Last month’s 38th African Union (AU) summit in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa saw the continent’s leaders make a renewed push to hold former European colonial powers accountable for “historical crimes and mass atrocities committed against Africans and people of African descent, including colonization, apartheid, and genocide.”

Held under the theme “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations," the meeting’s focus on reparatory justice entailed several key demands addressed at the nations that made their economic fortunes on the backs of 12.5 million enslaved Africans between the 15th and 19th century.

These included historical acknowledgment, financial reparations, land restitution, cultural preservation, and international accountability.

There has been limited progress in some of these areas. Using the example of the Netherlands, former Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Dutch King Willem-Alexander both issued formal apologies for the country’s historic role in slavery in December 2022 and July 2023, respectively, while last month, the Dutch government confirmed the transfer of 113 stolen Benin Bronzes to Nigeria.

Yet the issue of financial restitution continues to face steep European resistance.

Reparations as treason

Rutte’s apology was accompanied by a refusal to pay reparations, a move that went against the recommendation of the Slavery History Dialogue Group Advisory Board to “[p]rovide sufficient permanent funding for reparative measures” and “finance reparations on a structural and sustainable basis.”

Getting the governments of former colonial powers to dispense reparatory justice in the form of financial restitution is challenging enough, but the case for reparations is facing an even greater obstacle today in the rise of the far right.

In June 2024, Cabo Verde’s President José Maria Neves lamented that right-wing populism was making it difficult to have serious discussions over colonial reparations.

“We see extremist, xenophobic, anti-immigration groups growing in former colonizing powers,” the leader of the island nation and former Portuguese colony said in an interview for Brazilian news website Brasil Já, adding that there were “no political conditions to publicly discuss these questions at the moment.”

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He was referring to Portugal’s far-right Chega party which called for a criminal lawsuit to be filed against the country’s president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, for treason after he suggested the need for reparations to redress the country’s leading role in the transatlantic slave trade.

Portugal’s center-right government (which just lost a confidence vote in parliament amid accusations of corruption) refused to initiate any process to pay reparations.

The far right’s colonial revisionism 

In May 2021, Germany formally recognized the atrocities committed by its colonial troops against the Ovaherero and Nama people in what is today Namibia as a genocide. It agreed to pay the Namibian government 1.1 billion Euros for reconstruction and development (of which not a cent has been paid to this day), while completely disregarding victims' groups’ demands for monetary reparations to be paid out to the descendants of those killed.

Coming in second in last month’s snap federal elections after the collapse of the center-left Scholz government, the growing power of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), a party known for its revisionist stance toward Germany’s colonial history, could negatively impact an already arduous negotiation process between Berlin and Windhoek around reparations.

In 2019, the AfD tabled a motion in the German parliament, entitled “Rethinking German Colonial History in a Cultural-Politically Sophisticated Way” on the same day that right-wing US historian Bruce Gilley gave a speech in front of AfD representatives in which he praised Germany’s brutal colonial rule as a partial success story.

Following Germany’s hard electoral shift toward the right, there is a worry that a yet-to-be-formed government led by center-right chancellor-elect Friedrich Merz might not continue with the negotiations.

“Inevitably the collapse of the German coalition will have an adverse effect on the process if it is 100% impossible,” Charles Eiseb, the Namibian government’s chief negotiator said back in November.

The reparation of 'mental decolonization'

February also saw the African Court on Human and People’s Rights in Arusha, Tanzania, established by AU member states, open its 2025 judicial year under the theme “Advancing Justice through Reparations.”

In his keynote address, Cabo Verde’s leader Neves reiterated his warnings from the year before and called for a second decolonization that could face “the challenges of the present: hate speech, anti-immigration policies, the resurgence of xenophobic, racist and supremacist ideologies.”

He also said reparatory justice warranted focusing not only on material aspects, such as financial restitution but also on changing mindsets and reclaiming agency.

“I am convinced that the best reparation is mental decolonization. Without it, it will not be possible to transform the legacy of oppression into collective strength and emancipation,” Neves appealed to those present.

2025 is the AU’s official Year of Reparations, and Africans are pushing forward unperturbed by Western inaction and far-right populism’s growing influence on political discourse with their demands to redress 400 years of slavery and colonial exploitation, one of the most barbaric periods in the history of humankind.