WeeklySA_AdminADOPTION: Algeria recently hosted the ‘International Conference on the Crimes of Colonialism in Africa’, an event pushing for the recognition of colonialism as a crime against humanity, and demanding reparations for historical injustices…
By Nicholas Mwangi
On December 1, African leaders, diplomats, and scholars gathered in Algiers, Algeria for a conference on the crimes of colonialism in Africa.
Dubbed, “The International Conference on Colonial Crimes in Africa: Towards Correcting Historical Injustices by Criminalising Colonialism”, the event occurred under the leadership of President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, and culminated in the drafting and adoption of the Algiers Declaration. The statement consolidates decades of reparations and anti-colonial advocacy into a coherent continental position.
The conference took place on the heels of African Union (AU) resolutions earlier in 2025, which recognised slavery and colonialism as genocides and crimes against humanity. Delegates recognised the need to codify colonial crimes in International Law as the current law excludes colonial crimes.
The Algiers Declaration
The declaration is vast in scope, it situates reparations within a broader struggle for sovereignty, legality, ecological justice, and economic change. It begins by positioning memory as a terrain of political contestation, arguing that colonialism was, not only a system of exploitation, but also an assault on African histories, identities, and cosmologies.
Reclaiming memory, therefore, becomes foundational to reclaiming sovereignty.
In this vision, the establishment of a Pan-African digital archive, the revision of educational curricula to centre African historical experiences, the creation of memorials and museums, and the restitution of stolen artefacts and human remains are not acts of nostalgia; they are exercises in narrative power, the right of African peoples to define their own past and, therefore, their political future.
Colonial crimes
Building upon this epistemic reclamation, the declaration advances a bold legal agenda; the codification of colonialism as a crime in international law.
By mobilising domestic courts, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the UN General Assembly, the International Court of Justice, and even the International Criminal Court, the AU seeks to convert historical injustices into actionable legal claims.
Environmental reparations
The declaration also widened the reparations discourse by foregrounding the environmental violence of colonialism. Extractivism, forced agricultural schemes, and nuclear testing left deep ecological scars across the continent, from the Congo Basin to the Sahara.
To address these, the document calls for a continental environmental damage assessment, the formation of an African Platform for Environmental Justice, and demands for rehabilitation, compensation, and technological support.
In doing so, the AU links the ecological destruction of the colonial era to contemporary climate vulnerability, reframing reparations as essential to Africa’s environmental survival.
Finally, the declaration confronts the socio-economic legacies of colonial exploitation. It proposes a continent-wide audit of economic plunder, demands for compensation, debt cancellation, and reforms of global financial governance.
The AU’s analysis recognises that colonialism persists structurally through unequal trade regimes, debt dependency, the lingering effects of structural adjustment, predatory corporate contracts, and Africa’s limited control over global markets and technologies. This is a major geopolitical shift; Africa is attempting to globalise the reparations question.
Despite its historic ambition, Pan African organizers also raise probing questions about whether the AU’s approach can genuinely challenge the structures of domination that shape the continent today.
In conversation with People Dispatch, Blaise Tulo, of the Social Movement of Ghana (SMG), articulates a central contradiction at the heart of Africa’s reparations debate: “Reparations bring colonial crimes to the agenda which is very important and should be supported, but the neocolonial governments in Africa are looking at the monetary gain”.
Extractive financial systems
His critique looks at a structural dilemma: many African states remain entangled in systems of dependency shaped by Western financial institutions, multinational corporations, and unequal geopolitical partnerships.
As a result, their interest in reparations often appears less about justice and historical accountability and more about securing new avenues for negotiation within the existing global order. This raises the question: can governments complicit in neo-colonial arrangements genuinely lead a transformative anti-colonial reparations agenda?
Tulo presses this further: “If they pay, does it mean the neo-colonial order has ended? Because the structure has only transformed and evolved.”
He points out the reality that Africa continues to operate within extractive financial and economic systems, debt regimes, privatisation mandates, and austerity programmes that reproduce colonial logics of accumulation by dispossession.
