\n<\/p>\n
L<\/span>ast month, at commemorations marking the 25th anniversary of France\u2019s Taubira law recognising the trafficking of enslaved Africans as a crime against humanity, Emmanuel Macron did the unthinkable: he became the first French president to publicly utter the word \u201creparations\u201d.<\/p>\n Since 1825, when France punished Haiti for daring to declare itself the western world\u2019s first Black sovereign republic by extorting 150m francs in compensation for the loss of what it regarded as enslaved \u201cproperty\u201d, reparations to Black peoples and nations have been politically \u201cunthinkable\u201d.<\/p>\n The Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot famously argued that the 1804 Haitian revolution was the ultimate \u201cunthinkable\u201d event \u2013 a claim to Black sovereignty that the west could neither comprehend nor countenance. And so it sought to crush it.<\/p>\n Compelled by shifting geopolitical realities and Africa\u2019s growing demands for economic sovereignty, Macron invoked \u201creparations\u201d 10 times as part of a pre-emptive attempt to shape the terms of engagement before the African Union (AU) adopts its common position on reparations and Ghana hosts a global reparations conference this month.<\/p>\n <\/span>John Dramani Mahama, Ghana\u2019s president and the AU\u2019s leading advocate for reparations, with King Charles during their meeting at Buckingham Palace, London, on 3 June 2026.<\/span> Photograph: Yui Mok\/PA\/AP<\/p>\n He made those remarks a week after the Africa-France summit in Nairobi \u2013 France\u2019s scramble to recapture influence as its economy reels from a series of expulsions across the Sahel. Speaking alongside Ghana\u2019s president, John Dramani Mahama \u2013 the AU\u2019s leading advocate for reparations \u2013 Macron\u2019s intervention came just two months after France abstained from Ghana\u2019s UN resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans the gravest crime against humanity.<\/p>\n What Macron did not address was what reparations would actually entail: what France would pay, to whom and by when. Above all, he avoided the question of whether France would return the indemnity imposed on Haiti in 1825. Instead, the proposals centred on a commission, a memorial and the formal repeal of the 1685 Code Noir <\/em>(Black Code), which classified African people as \u201cmeuble<\/em>\u201d (movable furniture). Symbolic gestures, certainly. But not restitution.<\/p>\n This goes to the heart of what I call the Africa exception in global reparations. The west has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to pay reparations for the loss of what it once considered its African property \u2013 but never for the loss of the African person.<\/p>\n In 1833, the British empire paid \u00a320m reparations to enslavers for their \u201clost assets\u201d. In 2013, Britain paid Mau Mau torture and abuse survivors \u00a319.9m while continuing to deny liability. In 2021, Germany described its settlement over the 1904-08 Nama and Herero genocide as \u201cdevelopment aid\u201d. Yet western countries have paid reparations to non-Black people and countries it recognises as sovereign \u2013 including the 1952 Luxembourg agreement with Israel, and Japanese Americans under the 1988 Civil Liberties Act.<\/p>\n <\/span>Seven Herero men in chains in German South West Africa \u2013 now Namibia.<\/span> Photograph: Chronicle\/Alamy<\/p>\n The Africa exception is not simply a moral failure. It is a structural feature of an international legal order that, since the 1928 Chorz\u00f3w factory case \u2013 a dispute between Germany and Poland that established reparations as the mandatory consequence of wrongdoing between sovereign states \u2013 has provided reparations to those it recognises as sovereign, but never to Black people and countries. This is because it refuses to go beyond flag independence and recognise its former \u201cproperty\u201d as sovereign.<\/p>\n Haiti and France are the Africa exception\u2019s exemplar. In 2003, when the Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, demanded $21bn restitution for the 1825 indemnity, he posed a fundamental question: how can \u201cproperty\u201d demand its value back? The answer \u2013 a US and France-backed coup \u2013 was the ultimate denial of Black sovereignty.<\/p>\n Reparations remained \u201cunthinkable\u201d when Ghana tabled its UN resolution. Drawing on the AU Framework for Reparations, A Crime Does Not Rot, 1441-present \u2013 which I conceptualised and drafted as rapporteur of the AU committee of experts on reparations \u2013 the resolution invoked the pan-African legal principle of continuing obligation embodied in the dictum, \u201ca crime does not rot\u201d. One hundred and twenty-three states voted in favour; three voted against, while 52 abstained.<\/p>\n <\/span>UN adopts Ghana\u2019s resolution to class slave trade as crime against humanity \u2013 video<\/span><\/p>\n The EU dismissed the principle that \u201ca crime does not rot\u201d as \u201cregional jurisprudence\u201d beyond the universal reach of international law. The irony is striking: international law does not descend from God but from history. The 1648 treaty of Westphalia \u2013 mythologised as the birth of modern sovereignty \u2013 was itself a regional European settlement later universalised through slavery, colonialism and apartheid.