African Guy

People do not realize that the struggle for freedom in Africa cannot be reduced to a confrontation between Africans and Europeans/westerns. We are also fighting a class battle. Here in Africa, we have aristocratic, despotic families that have held power for decades, controlled businesses, maintained monopolies and treated entire countries as their private inheritance. Some draw their wealth and influence from lineages that collaborated with enslavers and colonizers and operated slave plantations within Africa itself. In some of our cities, vast portions of the land remain in the hands of these families, allowing them to extract wealth from generations of people whose ancestors they once enslaved or dispossessed. Even the authority of some so-called traditional rulers cannot be separated from colonial violence: colonial powers executed, deposed or exiled legitimate leaders, sometimes through beheading, and installed collaborators whose families have maintained those positions ever since. What is presented to us as ancestral legitimacy can therefore be the inheritance of a colonial appointment, secured through the destruction of those who resisted. Sections of these ruling classes later opposed independence or helped undermine and overthrow leaders who threatened their interests. That faction did not disappear when our countries raised their flags. It occupied the institutions of the new states and preserved its alliances with foreign powers. People speak of imperialism as though it operates entirely from outside Africa, when it also has domestic allies and bemeficiaries who share our skin colour, speak our languages while helping to keep us dispossessed. The foreign interests that profited from our subjugation have always needed local partners, and their allies are still governing, monopolizing and plundering Africa today.

The claim that Germany only paid reparations to living Holocaust survivors and American only to living survivors of their genocides is built on a falsehood. Germany’s reparations extended beyond individual payments to survivors. Under the 1952 Luxembourg Agreements, West Germany committed 3 billion Deutsche Marks to Israel to support the settlement and integration of Jewish refugees, alongside 450 million Deutsche Marks through the Claims Conference for Jewish refugees outside Israel. Restitution has also included the return of stolen property to victims’ heirs. Different programmes have different eligibility rules, but the claim that every beneficiary had to have personally survived the Holocaust is simply false. You can go educate yourself here 👉🏾(bundesfinanzministerium.de, 2021-2025.state.gov) Native American history exposes the same flaw. The United States established the Indian Claims Commission in 1946 to hear tribal claims against the federal government, including claims concerning land taken generations earlier. The commission awarded monetary compensation to tribes for those historical losses. The people who had experienced the original dispossession did not all have to remain alive for their nations to retain a claim. These settlements were limited and often inadequate, and they did not amount to full repair for the devastation inflicted on Indigenous peoples, but they recognised that an unresolved wrong does not disappear into the grave with its first victims. You can find more on (archives.gov)

The fact that European government have managed to convince their citizens that the official abolition of slavery in their countries in Britain, France, Belgium in the mid 19th century meant the end of the practice is precisely why we need reparations. Reparation starts with reinstating the truth and correcting history. Slavery didn’t end following the 1833 Act in Britain of the April 1848 Act in France that officially abolished it. It was rebranded as “forced labor” and redeployed intensely in the newly conquered territories in Africa. The official dates of the abolition of slavery only applied to their colonies in the Americas and the West Indies where they were mostly kicked out through liberation wars that led to the independence of those nations. But slavery continued in their African colonies. Calling it “colonialism” allows people to recite abolition dates as though Africans were no longer being forced to work for European for free and had their hands butchered, their rulers beheaded when they refused to. This continued over a century.

On the Issue of Reparation let’s revisit history and debunk the lies: Part I (🧵) Reducing the transatlantic slave trade’s reparations to working class white people handing cheques to Black people is a convenient way of avoiding what repair demands. Reparations begin with historical truth, cultural restitution and linguistic recovery: restoring communities’ ability to understand their past, reclaim their inheritance and preserve the languages through which they remember themselves. I majored history in Togo and come from a family of historians. My mother is a history professor. Her uncle was the first Togolese professor to write a comprehensive history of the territory now known as Togo and the wider region beyond its present borders, producing 5 volumes, each exceeding 800 pages. When I became interested in history, he told me he had spent six years learning German before undertaking his doctorate because essential sources concerning our past were held in Germany. Important records remain in German collections, alongside artifacts the Germans stole. My paternal family preserves the memory of Chokosi resistance to German conquest. A royal tunic associated with Na Bièma Bonsafô who was assassinated by the Germans for resistance the German occupation is currently held in Leipzig’s Grassi Museum. Even the dead were taken. European institutions acquired skulls and human remains from colonized communities they’ve massacred by the million. German collections still hold remains from Africa, including skulls whose provenance has required research in Togo and Cameroon. The Atlantic slave trade devastated people who remained in Africa as well as those transported overseas. My mother’s clan carries this history in its name, which identifies its members as “people who fled the raiders”. They escaped from territory now situated in Ghana, where relatives remain across the border and to this day they are landless in the territories where they sought refuge and the descendants struggle to establish an identity. Refuge does not always become belonging. Descendants can remain labelled foreigners generations after their ancestors arrived, their access to land and recognition burdened by an escape of slave raiders. The name of my country Togo is commonly comes the Ewe word “Tôgodo” which means “behind the river” or, more precisely in its lakeside setting, “beyond the water,” referring to a territory that is now situated between modern day Togo and Ghana. Tôgodo was the land of refuge belongs to the history of the peoples who settled within its present borders, including communities escaping slave raids and warfares and some seeking protection in mountainous terrain. Across the region, the descendants of communities devastated by slave raids now share citizenship with the descendants of peoples whose kingdoms conducted those raids, because colonial borders enclosed former enemies within the same states while dividing other communities between several countries. African participation in slavery demands investigation with the same seriousness required elsewhere. Responsibility must be located in identifiable rulers, merchants and institutions. Some of the rulers and merchants who profited from slave raids resisted abolition and, as the Atlantic trade was suppressed, expanded plantations in Africa where enslaved worked in plantations and in mines. The formal abolition of slavery in Europe did not end the practice in the colonies: it only ended their exportation to the West Indies. Part II 👇🏾👇🏾

