This article was first published by the Daily Maverick on 26 May 2025.

As the continent commemorated Africa Day this weekend past on 25 May 2025, and as the African Union (AU) has named “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations” as its theme for 2025, it is worth assessing the Black Atlantic’s — Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas — continuing quest for reparatory justice for European-led slavery.

The recently published 28-chapter book The Black Atlantic’s Triple Burden: Slavery, Colonialism, and Reparations addresses these timely concerns. Featuring contributions from a diverse, inter-disciplinary collective of renowned scholars, this volume, which I edited, offers a comprehensive assessment of the ongoing pursuit of reparatory justice.

The transatlantic slave trade

Slavery was undoubtedly Europe’s “original sin” against Africa. European locusts — explorers, slavers, merchants, missionaries, imperialists — arrived on the continent in the fifteenth century, and, for the next five centuries, ravaged Africa.

In the process, they spread destructive plague and pestilence. As with biblical locusts, the agricultural sector, in which most Africans worked, was destroyed; famines proliferated; and the greatest migration in human history was enforced, with enchained human cargo being transported to the Caribbean and the Americas as chattel in totally degrading circumstances.

Colonialism was the continuation of slavery by other means, with enslavement dehumanising Africans globally and providing the racist justifications and economic methods to implement colonial rule on the basis that black people could not yet stand on their own feet in the difficult conditions of “Western civilisation”. Slavery often existed alongside colonialism, and both were inseparable.

France, for example, established settlement colonies and trading posts in Madagascar in 1642 and Senegal from 1659, while simultaneously exporting African slaves to Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. England established a settler colony on James Island in the Gambia River in 1661 and colonies in Sierra Leone in 1787 and the Cape of Good Hope in 1806, even as it exported slaves from Africa to plantations in Barbados, Jamaica, and Antigua from the seventeenth century.

Four-and-a-half centuries of European enslavement of Africans (1450 to 1888), who were sent to work on plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas, thus created the Black Atlantic, and flowed seamlessly into a century of European imperialism on the African continent. Both systems involved profit-driven exploitation — cloaked under the perverse justifications of a mission civilisatrice — which blamed their African victims for their own misfortunes, while the whole enterprise was legitimised by Western politicians, monarchs, capitalists, churches, slavers, and scientists.

Aside from numerous slave revolts in the Caribbean and the Americas, there were many cases of African resistance to European colonialism. One of the most famous was the seventeenth-century Queen Njinga, who ruled the Ndongo kingdom, in what is now Angola, for three decades. She bravely resisted Portuguese colonisers through adroit diplomacy and military prowess, and by forging effective alliances.

Pan-Africanism

Pan-Africanist movements also emerged by the eighteenth century to provide African resistance to the evils of slavery. It is no coincidence that Pan-Africanism was born in the United States (US) and the Caribbean as a response to European enslavement. This struggle was led by the descendants of African slaves in the diaspora, fighting for both their freedom and that of Africans on the mother continent. The Haitian Revolution, which created the world’s first black republic — and only the second republic in the hemisphere after the United States — was achieved in 1804, as the result of a slave revolt.

During the transatlantic slave trade, between 12 and 15 million Africans were transported to the Caribbean and the Americas. The slavers mostly involved European states – England, France, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden – and included merchants and plantation owners. By the seventeenth century, slaves were being exported by these European nations to work on sugar plantations in Caribbean islands, as well as South and Latin American countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Colombia.

The US, which had been born out of the European genocide of indigenous Indians, was also deeply involved in the trade, having inherited sugar, tobacco and rice-growing slave plantations — which came with 700,000 enslaved people — from former English overlords at the country’s independence (for the white population) in 1776. Cotton produced by enslaved people became the heart of the American economy, greatly enabling the US’s industrialisation.

Captives were often kidnapped in wars between African kingdoms and principalities, while some had been convicted of domestic crimes of a sometimes dubious nature. An estimated 25 to 35% of enslaved people died en route, while about 30% were thrown overboard to their deaths in aquatic Atlantic graves. Widespread abuse and rape of female bodies took place throughout the Middle Passage, both in the Americas and in Africa, as well as on slave ships.