<\/p>\n Drawing on the AU Framework, Ghana\u2019s resolution sets the record straight: the birthdate of modern sovereignty, and the modern racial capitalist system, is not 1648. It is on the coast of present-day Mauritania in 1441, when the Portuguese sailor Ant\u00e3o Gon\u00e7alves captured 12 Africans as the first cargo of the trafficking era.<\/p>\n It is in the Vatican\u2019s papal bulls \u2013 Dum Diversas <\/em>(1452), Romanus Pontifex <\/em>(1455), Inter Caetera <\/em>(1493) <\/em>\u2013 which reduced Africans to \u201cperpetual slavery\u201d and codified the Doctrine of Discovery that licensed European conquest. It is, as Sylvia Wynter and Mahmood Mamdani remind us, in 1492, when Columbus \u201cdiscovered\u201d the \u201cNew World\u201d and Spain expelled Jews and Muslims from Iberia. It is in the international law that codified African people as property through the Portuguese Pe\u00e7a de \u00cdndias<\/em> (1513), the Spanish <\/em>Asiento de Negros<\/em> <\/em>(1518), the Dutch West India Company charter (1621), the English Barbados Slave Code (1661), and the French Code Noir <\/em>(1685).<\/p>\n <\/span>Protesters call for justice at a rally in Los Angeles in 2025.<\/span> Photograph: Mario Tama\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Slavery is ancient. As black feminist scholars such as Jennifer L Morgan and Bibi Bakare-Yusuf have shown, what was unprecedented was the racialised system of chattel enslavement that reduced African people to property in perpetuity through partus sequitur ventrem <\/em>\u2013 the principle that status follows the womb. Codified in Virginia in 1662, it made enslavement hereditary through Black women\u2019s wombs, regardless of paternity.<\/p>\n As the US president Thomas Jefferson, father of six enslaved children, wrote in 1819: \u201cI consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm. What she produces is an addition to the capital.\u201d Just as Africa became the world\u2019s site of capital accumulation, Black women\u2019s wombs became the site of capital reproduction. Without sovereignty over our wombs, what meaningful sovereignty can we claim?<\/p>\n By reducing Black people to property in perpetuity, racialised chattel enslavement positioned Black people as the world\u2019s ultimate non-sovereigns. Race is sovereignty. This is the global reparations trap: the post-1928 international legal order requires a victim to be sovereign in order to receive reparations, yet the crimes of chattel slavery, colonialism and apartheid depended on the systematic destruction of Black sovereignty.<\/p>\n <\/span>Formerly enslaved people plant sweet potatoes at the Hopkinson plantation in South Carolina, 1862.<\/span> Photograph: Everett Collection\/Alamy<\/p>\n Ultimately, the Africa exception demonstrates that reparations are not simply a moral imperative but a geopolitical question of sovereignty. It is no coincidence that France announces reparations without payment \u2013 invoking the language of justice while avoiding its cost \u2013 just as growing African demands for sovereignty threaten its economic interests. We cannot wait for the west to deem us sovereign.<\/p>\n The central challenge for the 21st-century global Black reparations movement is to build geopolitical leverage across the African continent, the African diaspora and the global south majority that backed the resolution. One substantial source of leverage is that Africa holds 30% of the world\u2019s known critical minerals \u2013 including cobalt, lithium manganese and rare earths \u2013 on which the west\u2019s green transition and AI infrastructure depend. Without reparations, there should be no access to Africa\u2019s critical mineral supply chains.<\/p>\n Another source of leverage lies in institutions such as the AU, the Caribbean Community (Caricom), and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac), which are building south-south trade and financial coordination beyond the reach of former slaveholding empires. Without reparations, there should be no participation in global south trade and economic integration.<\/p>\n Just as Haiti emancipated itself by making the cost of enslavement intolerably high, the 21st-century reparations movement must shift from moral persuasion to geopolitical cost imposition. What has been \u201cunthinkable\u201d for two centuries will become \u201cthinkable\u201d only when the cost of refusal is higher than the cost of reparation.<\/p>\n Panashe Chigumadzi is rapporteur for the <\/em>African Union committee of experts on reparations for racialised chattel enslavement, colonialism and apartheid<\/em><\/p>\n ************************<\/p>\n On Thursday 2 July, join Maya Wolfe-Robinson, Ebony Riddell Bamber, Prof Verene A Shepherd and Ahmad Ward in this free event for a wide-ranging discussion on the Guardian\u2019s Legacies of Enslavement programme. Book tickets here or at guardian.live<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last month, at commemorations marking the 25th anniversary of France\u2019s Taubira law recognising the trafficking of enslaved Africans as a crime against humanity, Emmanuel Macron did the unthinkable: he became the first French president to publicly utter the word \u201creparations\u201d. 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