REPARATIONS
Reclaiming Dignity, Restoring Justice
Africans Rising is advancing a movement-building approach to reparations; bringing the struggle out of boardrooms and into communities. We confront the legacies of centuries of slave-trade and slavery, colonialism, and modern-day exploitation, while celebrating Africa’s resilience and imagining a future of dignity, justice, and restoration. Through education, mobilisation, research, advocacy, and solidarity across Africa and the diaspora, we are building a people-powered movement to demand and shape reparations.
What is the Reparations Campaign About?
The Reparations Campaign is an initiative that seeks to reclaim justice for Africa and its diaspora. It is about healing, restoration, and justice. Reparations for us go beyond public apologies and monetary compensation. They are about reclaiming memory, restoring cultures, rebuilding dignity, and holding systems accountable for centuries of exploitation.
Our approach ensures that reparations conversations are not trapped in elite spaces but are rooted in the lived realities of ordinary people from grassroots communities in Africa to Afro-descendant communities across the world.
Our Activities
1. Education & Political Consciousness Building
Education is central to building a mass movement for reparations. We create spaces for learning, reflection, dialogue, and mobilisation that connect history to present-day struggles.
Workshops & Webinars
We regularly organise workshops and webinars across Africa and the diaspora, in partnership with social movements, scholars, artists, and community groups. These sessions go beyond discussion; they are spaces of collective learning, political education, reflection, and action, helping communities understand how slavery, colonialism, and imperialism shape today’s realities.
Diaspora Series
Our Diaspora Series connects Afro-descendants from the Caribbean, the Americas, Europe, and Asia with Africa. These sessions foster learning, exchange, solidarity, and political organising, drawing clear connections between historical injustices and present-day struggles such as racism, economic exploitation, displacement, and cultural loss.
Reparations Fridays
Every Friday, we keep reparations alive in public consciousness through reflections, updates, storytelling, and calls to action across our social media platforms, ensuring consistent engagement, learning, and mobilisation.
Reflections & Blogs
Our members and allies regularly publish blogs and reflections that make reparations accessible, relatable, and grounded in lived realities, supporting continuous political education and movement-building.
2. Research, Documentation & Storytelling
We believe that telling our own stories and documenting our histories is a vital form of resistance, healing, and justice-building.
The African Storyline
We are developing an African-centred historical narrative that:
- Revisits pre-invasion Africa,
- Documents the disruptions of slavery, missionary activity, colonialism, and imperialism, and
- Highlights ongoing struggles for justice, dignity, and self-determination.
Stories from the Diaspora
We are collecting stories, testimonies, and lived experiences from Africans and People of African Descent across the diaspora, documenting the long-term impacts of enslavement, racial oppression, economic exclusion, cultural loss, and displacement. These stories form a central pillar of our global reparations knowledge work and public education efforts.
Community Testimonies & Living Archive
We are gathering community testimonies across Africa and the diaspora, documenting lived experiences of dispossession, cultural erasure, forced labour, land theft, racial violence, and resistance. This work will culminate in an anthology and living archive that serves as both a historical record and a movement tool for education, advocacy, and reparations struggles.
3. Advocacy, Accountability & Policy Engagement
We work to transform education, memory, and research into political action, accountability, and structural change.
Petitions & Reparations Claims
We support Africans and People of African Descent, communities, institutions, and social movements to develop and advance formal petitions and reparations claims against states, monarchies, corporations, churches, and institutions responsible for historical and modern-day harms.
These petitions seek:
- Historical acknowledgment
- Restitution of stolen cultural and material wealth
- Compensation for social, economic, and cultural losses
- Institutional reform and guarantees of non-repetition
Our approach ensures that reparations claims remain people-driven, community-rooted, and justice-centred.
Strategic Policy Engagement
We engage governments, regional and continental bodies, learning institutions, cultural authorities, and international platforms to:
- Advance policy dialogue on reparations,
- Institutionalise reparations frameworks, and
- Strengthen political accountability at local, national, continental, and global levels.
Get Involved
Share Your Story:
Contribute your community’s experiences to the Compendium, share personal reflections and blogs
Join the Reparations Action Group:
Learn, strategise, and act with others driving the reparations agenda.
Build Partnerships:
Connect your movement, community, or institution to Africans Rising.
Engage in Education Platforms:
Engage in Education Platforms: Be part of webinars, Reparations Thursdays, and reflections.
Belgium
The Africans Rising movement demands that Belgium's leaders initiate a process of apology and reparation for the historical crimes and current injustices committed against the people of Congo, all of which are the result of Belgium's brutal colonial reign in Congo.
Sign the PetitionEngland
Your Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II of England, we write to you to appeal for you to join us in defending truth and justice, lending your voice to help heal the wrongs of the past and dismantle the racism of the present.
Sign the PetitionJoin the Movement
Reparations are not just about the past; they are about the future we are determined to build. They are about truth, justice, dignity, and restoration for Africa and all her children across the world.
Through education, mobilisation, research, commemoration, advocacy, and partnerships, we are building a Pan-African movement that refuses to forget, refuses to be silenced, and refuses to stop until justice is done.
