Tendai Ruben Mbofana
The modern global debate surrounding reparations for the transatlantic slave trade and Western colonialism has reached a fever pitch.
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The recent UN General Assembly in New York was no exception to this trend.
During the session, African and Caribbean delegates pushed for resolutions to classify historical enslavement as a crime against humanity and demand formal financial restitution.
African leaders, international advocacy groups, and intellectuals increasingly gather at these international summits to demand debt forgiveness, direct economic repair, and official apologies from European powers.
The moral core of their argument appears straightforward.
Western powers extracted vast wealth, brutalized populations, and left behind fractured continents, so they must pay.
But this popular narrative relies on a selective view of history—one that conveniently ignores a painful, inconvenient truth.
Before, during, and after European intervention, Africans colonized, subjugated, and enslaved one another on a massive scale.
If the basis for reparations is historical conquest and human exploitation, the internal history of the African continent severely muddies the moral clarity of the demand.
Slavery was not a European invention brought to the shores of Africa.
It was a deeply entrenched social and economic institution across the continent long before European ships dominated the coastlines.
Dynamic empires like the Mutapa Empire, Dahomey, and the Ashanti built their territorial dominance and wealth through the conquest of neighboring populations.
In the Zambezi valley, the Mutapa state expanded by subjugating rival clans, enforcing heavy tribute, and eventually trading captives and local populations to Portuguese traders in exchange for firearms, textiles, and strategic advantage.
The slave trade did not function through foreign armies marching into the interior to snatch victims unaided.
It operated through sophisticated domestic networks where African rulers and warlords systematically captured, traded, and sold fellow Africans.
To frame this history solely as external victimization strips these historic African states of their agency, reducing powerful, strategic empires like the Mutapa to passive bystanders in their own backyards.
Furthermore, the narrative of historical victimhood deliberately ignores the fact that European populations were also subjected to systemic enslavement by African and Ottoman states.
Yes, black people also enslaved whites!
For nearly three centuries, the Barbary slave trade operated out of North African ports in Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, sending corsairs to raid European coastal villages as far north as Ireland and Iceland.
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, over one million European Christians were captured, dragged to North Africa, and sold into brutal servitude as galley rowers, construction laborers, and domestic slaves.
At the same time, elite Black African regiments—such as Sultan Moulay Ismail’s Abid al-Bukhari in Morocco—enforced state power over territories that systematically bought, sold, and exploited both Black and white captives.
Enslavement and conquest were never the exclusive domain of white Europeans.
They were global instruments of empire, practiced aggressively by North African and Middle Eastern powers long before Western colonialism took root.
Additionally, internal conquest and indigenous imperialism were widespread features of the continent’s history.
Long before European cartographers drew arbitrary borders in Berlin, powerful African polities violently displaced and absorbed weaker ones.
The expansion of the Ndebele state under Mzilikazi saw the conquest and cultural assimilation of numerous Shona chiefdoms, establishing rigid social hierarchies and tribute systems long before British settler colonialism arrived.
Similarly, the Mfecane across Southern Africa resulted in the forced displacement and deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans at the hands of other Africans.
If historical suffering demands financial restitution, who pays whom on a continent where conquest was the primary instrument of state-building for centuries?
Should the descendants of vanquished groups demand reparations from the descendants of the indigenous empires that enslaved or subjugated them?
Raising these historical facts is not an attempt to minimize the unspeakable cruelties of Transatlantic slavery or the devastating systemic impacts of European colonization.
However, demanding that modern Western taxpayers—generations removed from the atrocities—foot an ill-defined bill while ignoring internal historical complicity is morally inconsistent.
It transforms a complex historical reality into a simplified, racialized theater of guilt and retribution.
The fixation on external reparations also serves as a convenient distraction for modern African political elites.
Blaming external historical forces for contemporary governance failures, systemic corruption, and economic mismanagement is a time-tested strategy to deflect internal accountability.
Decades after independence, the primary barriers to prosperity in many African nations are not the ghosts of nineteenth-century European administrators.
It is purely bad governance, political repression, and economic policy choices made in real time by local leaders.
History is not a simple story of pure victims and pure aggressors neatly divided by race or continent.
It is a messy, tragic record of human power dynamics, where groups across every inhabited continent exploited available technology and power to dominate others.
If humanity adopts a framework where descendants must financially compensate other descendants for ancient historical wrongs, the list of claims becomes infinite and unsolvable.
True progress for Africa will not come from winning a moral lawsuit against the West for historical atrocities in which local elites actively participated.
It will come from an honest reckoning with the entirety of its history.
From there, it requires an uncompromising focus on building transparent, accountable, and self-reliant societies today.
- Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to contact him on +263715667700 or mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com