The African struggle for reparations is a just and righteous struggle, for it is a struggle borne out of the dehumanisation and subjugation of our people over the past 500 years. It is part of that long demand for justice by people from all corners of the world that arises from the brutal history, harm and human cost of enslavement and colonialism – whose legacies still influence the economic and political trajectory of people and countries across Africa, the Caribbean, Americas, and other territories. In engaging in this struggle for reparations, we are keeping alive memories of the people, cultures and nations that came before us – the seeds they tried to bury.

In this phase of the struggle for reparations, our generation is unapologetically pointing out historical facts and demanding reparative justice, because, as Milan Kundera reminds us, ‘‘the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’’.

This compilation of notes and thoughts examines the historical context of slavery and colonialism from economic, political and social prisms, before illuminating their legacies, structures and manifestations in the neo-colonial era. These notes further outline what reparations mean to Africans based on our material conditions and lived realities, and highlights attempts at subduing and scuttling the struggle for reparations through non-meaningful recognitions, apologies and other short stories.

This pamphlet concludes by laying the framework for an African People’s Reparation Commission, a body tasked with establishing and actualizing Africa’s pathway toward reparations for her people, nations and nationalities through a framework with clear economic, political, socio-cultural and ecological dimensions and fronts.

This written work is a pointer to one of the key directions of the African Revolution in its current dimensions, for in the 21st Century the struggle for reparations is at the centre of the struggle for complete decolonisation.