Four years after Britain abolished slavery in 1833, £20m in compensation was paid — to slaveowners. Incredible as this direction seems now, the principle of reparations for slavery was established.
The movement motivating reparations for slavery’s victims has been far slower to gain traction. The 1993 Abuja Declaration of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) urged recognition of a moral debt, but stalled. The Caribbean Community (Caricom) Reparations Commission, established in 2013, was the first formal, multilateral push for redress.
Ten years later, the Brattle Group consultancy firm published an 86-page report, “Quantification of Reparations for Transatlantic Chattel Slavery”, synthesising complex and commingled histories, data and valuation methodologies. Astonishingly holistic, but realistic, too, in not venturing guesswork figures for the effect without accounting or economic principles of valuation, it calculates quantifiable damages during its defined 1511-1870 “period of enslavement” of between $76.956-trillion and $107,799-trillion. It augments this with $22.931-trillion for the postenslavement period, concluding that total reparations should settle in the $100-trillion to $131-trillion range.
Who owes — and who benefits
Attributable compensation is apportioned overwhelmingly between seven European nations and the US. Unsurprisingly, the US and the UK owe the most, about $25-trillion each. Portugal ranks a comparatively close third, at $21-trillion. Thirty countries are itemised as beneficiaries of these reparations payments, with specific amounts calculated and cross-tabulated by each of the debtors. The report’s appendices provide payment tables at various interest rates over 10-25 year term options.
None of the 30 identified recipient countries is in Africa — only in the Caribbean, the Americas, and the US itself. This is partly due to the report being commissioned by the University of the West Indies and the American Society of International Law; only this year did the AU formally partner with Caricom, declaring 2025 the year of “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent” and hosting a joint summit on reparatory justice.
It may be another decade before African countries feature on an accounting spreadsheet for reparations. Recompense is more logically due to the descendants of slaves, who, now, are in Africa’s diaspora. Selected academic studies do conclude on a causal relationship between slavery and Africa’s economic underdevelopment, but calculating reparations due to African countries for the impact of slavery on the continent would require imaginative conceptual modelling.
“It’s extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to settle on a clear set of accounting principles for performing analyses that involve such complex counterfactuals, since they’re sensitive to estimates of what would have happened had European powers left Africa alone,” notes Don Ross, professor of economics at UCT and of society, politics and ethics at University College Cork.
Counting the human cost
US economist Charles L Betsey has made an attempt. His 2023 treatise, “Reparations to Africa for the Slave Trade”, uses a forensic hedonic damages and statistical value-of-life approach — subject to debate among economists — to calculate values for intangibles including forfeited freedom, loss of enjoyment of life and psychological trauma. Betsey concludes that damages amount to $3.2-trillion to $3.3-trillion for transatlantic slavery, $1.0-trillion to $1.4-trillion for the trans-Sahara route, and ranges of $278bn-$740bn and $347bn-$378bn for the Indian Ocean and Red Sea trades respectively.
The Betsey document alludes to ongoing misinterpretations or distortions of slavery’s history. In Unbroken Chains: A 5,000 Year History of African Enslavement, Commonwealth studies researcher Martin Plaut segments African slavery’s comprehensive story according to route or empire. In the context of the reparations issue, amplifying the transatlantic trade, and colonialism as its spin-off, amounts to a half-truth. Plaut aggregates African slavery between 650 CE and 1900 CE at 41.2-million people. The largest and longest-running component bondage channel was the Indian Ocean route, taking 12.6-million slaves to the Arabian Gulf, Persia, India and beyond. The transatlantic route runs a close second, at 12.5-million people; a tiny mercy is that it was far shorter, compressed within three-and-a-half centuries — but, as such, likely to have created more devastating consequences in African societies.
The trans-Saharan route, like the Indian Ocean trade, ran for more than a millennium, transporting Africans to the Mediterranean and Middle East. Bracketed with the Indian Ocean route as the Arab or Islamic slave trade, its duration and total numbers far exceed transatlantic slavery. Whether it was less brutal is a facile debate: the Atlantic’s Middle Passage was one form of torture: the desert heat, night-time cold, thirst and fatigue — and routine en route castration in the case of males to be sold as eunuchs — of the Sahara caravans was another.
