefore require the return of the artifacts and the end to mineral and other resource extraction and recognize Africa's sovereign control of their god-given natural resources. It would empower Africa to determine the future of industrial development since the industrial revolution was made entirely possible by the Dum Diversas Apostolic Edict and the exploitation of African labor and African raw materials. The future, then, would now be largely determined by Africa. This, of course, is the ultimate effect of Reparations.
Finally, the Dum Diversas War Reparations Claim unites all the local, national and regional African and Afro Descendant reparations movements into one united front since it covers the entire 572 years, 8 months and 10 days of war damage suffereed by African people regardless of where they came from or are currently living on the continent or where they were trafficked to and are currently living outside the continent of Africa. It covers both the internal reparations (for example, the obligation of African states to recognize the right of return of the descendants of the prsioners of war and provide them with citizenship) and the external reparations that are owed by all parties working with tthe Asiento monopoly war contract holders.
Thus, it is my hope, that during the African Union’s themed year, “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations”, that we remain vigilant in asserting Africa’s Claim based on compensation for the Dum Diversas War damage and effectively resist any new reinterpretation of Africa’s claim.
