Johannesburg, May 4 (IANS) As Africa Month commemorations begin across the continent, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has renewed calls for slavery reparations.
Centuries of exploitation and the systematic looting of African resources continue to inflict lasting economic damage on African nations, Ramaphosa said in a newsletter released on Monday.
Reparations must go beyond financial compensation to include “increased foreign direct investment and market access for the African countries affected by slavery,” the president said, Xinhua News Agency reported.
He also called for technology and skills transfers, as well as the unconditional return of artifacts stolen from the continent centuries ago.
According to Ramaphosa, reparations could provide critical support for the continent’s developmental goals and help nations manage rising debt levels, burdens he links directly to the enduring economic legacy of slavery and colonial exploitation.
“Not only were millions of Africans enslaved, but colonial powers grew wealthy from the vast tracts of African land they forcibly occupied and the valuable resources they extracted,” he said.
Ramaphosa emphasised that the slave trade was not only the theft of millions of African men, women, and children, but a system from which former enslavers derived immense wealth through dehumanising practices that spanned centuries.
This wealth, he noted, was further bolstered by the looting of cultural artifacts, many of which remain on display in European museums.
Ramaphosa’s remarks follow a United Nations General Assembly resolution in March that recognised slavery as the “gravest crime against humanity.”
A majority of nations supported the resolution, which calls for reparatory justice, including formal apologies, financial compensation, and restitution. The United States, Israel, and Argentina voted against it, while European Union members abstained.
“The most extreme form of dehumanisation was the transcontinental slave trade perpetrated by European empires and slave-trading networks across the Sahara and North Africa,” Ramaphosa said.
“For more than a hundred years, millions of African men, women, and children were hunted down, captured, and traded not as people, but as possessions,” he said.
–IANS
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