Our demand for reparation is based on the tripod of moral, historic and legal arguments. Who knows what path Africa’s social development would have taken if our great centres of civilisation had not been razed in search of human cargo? Who knows how our economies would have developed?
It is international law which compels Nigeria to pay her debts to Western banks and financial institutions: it is international law which must now demand that Western nations pay us what they owed us for six centuries. – late Chief MKO Abiola in London, 1992.

For much of the 1980s, it
was unbelievable that any University of Port Harcourt social sciences student taught by the likes of Professors Claude Ake, Ikenna Nzimiro, Dr Mark Anikpo, Thomas Taiwo and the then visiting Dr Patrick Wilmot from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria would graduate without owning a copy of the book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa written by Dr Walter Rodney from the West Indies.
These teachers and a few more of their colleagues had constituted a motley crew of radical thinkers that literally turned Choba to the hotbed of Marxist ideology in the country. Back then, no topic, sentence or action was spared a leftist scrutiny on campus. In fact, so discomfiting were their almost daily classroom criticisms of successive administrations in Nigeria that the then military Head of State, General Muhammadu Buhari, could no longer tolerate it and, seeing Wilmot as the arrowhead of these academic ‘coup plotters’, permanently deported him back to his native Britain. Ironically, his socialist co-traveller, Nzimiro, was later appointed into an economic advisory team by Buhari’s successor, General Ibrahim Babangida.
For economic historians, Rodney’s book is, indeed, a must-read as it contains a brilliant expose of the political economy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade; especially how European slave merchants, driven by huge materialistic instincts, acquired almost freely and for centuries, several batches of young and energetic African natives and shipped same in chains across the Atlantic to work not only in the factories of Europe but also the cotton, tobacco and sugar cane plantations in the Americas.
How this wicked and atrocious human undertaking benefited the slave merchants with their buyers and home continents while truncating the development of African societies has since birthed a serious agitation for the payment of compensations by the defaulting continents.
Unlike the Choba socialism discourses, initial reparation agitations had presented little to prick the government until Chief Moshood Abiola, a Nigerian business mogul and publisher, volunteered to throw part of his time and huge resources into the effort. It was largely in recognition of this rare sacrifice that the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in faraway Washington DC, USA bestowed on him the CBC Chairman’s Award for Excellence in service.
That was in October, 1990. And by December, Bashorun Abiola had sponsored a three-day conference in Lagos with the topic: ‘Reparation for Africa and Africans in the Diaspora’. In his opening address at the confab, General Babangida was said to have called on European and American countries to compensate Africa for the untold hardship and exploitation which the continent had suffered in the past, particularly the enslavement of about 30 million young and virile Africans taken away from a continent that was almost at the same development level with Europe.
The self-styled Evil Genius drew special analogy from the recompense made by West Germany to Israel for over a decade of atrocities committed against the Jews by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party which culminated in the Holocaust during World War II. Also raised at the gathering was the possibility that pressuring Western nations on reparation might provide African countries some leverage when negotiating foreign loans and repayment terms.
People now also cite the UN resolution which backed the payment of reparation by Iraq to the Government of Kuwait for the destruction and looting by its forces during Gulf War I.
But several Western diplomats, after the discussions, reportedly doubted that their home governments would be receptive to the call for slavery reparation, pointing out that the Lagos colloquium focused mainly on Europe and North America while excluding many Arab countries that engaged in trans-Saharan slave trade.
The Organisation of African Unity (OAU), now simply known as the African Union (AU), was said to have backed Abiola’s reparation effort in 1991 by passing a resolution on the injustices of slavery and the need for recompense. On June 28, 1992, the organisation reportedly raised a 12-man Group of Eminent Persons (GEP) to pursue Africa’s slavery reparation. The group had Abiola as chairman.
In April 1993, the first pan-African conference on reparation was held in the new Nigerian capital, Abuja, to officially form the body that would carry out a global campaign for reparation payment. That, incidentally, was when the Aare Ona Kakanfo of Yorubaland was campaigning to become Nigeria’s next civilian president in an election he was clearly adjudged to have won but which was later annulled by the Babangida administration. And even until his death on July 7, 1998, under very questionable circumstances, Abiola still endeavoured to sustain the spirit of the reparation movement.
Abiola’s open sponsorship of the reparations agitation and the circumstances of his untimely demise had raised suspicions of international collaborations to eliminate him and possibly scuttle any further push for such demand. Could this explain why no other person in the vast African continent, including diaspora Blacks, has opted to pick up the baton from where the Aare left off?

By: Ibelema Jumbo