Hosted by Future Africa and the University of Pretoria, this webinar titled “A False Start? Actions for Reparations and the UN Resolution on Slavery” brings together three scholars: Professor Helen Colum (University of Cape Town), Dr. Shangu (University of Jerusalem), and Professor Abdi Summit (University of Minnesota and member of the Pan-African Parliament). Together they examine what the UN’s March 2026 resolution on slavery actually means, who opposed it, and what it will take to turn moral recognition into material justice.
1. The UN declared slavery the most serious crime against humanity. Every EU state abstained or voted against.
In March 2026, 123 nations voted for a UN resolution on reparative justice for slavery. The United States, United Kingdom, and Argentina voted no. All 27 European Union states abstained. The countries that benefited most from the transatlantic slave trade could not support even a non-binding, unenforceable resolution.
2. Western states support remembrance. They resist reparations. This is a deliberate pattern.
From the 2001 Durban Declaration to the 2026 resolution, the same countries vote the same way whenever reparatory language carries legal or financial weight. They celebrate abolition. They fund museums. They express regret. The moment the conversation turns to accountability, they abstain.
3. The Holocaust is the benchmark, and the contrast is damning.
Germany accepted its perpetratorhood, included survivors in every negotiation, and built a continuously evolving reparations program. The US and UK are currently arguing there is no legal right to reparations for wrongs that were not illegal at the time. That argument was dismantled in the Namibian genocide context. It needs to be dismantled again here.
4. Symbolic reparations are not a consolation prize. They are the foundation for material ones.
Formal apologies, museum acknowledgment, the return of stolen artifacts and archives, and the establishment of undeniable historical truth are prerequisites, not alternatives, to financial reparations. Denialism is not ignorance. It is a strategy to keep material reparations permanently deferred.
5. Africa must press the external claim and build internal systems simultaneously.
If reparations materialize without accountable institutions in place, the resources risk flowing to elites who are already replicating extractive structures across the continent. The argument is not to delay the claim. It is to do both things at once: force accountability from former colonial powers while building the governance systems that would make reparations transformative.
“There is nothing that has happened to date, whether reparations for colonialism, symbolic or otherwise, that hasn’t happened without being forced. No one woke up in the United Kingdom or the United States and said, ‘I feel bad. Let’s give reparations.’ It just doesn’t work like that.”
— Professor Helen Colum, University of Cape Town
“The resolution matters not because it closes history but because it reopens responsibility.”
— Dr. Shangu, University of Jerusalem
“If the elites are restructuring our economies and our cities this way today, what can we expect of them if reparations became a reality?”
— Professor Abdi Summit, University of Minnesota