The AU seeks justice, not guilt, in reparations for historical injustices towards Africa and its descendants
By Annina van Neel
The African Union declared 2025 the Year of Reparations, aiming to achieve justice through reparations for Africans and their descendants, for the harms caused by enslavement, colonization, and neo-colonialism. The 1993 Abuja Proclamation set the agenda, recognizing that the damage inflicted on African peoples is not merely a “thing of the past.”1 The Abuja Proclamation stresses seeking responsibility, not guilt, from states and nations whose economic growth once relied on slave labor and colonialism, and neocolonialism today. It clearly calls on those states in Europe and the Americas “still engaged in racism and neocolonialism to desist from any further damage.”2 The AU’s 2025 goal is to address these ongoing injustices and build multi-stakeholder relationships.3
This paper argues that reparations must go hand in hand with preserving heritage. This is through the lens of the African Union’s Charter for African Renaissance: the Protection of African Cultural Heritage4, Agenda 20635, and the Abuja Proclamation. It emphasizes empowering marginalized African descendant communities in memorializing sites of trauma — African burial grounds linked to enslavement, colonialism, and apartheid.
As the activist thinker, writer and organizer Peggy King Jorde said during a visit to St. Eustatius, “Memorialization isn’t limited to buildings or statues – it’s shaped by how people occupy a place, bearing witness to its historical and cultural significance. Gathering to reflect where ancestors once worked, suffered, and perished is a powerful act of remembrance and memorialization. People give places their meaning.”6
Annina van Neel with son Noah van Neel-Hayes at the Upper African Burial Ground inRuperts Valley, Saint Helena Island.
African Burial Grounds, and the rites and rituals that made them, connect us to each other, to our brief existence, to the land, to time and memory. They are a powerful and precious gift from our ancestors and the land in which they rest, to not only heal the past, but to connect and heal humanity in the present. Memorialization of our shared past rooted in the ‘Maafa’ – the great trauma of the African people – provides a gateway through which the African Union can realize three pillars of the Charter for African Cultural Renaissance: envisioning an Africa with a strong cultural identity, with a common heritage, and with shared values and ethics.
Compensation for historical injustices is not new: Germany’s reparations to Jewish people for their immense human suffering in the Nazi Holocaust stands as a key example. Yet Namibia, my birth country, still bears the scars of genocide under German colonization and the country still awaits reparations for the trauma endured.7 What matters, though, is not guilt, but the taking of responsibility by nation states whose economic evolution once depended on slave labor, genocide and colonialism.
Laidlaw Peringanda (Community Activist, Director of Swakopmund Genocide Museum) atthe Nama and Ovaherero Genocide Monument
in Swakopmund Namibia, 21 March 2024
A Story of Bones
Across the globe, African descendant communities remain vulnerable to predatory systems that devalue African cultural heritage. Their experiences, rooted in colonialism, enslavement, and apartheid, are now compounded by exploitative forms of globalization (eg. tourism, industrialisation, mining), which threatens to erase African memory from both the land and its people at an alarming rate. The islands of Saint Helena and St. Eustatius, the overseas territories of Britain and the Netherlands, respectively, and both linked to the Middle Passage of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, exemplify both the destructive colonial legacies continuing into the present, as well as the agency and resilience of civil society.
As founder and CEO of the Tiekie Box Project, I lead an organization dedicated to transforming how African descendant communities and the diaspora engage with their cultural heritage.8 We amplify the work of global cultural rights activists and preservationists protecting this legacy.
The project was inspired by a chance encounter with the darkest of tragedies – an unmarked mass grave of around 9,000 formerly enslaved Africans in Rupert’s Valley on the Island of St Helena. Ironically, these were enslaved Africans “rescued” from Portuguese illegal slave ships by the British navy, then quarantined on the island with little concern for how they were supposed to survive there.9 St. Helena, a United Kingdom Overseas Territory, served as a Middle Passage pit stop during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Between 1840 and 1872, during the abolition phase, over 25,000 enslaved Africans were transported there. Though “liberated,” most of them were then sent to the British West Indies as indentured laborers; the majority of who remained, perished in often abysmal conditions, and were buried on the island. Their unmarked burial grounds are one of the most significant physical remnants of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade – a haunting testament to forgotten lives.
The reburial site of the 325 ancestral remains in Ruperts Valley, Saint Helena Island. 10November, Remembrance Day 2022
Since the mid-20th century, these sacred and globally significant African burial grounds have faced neglect and destruction due to state-led economic and infrastructural developments. These range from small-scale buildings and roads to large-scale industrial projects, including power stations, highways, airports, and fuel depots. On St. Helena, archaeological excavations of an African burial ground were conducted to make way for the island’s first airport. The ancestral remains were packed in boxes (subjected to repeated scientific studies), and their possessions were sent to museum exhibitions in the UK, without the knowledge or consent of the African descendant and ancestral communities. The remains were stored in undignified and neglectful conditions for over a decade. These acts, willful or not, further dehumanize black bodies, reducing them to commodities, archaeological objects. With local and global support, the ongoing fight for their right and proper re-burial and memorialization is chronicled in the documentary: A Story of Bones 2022.
