Zimbabwe Commentary: Africa's Reparations Demands and International Law

Tendai Ruben Mbofana The modern global debate surrounding reparations for the transatlantic slave trade and Western colonialism has reached a fever pitch. To directly receive my articles please join my WhatsApp Channel on: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaqprWCIyPtRnKpkHe08 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,