Seen this way, the reparations debate cannot be disconnected from the broader struggle against neoliberalism. Any settlement that ignores the material foundations of exploitation risks becoming symbolic rather than the transformative change required. The danger, Tulo says, lies in allowing reparations to become a political diversion.
“We cannot let the demand for reparations be a distraction. It cannot be a substitute for class struggle.” It demands a materialist understanding of African liberation; reparations must be inherently political, not just legal or monetary.
Without addressing class relations, labour exploitation, land dispossession, and the capitalist structures inherited and adapted from colonial rule, any compensation, if it arrives, risks being captured by the same elite class who have long benefited from neo-colonial arrangements.
In this sense, the reparations struggle is inseparable from the fight to dismantle the socio-economic architecture that continues to sustain inequality across the continent.
The strength of the Algiers Declaration lies in its multi-dimensional framework spanning memory, legal codification, ecological justice, and socio-economic redress. But this expansion must not be overly invested in legal technicalities, symbolic acts of restitution, and diplomatic proclamations, while sidestepping the deeper contradictions within African political economies.
The declaration’s ambition must recognise the entrenched interests of the neocolonial state, persistent internal plunder, the rise of militarised governance and political repression, and the continent’s ongoing subordination to global capitalism.
African sovereignty
The Algiers Declaration is monumental. Africa must defend its sovereignty over its historical narrative, its capacity to define legal norms, its insistence that colonialism was a crime rather than a civilising project, and its right to economic redress, cultural restitution, and global restructuring.
Nevertheless, Africa’s challenge is, not only to seek justice for the past, but to restructure the conditions of the present in ways that make true sovereignty possible.
Comment
LAST CHANCE FOR ANC
Almost three weeks before we bid farewell to the year 2025 and nearly 35 years since the dawn of democracy, South Africa is still struggling with the extreme challenges of corruption, abject poverty and high inequality aggravated by one of the highest crime rate in the world.
Led by world-renowned figure, Nelson Mandela as the first democratically-elected President after the ushering of democracy in 1994, the African National Congress became a beacon of hope for the Black majority of poor people who had been living under apartheid laws for years with no representation in government.
Better life was on the cards, the masses thought. The ANC leadership, under Mandela and Oliver Tambo had achieved its noble mission of doing away with laws that treated Black people as sojourners in their own country. Unjust laws. The ANC leaders were resolute : the people shall govern and all would be equal before the law in line with the Freedom Charter.
After these leaders, and many others who worked with them, passed on, all hell broke loose. Many of those who pretended to abide by the party’s resolutions and working towards improving the lives of the impoverished, showed their true colours. Corruption set in. They started looting the millions of rand that were earmarked for the upliftment of the poor who had voted them into power. The people who had been going around claiming to have freed Black people from the shackles of apartheid were now stealing the money that was supposed to renew their lives for the better. And to crown it all, many, if not all, are still roaming the streets enjoying this loot as if nothing had happened. The Special Investigating Unit should however be commended for their effort in obtaining court orders to seize assets of some of these looters.
The ANC leaders who took over after the trail of the massive theft, were left with a huge task of restoring the image of this once glorious movement. They tried very hard to provide the masses with what they had initially promised – housing, jobs and good governance. But alas, this was not to be. South Africa is still facing significant socio-economic challenges. Some areas, especially in rural areas still do not have running water. Nearly two thirds of the people still live in poverty, unemployment , especially among the youth is extremely high, failing infrastructure has affected most areas, the crime wave, including murder and gender-based violence has affected people’s lives. There is also growing frustration about poor governance especially at local government level where service delivery has almost collapsed. Most municipalities are in chaos. Street lights are not functioning and almost every road has massive potholes.
The ANC, which leads the Government of National Unity, at its 5th National General Council that started last week, promised to redeem itself, mobilise their lost support in an effort to achieve majority votes to rule this country again. This can only be achieved if the party rid itself of greedy comrades who have tarnished the image of this once glorious movement.
This could be their last chance to survive.