On their arrival in the New World, the surviving slaves were typically branded with a hot iron, given European names, and — in the US especially — often denied the right to speak their own languages or practise their own indigenous African religions. They were also prevented from learning to read and write. Within three years, 25 to 33% of the slaves taken to Jamaica had died from the inhumane 16- to 18-hour workdays, and few lived for more than nine years, as they were literally worked to death.

Slave profiteers

Millions of the most productive African men and women (typically between the ages of 15 and 35) were enslaved in their prime, and an entire continent was depopulated of some of its most productive workforce. Africa’s population stagnated between 1650 and 1850, and ecological damage was caused in some depopulated areas, where the tsetse fly forced populations to migrate.

African agriculture suffered greatly, and famines increased in some areas, as slave hunters and warriors were prioritised over farmers and entrepreneurs. Slavery effectively arrested human and socioeconomic development and intra-regional trade across Africa. The inhuman trade provided the capital for Europe’s and America’s industrial revolutions. The West’s industrialisation was thus literally built on the back of African slavery.

The Portuguese were among the earliest slave traders from the fifteenth century. England, however, soon became the largest slave-trading nation after establishing colonies in the Caribbean by the middle of the seventeenth century (along with France and Spain), based largely on exports from slaveholding sugar plantations. As they had done in the US, Europeans annihilated most of the indigenous Amerindian population in the Caribbean by the seventeenth century in another genocidal act.

As the Trinidadian scholar-politician Eric Williams demonstrated in his seminal 1944 study Capitalism and Slavery, the slave trade laid the foundations of modern British industry and banking, and had widespread support within society.

Slave traders included British parliamentarians, the Barclay and Baring banking families, and several prominent Boston families in the United States, such as the Seavers, the Shirleys, the Eustices, the Lamberts and the Welds.

The English further supplied an estimated 500,000 slaves to Spanish and French sugar plantations in the Americas. British colonial rivalry with France in the eighteenth century revolved largely around African slaves and Caribbean sugar.

Aside from the Caribbean, a French slave presence was also established on plantations in Mauritius and the Seychelles. European priests blessed slaves boarding vessels. The British government and British churches went along with their planters’ insistence on denying slaves the right to religious worship, while Moravian missionaries in Jamaica themselves held slaves. The church also marched in lockstep with the Devil in Spanish colonies, being involved in both slave-holding and sugar-growing.

Catholic missionaries in Brazil exploited the indigenous Amerindian population for two centuries, until the eighteenth century. But the system of slavery contained the seeds of its own destruction, as the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, which had been financed by the proceeds of slavery in the preceding four centuries, rendered the slave trade anachronistic.

Internal slavery

Although there was internal slavery in African societies, this phenomenon had never formed the basis of the social system, and there was often social mobility within this structure. These were not “slaves” in the European sense, in which human beings totally lost their freedom and became the property of slave masters.

Many African chiefs and merchants from kingdoms such as Oyo, Benin, Dahomey, and Asante shamefully took part in providing slaves to European slavers and profited from this trade, but they were not its main beneficiaries and were a tiny cog in a much larger European wheel.

This was a grossly unequal exchange, and slavery’s main profiteers and the trade’s initiators and promoters were based in Europe and America, not in Africa. Chiefs who were unwilling to provide slaves were put under tremendous pressure, and European slavers often used force against uncooperative Africans.

The insatiable Western demand for slaves in fact fuelled and exacerbated conflicts in African societies, as chiefs sought to capture prisoners of war to sell into serfdom. Pressure also led to more widespread kidnapping and wider definitions of crime in African societies in order to provide sufficient slaves to satisfy the gluttony of white slavers.

Formal slavery was thus not abolished in the nineteenth century out of any moral conscience on the part of European slavers and governments, but because industrialisation rendered it inefficient.

Perversely, after the end of formal slavery, it was slave-owning planters who were compensated by the American, British, Dutch, and other European governments, not the victims of four-and-a-half centuries of unpaid labour or their descendants.

This is the basis for global Africa’s continuing quest for reparations.

Professor Adekeye Adebajo is a professor and senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Pretoria.