You have managed the remarkable feat of being condescending about a distinction you are too ignorant to understand. Nobody said Africa lacked sovereign kingdoms before colonialism. The point, since it has apparently escaped your sanity is that those kingdoms were not identical to the countries on today’s map. Thanks to the wickedness of European colonizers, who, after centuries of conquest and plunder in the Americas, met in Berlin to establish the rules for carving up Africa, existing kingdoms and communities were subsequently sliced across colonial borders, while previously separate societies were bundled into the same territories. Communities whose villages were raided and whose people had been captured and sold into slavery find themselves enclosed within the same colonial borders as the powers that had preyed upon them. Take my country Togo for example. The country known as the Republic of Togo today has over 40 ethnic communities. One of the kingdoms that conducted the raids was split between Nigeria, Benin and Togo and its population does not even make up 5% of Togo’s population today. But many of the ethnic communities that were raided are also in modern Togo. As a result, both victims and perpetrators were forced to live in the same country because of colonialism and this has been the root of political crisis to this very day.

Genocide was very common throughout human history. So why did Germany ever have to pay reparations to Jewish victims of the Holocaust? Why should Germany be held accountable for something that had been practiced by so many civilizations before it? After all, at the beginning of that same 20th century, Germany had already committed genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia decades before the Holocaust. Massacres, ethnic persecution, enslavement and extermination were hardly new inventions of the Nazis. So why single out Germany? Why demand accountability for something that was common at the time? War was equally common in the 19th and 20th centuries. So why was Germany and Japan forced to pay reparations after the World War? Why should any country compensate another for the consequences of war when human beings have been fighting wars since the beginning of civilization? Does this reasoning sound intellectually bankrupt to you? Good. Because this is precisely the reasoning we are subjected to whenever we raise the issue reparations for the transatlantic slave trade. Suddenly, we are reminded that slavery was common at the time, that Europeans were not the only people who practiced it. Can anyone name another system of enslavement besides the transatlantic slave trade that forcibly uprooted millions of people, transported them across oceans and left generations of their descendants permanently displaced from their ancestral homelands? If so, let us demand reparations for its victims too! For centuries, European nations codified slavery into their laws, protected it through state institutions and made human beings legally recognized property. France’s infamous Code Noir, introduced in 1685, legally classified enslaved Africans as movable property, made slavery hereditary and authorized brutal punishments, including mutilation. It was only in 2026 ( yes this very year) that France’s Parliament voted to formally repeal this legislation. We are talking about state-sponsored crimes, written into law and enforced for centuries. Why should the states responsible be exempt from accountability? If your argument against reparations is that everybody was doing it, then you are not offering a historical defense. You are simply suggesting that atrocities should become exempt from accountability once enough people have participated in them.

This is what happens when historical ignorance is accompanied by an astonishing degree of intellectual arrogance. First, there were no “West African countries” during the transatlantic slave trade. The region comprised kingdoms, empires, city-states and independent societies. Applying modern national identities to centuries-old history is an extraordinary display of ignorance. Second, Europeans did not arrive in Africa as benevolent abolitionists. For centuries, they financed, institutionalised and industrialised human trafficking, supplying weapons that fuelled wars and slave raids, creating an enormous market for human captives, and codifying racial slavery into their laws. African collaborators existed, but their complicity does not absolve the European empires that sustained this monstrous commerce. Entire African communities were devastated, populations displaced, villages destroyed and societies destabilised. Millions were deported across the Atlantic, while countless others suffered captivity, violence and death on African soil. Africa was itself a vast crime scene, not merely the departure point of enslaved people. And perhaps the most remarkable historical fraud is how European nations have managed to present themselves as the liberators of the very people they spent centuries enslaving. I grew up in a former French colony in Africa being taught from primary school that slavery was abolished by a Frenchman named Victor Schœlcher. It was only in 2026 ( yes this year ) that I discovered that people in former British colonies had been taught a remarkably similar story, except that their white saviour was an Englishman named William Wilberforce. Yet long before Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833, enslaved Africans in Haiti had fought a revolution, defeated European armies and proclaimed their independence in 1804. Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines were central to that struggle. In 1816, Haitian President Alexandre Pétion supplied Simón Bolívar with weapons, ammunition and military assistance to support South America’s liberation struggles, on the condition that he advance the emancipation of enslaved people. And he went on to free more than half a dozen Latin American countries. And what was Haiti’s reward for daring to liberate itself? Diplomatic isolation and, in 1825, a crushing indemnity of 150 million francs imposed by France, effectively forcing formerly enslaved people to compensate the descendants of their enslavers for the loss of their supposed property. Meanwhile, Britain compensated slave owners with £20 million following abolition, while the enslaved received nothing. Where are these stories in the European narratives of abolition? Where are Nat Turner, who led an enslaved uprising in Virginia in 1831, Queen Nzinga, who resisted Portuguese expansion and slave raiding in Central Africa, or the countless African rulers, communities and freedom fighters who resisted enslavement? Black people fought for their freedom. They rebelled, resisted, organised, sacrificed and died for it. Their liberation was never simply a gift bestowed upon them by benevolent Europeans. There is something profoundly tragic about descendants of enslaved Africans, born and educated in the lands of their ancestors’ enslavers, regurgitating sanitised colonial history, seemingly incapable of distinguishing historical scholarship from imperial propaganda. The greatest triumph of colonial indoctrination is when the descendants of its victims become the most zealous defenders of its mythology. What a pity!