Uncomfortable truths
A further dimension must be acknowledged. Slavery is as old as prehistory, and as global. “Africans themselves engaged in the trade for centuries before external powers intervened,” writes Plaut. Egypt raided neighbouring Nubia from at least 4,500 BCE. The 19th-century West African Sokoto Caliphate enslaved about 4-million people; with the Ethiopian Empire’s figure for the 1930s alone, this represents more than 10% of Plaut’s aggregated, documented number. Unquestionably, it’s understated due to mortalities in transit and unknown histories. Ignoring the continent’s indigenous trade “is just dishonest”, says US historian and literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. “It’s bad history.”
By not encompassing the Islamic trade in its documents and modelling, or being transparent about the scale of Africa’s own trade and agency in others, the reparations movement rests its case on a third of the truth. As a political alliance strategy to navigate the Global North-South this is practical, but it gives the antireparations lobby a whataboutery weapon.
Paying the price again and again
Though focused on the transatlantic trade and its legacy, the new volume by University of Pretoria senior research fellow Adekeye Adebajo, The Black Atlantic’s Triple Burden: Slavery, Colonialism and Reparations, magisterially connects slavery and European empires’ histories with the modern politics of reparation.
Black Atlantic references sociologist Paul Gilroy’s organising term, conjuring “ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean”. Connecting times and places of slavery, Gilroy’s idea was to forge a shared history among Africa’s diaspora, and to the continent — a starting point for a unified black identity and counterculture in modern society.
The reparations movement can be considered part of this counterculture. Framed against a vast Black Atlantic horror, it challenges current inequalities and the shape of justice based on accepting a conventional interpretation of history, and motivates for a radical economic transaction to rebalance the past.
Imperfect precedents
The principle of reparations in cases of widely accepted, proven culpability seems clear. The Treaty of Versailles, ending World War 1, included a war guilt clause and 132-billion gold marks owed in reparations, the equivalent of $33bn then and about $600bn now. Germany’s World War 2 reparations were far more complex in structure, including territory and industrial assets; amounts were also earmarked for compensation to Israel and individual Jews in terms of the 1952 Conference on Material Jewish Claims against Germany.
The practicalities and consequences of reparations are more complex. The Weimar Republic collapsed, giving rise to Nazism, in no small part because the reparations debt was ruinous. Treaties do not, or cannot, block individual litigation. A political paradox is at play: national leaders may admit a moral requirement to apologise and volunteer funds, but they resist acknowledging this as reparations. Henry Kissinger, in negotiations about the 1973 Paris Peace Accords towards ending the Vietnam War, offered greater figures as postwar US aid to rebuild Vietnam, provided clauses in which the US acknowledged liability for reparations were scrapped. International reparations agreements are rare because, despite the theoretical intent of reconciliation and closure, “the international system lacks authorities to ensure settlements remain settled”, notes the political scientist Adam B Lerner.
As such, one argument against formal reparations for slavery has a rational basis. The idea that a credible, universally accepted body could negotiate and implement globally binding agreements with guaranteed time-bound limits is simplistic. A second practical argument, that — assuming the international community could agree on a figure — the colossal amount owed would shock the world’s economic systems, is vaguely credible. The Brattle Group’s lower rounded total proposed, $100-trillion, is about the size of the global economy’s current annual GDP. A shock to the economic system — a transfer of wealth, not a loss — is precisely what proponents are seeking, something that would ignite the economies of the Global South and rebalance equity towards a better global order. And transfers phased over 25 years would not be as onerous, nor likely to be shock-inducing.
Still, the political risk would be huge. Feasibly, the West’s recent populist, right-wing surges would extrapolate. “The majority of [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development]-country voters can’t even be persuaded to support modest carbon taxes that would benefit their own children’s future. So they would never go along with handing over a pile of public money to balance the sins of their ancestors,” says Ross.
The politics of denial
Slavery reparations are being challenged on moral grounds, too. In 2023 the Church of England formally acknowledged its tacit participation in a “shameful past”, which allowed it to benefit on a vast scale from slavery, as a “moral sin”. Without using the word reparations, it committed £100m to kick-start a targeted £1bn fund to “address past wrongs”. But a response document published by conservative think-tank Policy Exchange rejects this outright. Two of its three authors are Christian leaders and theology academics. One, Nigel Biggar, has piloted Britain’s antireparations countermovement since 2017; his arguments in the Policy Exchange document rephrase key points in his latest book, Slavery: The Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt.
