“When I See the Street Lights in Brussels, I See Congo: Professor PLO Lumumba on Global Reparations”

• The African Union declared 2025 the Year of Reparations and Justice — making this a coordinated global movement involving Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the diaspora worldwide. Professor Lumumba situates the American reparations debate inside this larger global framework: “It is only a matter of time before we break the back of these erstwhile enslavers and colonizers.”

• Lumumba lays out the full architecture of what was stolen — not just enslaved labor but: the theft of an estimated half the able-bodied population of entire African nations (half of whom died before arriving in the Americas), the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 where European powers literally divided Africa into “hunting grounds,” forced labor and pole taxes in Kenya, the massacre of the Kikuyu people, syphilis experiments on African populations, the systematic looting of artifacts from Benin, Nigeria, Ghana, Namibia, and Egypt, and the spiritual destruction of forcing people to abandon their own religions. His line: “Whenever I go to Brussels and I see the street lights, I see the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

• The 1993 Abuja Proclamation — signed by African nations and diaspora representatives in Nigeria — remains the foundational document of the global reparations movement. Its four demands: formal apology from colonizing nations and institutions; cancellation of all African debt to the World Bank and IMF (debt engineered through colonial extraction); return of all stolen artifacts; and monetary compensation administered through a revamped African Union continental fund directed toward education, health, infrastructure, agriculture, and AI research

• On apologies: Germany apologized and paid a token amount to Namibia. The Dutch apologized. The Anglican Church acknowledged it was a beneficiary of slavery. Barclays Bank admitted its role. But France speaks “some language which is close to apology but it is trickery” — and Britain explicitly refuses, citing fears of opening a legal floodgate of claims. Lumumba’s response is precise: “That is not a cultural position. That is a legal strategy.”

• Lumumba invokes Thomas Sankara’s 1987 Addis Ababa speech — “Let us stop paying this debt” — delivered just before Sankara was assassinated, as the spirit behind current legal cases using universal jurisdiction to obtain declaratory orders that African debt to Western financial institutions is null and void. He argues that a properly structured African Union continental fund — not individual government payouts vulnerable to corruption — is the correct administrative vehicle for reparations payments

“Colonialism was a crime against humanity. Slavery was a crime against humanity. Some element of atonement is mandatory for the world to have a level playing field.”
— Professor P.L.O. Lumumba, Machakos County, Kenya