By Gillian Schutte

There is a growing body of commentary – written in clipped prose and earnest paternalism – in which white liberal analysts perform moral outrage at the ‘legacy’ of slavery and colonialism.

These pieces often begin with a neat historical summation of African suffering and quickly turn to finger-wagging advice on what the African Union should do to earn the respect of the international community. They float phrases like “good governance” and “realistic expectations” while offering minimal political, historical, or decolonial insight. They speak in passive voices – “atrocities were committed,” “aid has been provided” – erasing agency, responsibility, and resistance alike.

In these columns, reparations are reduced to a technical problem to be solved with better strategy, more leadership, and improved optics. The violence of centuries is softened into administrative concern. And the reader is gently guided to the conclusion that Africa’s failure to “unite” or “stabilise” is the primary barrier to progress – rather than the geopolitical system that continues to extract from, punish, and police the continent.

Such analysis is not only superficial – it is reductionist.

It positions the West as the moral barometer and Africa as the eternal apprentice. It rarely interrogates the global architecture that made reparations necessary in the first place, nor does it propose anything disruptive enough to threaten the comfort of those still benefiting from imperial plunder. Instead, it reasserts the old colonial logic under the guise of reason and restraint.

But what would it mean to think beyond this white gaze? To approach reparations as a revolutionary imperative instead of a diplomatic pitch?

It begins by naming the theft. Reparations are not about hurt feelings or historical guilt. They are about the forced accumulation of wealth in Europe and North America at the direct expense of Africa and her diaspora. They are about stolen land, unpaid labour, cultural erasure, and the systematic underdevelopment of entire regions. They are about the enduring financial, ecological, and psychological damage that continues through unequal trade regimes, exploitative debt structures, and toxic donor relations.

South African economist, Sampie Terreblanche, wrote, “The transition in South Africa was not a victory over white supremacy, but a negotiated surrender to global capital.”

This insight applies more broadly. Across the continent, transitions from colonial rule were choreographed to safeguard Western access to African resources. Reparations, then, cannot be asked for within the logic of the very institutions that depend on African subservience. They must be demanded – and enacted – as part of a larger project to dismantle that logic.

And yet, the African Union’s recent declaration of 2025 as a “Year of Justice” through reparations is already showing signs of falling into the performance trap. Lofty rhetoric is not backed by unified vision or structural strategy. Some member states are paralysed by internal crises. Others are deeply entangled with the same Western financial institutions that have every reason to suppress talk of reparations. The AU’s cautious, diplomatic tone does not rise to the scale of what is being demanded.

Meanwhile, the former colonisers – and the United States, with its own shameful legacy of slavery and racial capitalism – either ignore the demand entirely or reframe it as an ungrateful request for charity. Germany’s $1 billion “reconciliation package” to Namibia for the Herero and Nama genocide is case in point: not only was it framed as development aid, it explicitly ruled out any legal liability. It was not justice. It was containment.

That containment is global. Reparations have been hemmed in by bureaucrats, sanitised by NGOs, and gutted by consultants. What began as a grassroots demand for revolutionary redress has been repackaged as a policy framework – palatable to donor logic, but stripped of its soul.

But Africa does not need more frameworks. It needs rupture.

Reparations must be expansive, not transactional. They are not about money alone – though wealth redistribution is part of it. They are about the restoration of land, sovereignty, and self-determined development. They are about ending Africa’s role as a cheap resource supplier for Western industry. They are about dismantling debt traps, confronting the ecological damage caused by extractive industries, and removing the structural chokehold of the Bretton Woods institutions.

And reparations are not just for states. They belong to communities – to the displaced, the exploited, the enslaved and their descendants. The diaspora – scattered across the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe – must be central to this process, not appended to it. The demand for reparations cannot be controlled by state elites who have themselves colluded with imperial powers for personal gain. Nor can it be reduced to a neat ten-point plan approved by the same global governance bodies that profited from the crime.

Across the world, grassroots movements are already shaping a radical reparations framework – one that moves beyond Western legalism and into material and cultural reclamation.

In Ghana, the Pan-African Reparations Coalition in Europe (PARCOE) and the Economic Justice Network have demanded not only state-level restitution, but also the return of gold looted by the British and held in the Bank of England. Their calls go beyond financial claims, centring on reparative justice as a condition for healing both African and diasporic trauma.

In Jamaica, the National Commission on Reparations is pushing for the cancellation of historic debt to Britain and the restitution of land stolen during sugar plantation rule — land that today is owned by multinational companies or controlled by tourism elites while working-class Jamaicans remain landless.

In Kenya, the Mau Mau War Veterans Association, supported by the Kenya Human Rights Commission, secured a historic £20 million settlement from the UK government in 2013 for colonial-era torture victims. But the survivors have consistently argued that this was symbolic at best — and that real reparations must include land redistribution and the return of cultural artefacts.

In the United States, organisations such as the National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC) and the Movement for Black Lives have rejected federal foot-dragging in favour of localised strategies: demanding housing funds, community land trusts, public banking reforms, and education reparations to counter generational dispossession.

In South Africa, where economic apartheid persists, community-led land occupation movements like Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Rural Women’s Assembly have reframed reparations through the lens of land back, food sovereignty, and state accountability for the post-1994 betrayal. These are not only protest movements – they are political schools of thought and action, where reparations are being enacted from below.

In the Sahel, youth collectives aligned with the West African Anti-Imperialist Front are demanding the expulsion of French troops, the nationalisation of gold and uranium mining, and reparations from France not only for slavery and colonial violence – but for its continued interference and economic sabotage.

This is where African agency lives – not in the chambers of donor negotiation, but in the collective imagination of its peoples. Reparations must grow from the ground – not from the boardrooms of continental diplomacy.

Here, we might take inspiration from Burkina Faso under Captain Ibrahim Traoré. His leadership has rejected dependency, expelled foreign troops, and asserted energy and food sovereignty. This is a live experiment in what it means to de-link from the empire’s chokehold – to move beyond symbolic gestures and into material reconfiguration.

That is what reparations demand.

As a white South African writer in solidarity with Black struggle, I do not speak for Africa. I write from a place of responsibility – shaped by complicity, but committed to truth. My voice is not central, nor neutral. It is situated. It recognises that white South Africans, myself included, have inherited benefit from theft – and that no true justice is possible without redistribution and reckoning. Reparations, then, must also unsettle whiteness itself.

They must be disruptive. They must be impolite. They must refuse the comfort of gradualism.

To quote Terreblanche once more: “The post-colonial order did not fail because it was too radical – it failed because it was not radical enough.”

If we are to speak of reparations at all, let us start there.

* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, and social justice activist. Her work interrogates systems of power, capitalism, patriarchy, and whiteness, and is rooted in the defence of the commons, decolonial justice, and the dignity of all life.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.

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