Despite Biggar’s calm prose and use of the Socratic method, his stance rejecting any reparatory reckoning for slavery is difficult to square at all, let alone with Christianity. He reiterates that slavery was a global practice — but this is whataboutery. While agreeing that slavery was a sin, “things become more complicated, however, the more time elapses between the past wrong and the present”, he writes, presenting data about how Britain’s former colonies contributed to their own economic decline long after the end of its empire. (So a subsequent wrong makes a moral correction for the original sin?) He believes, anyway, that by leading the abolitionist movement, Britain has done its penance.
There’s no middle ground between Biggar as flag-bearer against reparations and, among other protagonists for meaningful reparatory justice, Caricom Reparations Commission chair, Hilary Beckles and Adebajo as an intellectual historiographer. Which is what makes neutral, in-depth studies such as Plaut’s Unbroken Chains valuable: it clarifies that there is no false narrative in portrayals of the slave trade’s human devastation. Right-wing fulminations against the facts, often overtly asserting an “antiwoke” position, obfuscate the issue by casting doubt on historians’ estimates or on economists’ computations of slavery’s impact, which, by nature, are framed around assumptions and qualifiers.
What form should reparations take? Slavery was systemic; concomitantly, leading bodies in the reparations movement are calling for structural reform initiatives. The Caricom Reparations Commission and the National African-American Reparations Commission propose relatively similar 10-point plans. Both plans start with, and emphasise, the need for a formal apology. (To date only the Netherlands has declared this.) They pinpoint land, housing development funds, institutions of memorial, education programmes and repatriation initiatives for people wishing to return to Africa. The main difference between the two plans is Caricom’s specification of member countries’ debt cancellation, and the National African American Reparations Commission’s demand for America’s justice system reform.
The AU will presumably soon announce similar proposals. However, Adebajo’s book includes cautionary lessons on the fragility of alliances and the inordinately fraught, complex reality of multilateral negotiations. The concluding statement issued by the 2001 UN Conference Against Racism in Durban declared slavery a crime against humanity, but the phraseology was diluted and no firm call for reparations was included. Beckles, who later became chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission, lamented that “Africa broke with its own diaspora [and] joined with the former enslavers and colonisers”. Adebajo calls former SA president Thabo Mbeki one of four African “prophets” leading the intellectual movement for reparations, but notes the 20-year history of disunity among Black Atlantic nations, amounting to forfeited leverage — and much lost time.
A full and proper moral ledger
Realistically, and despite the enormous sovereign wealth of the Gulf states, in particular, reparations involving the Arab world are moot. “Arab countries are also perceived as having been victims of European colonialism, so the moral accounts are viewed as more muddled,” observes Ross. Leaders of humancentric causes such as reparatory justice for slavery probably also realise the futility of appealing to autocratic nations that do not remotely align with human rights.
These regimes, and some African countries, continue to hold slavery’s chains. These are unbroken, writes Plaut, detailing terrible ongoing practices. This is confirmed by the global slavery index , estimating 7-million Africans, out of 49.6-million people worldwide, still in some form of bondage, such as forced adult or child labour, or involuntary marriage and prostitution. Mauritania, South Sudan and Eritrea are especially highly indexed, while Saudi Arabia has one of the highest proportions of people in modern-day slavery, at more than 21 per 1,000.
If not now, then when?
Ultimately, reparations — for slavery, colonialism or genocide — are a test of imagination. Can societies founded on exploitation conceive of justice broad enough to include their own beneficiaries?
The framework now exists, but the will to write laws and implement slavery reparations are probably still decades away, on hold until the cause’s moral spark ignites a global reawakening to the debts of history.
As far back as 1896, sociologist and civil rights pioneer WEB Du Bois warned that history did not forgive those who ignored it. Missed opportunities for change and reconciliation are paid for, over and over, by subsequent generations. And, as the Brattle Group’s report computes, the past accrues interest, compounding, until it is properly acknowledged and — hopefully — substantively repaired.