A Story of Bones 2022- Film Poster
The St. Eustatius Afrikan Burial Ground Alliance
On the other side of the Atlantic, St. Eustatius, a small Dutch Caribbean island near St. Maarten and St. Kitts with a similarly rich, and painful colonial history. During the 17th and 18th centuries, it changed hands 22 times between the Dutch, Spanish, English, and French. Known as the Golden Rock, it became a major trading hub and free port, where taxes were not charged – including on the trade of enslaved Africans, who were sold to work on Caribbean plantations. Although the island’s population today is mostly of African descent (while the traces of previous indigenous inhabitants have been largely lost), its historiography still mostly centers on – and glorifies – its colonial past.10
In 2021, the grassroots organization St. Eustatius Afrikan Burial Grounds Alliance was formed in response to government-authorized, highly unethical excavations of an 18th century burial ground of enslaved Africans, during airport construction works. They launched an online petition, “Stop the Excavations at St. Eustatius African Burial Ground”, advocating for the protection of this sacred site.11 Ever since, the Alliance’s mission focuses on preserving African history, spirituality, culture, education, and consciousness.
The job at hand is to preserve and memorialize African history with a focus on community empowerment. Over the years, the St. Eustatius African Burial Ground Alliance has done exactly that: empowered and educated local, regional, and global African descendant communities, while challenging institutions and systems that perpetuate the legacies of slavery and colonialism. The Alliance and the descendant community’s collective efforts, have successfully led to the return of the possessions (artefacts) of the 69 ancestral remains to St. Eustatius, and secured government funding for their respectful and dignified reburial, which is planned to take place in November 2026.
Caskets built by the Sint Eustatius community for the ancestral reburial, placed on display at A Story of Bones Film Screening.
19 November 2024, Sint Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean
Their campaign demonstrates that the path to reparations indeed begins with involving a global network of stakeholders, as suggested by the AU Declaration quoted at the beginning of this article. The Alliance has engaged with a diverse group of global leaders, including: the State of the African Diaspora (SOAD) International Commission of Cultural Heritage12; the Royal Chamber of the SOAD (representing Kings, Queens, and other royalties and Chiefs of the African continent)13; national and international human rights lawyers; university researchers and professors specializing in decolonization; and archaeologists, activists, and global cultural heritage preservation experts.
In its first year, the Alliance initiated and completed an application for UNESCO site recognition to protect the burial grounds on St. Eustatius. A UNESCO delegation visited the island in 2022, witnessing first hand the stark discrimination between the well-maintained colonial heritage, and the neglected African burial sites. UNESCO awarded the sites official recognition in October 2024, marking the island’s first-ever UNESCO designation, but an even greater win was the community-led process which led to it.14
Kenneth Cuvalay (Community Activist and President of the St Eustatius Afrikan Burial GroundAlliance) at the Congo Burial Ground,
November 2024 Sint Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean
In conclusion
Over the past decade, people of African descent have increasingly reclaimed their narratives and occupied spaces worldwide. The global Black Lives Matter movement during the COVID pandemic, and the Diaspora’s powerful response to the Netherlands’ national apology for its slavery past, are clear examples of this growing movement for justice and recognition.
More needs to be done. The African Union’s declaration of 2025 as Year of Reparations: Justice for Africans and People of African descent, offers a unique opportunity for the AU and global African descendant communities to unite in their fight for reparations and assert their right to preserve and protect their cultural heritage. Only our collective efforts can effectively liberate the historical narrative from colonial structures controlled by an elite few, and restore it to its rightful authoritative holders – the local descendant community, the global African Diaspora, and all other people of African descent.
The global African diaspora is vast and dispersed, yet, when connected through a robust network of relationships rooted in ancestral cultural heritage, it can significantly strengthen efforts to achieve an African cultural renaissance. This requires a firm commitment from institutional structures – museums, universities, archaeologists, governments, and other stakeholders – to provide unfettered access to cultural heritage knowledge and resources to local, grassroots communities and activists.
The memorialization and preservation of African burial grounds, as a form of reparations by former and current colonial powers, as well as ancestral African states, represents a rare and powerful act of restitution and healing. It engages individuals and communities through a holistic and universal tradition of remembrance that can lead to meaningful and lasting reparations and healing for Africans and their descendants.
1 Abuja Protocol https://ncobra.org/resources/pdf/TheAbujaProclamation.pdf
2 Abuja Proclamation https://ncobra.org/resources/pdf/TheAbujaProclamation.pdf
3 AU 2025 Objectives: Building Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships AU THEME OF THE YEAR 2025 | African Union
4 African Union’s Charter for African Cultural Renaissance, (37305-treaty-Charter_for_African_Renissance_ENGLISH_digital_0.pdf)
5 Agenda 2063, available https://au.int/agenda2063/overview
6 Peggy King Jorde (2024 St. Eustatius Island, Dutch Caribbean)
7 European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, 2025 https://www.ecchr.eu/en/case/colonial-repercussions-germany-and-namibia/
8 The Tiekie Box Project www.tiekieboxproject.com
9 A Story of Bones (www.astoryofbones.com)
10 St. Eustatius Afrikan Burial Ground Alliance St.Eustatius Afrikan Burial Ground
11 Petition · Stop the Excavations at St. Eustatius Afrikan Burial Ground – Netherlands · Change.org
12 Restitution: SOAD and ICHC hold Unprecedented Press Conference to announce International Class Action | State Of African Diaspora
13 The Royal Chamber of SOAD | State Of African Diaspora
14 PRESS RELEASE: Afrikan Burial Grounds St. Eustatius recognized by UNESCO – St.Eustatius Afrikan Burial Ground