What are the challenges as experts study slavery, reparations?

The African Union (AU) has named 2025 the Year of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations during the 38th AU Summit held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, earlier in February.

“Having reparations for Africans and the people of African descent offers the AU the opportunity to take leadership on the Africa Reparations Agenda,” stated the union in a concept note.

“The complexities of addressing past wrongs, whether they stem from colonialism, the trans-Atlantic enslavement, apartheid or systemic discrimination, require a thorough examination and strategic approach.

“It will also help to bring together the African citizenry and the African diaspora to build a common and united front for the cause of justice and payment of reparations to Africans for historical crimes, and mass atrocities committed against Africans and people of African descent, including colonisation, apartheid, and genocide.”

With this theme, the AU is injecting more energy into existing momentum around the topic of reparations that has been driven by various global structures, including the United Nations, as well as individual countries. The role of experts from the higher education sector has been notable.

Earlier in February 2025, some 14 academic researchers from Cameroon and France who were commissioned to research the role played by France in Cameroon’s independence have handed their findings to the two countries’ presidents, Paul Biya of Cameroon and Emmanuel Macron of France.

In November 2024, University World News reported that UNESCO had called for the creation of university chairs to study the history of enslavement and the transatlantic slave trade. Earlier, University World News also reported on Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s launch of an academic study into the impact of colonialism on the African country that will culminate in a demand for reparations from its former colonial power, Britain.

In this context and against the backdrop of this unfolding agenda, University World News earlier interviewed Dr José Lingna Nafafé, a native of Guinea-Bissau, Associate Professor of African and Atlantic history at the department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American studies in the faculty of arts, law and social sciences, University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom, about the UNESCO initiative for the establishment of a new alliance of university chairs on the study and the history of enslavement and the transatlantic slave trade.

UWN: What is the significance of the UNESCO initiative and what are the themes that such an initiative must focus on in Africa?

JLN: UNESCO’s [initiative] … is commendable. However, the study will require holistic research themes such as abolition, African political, economic and social structures, law, reparations, the return of the artefacts, religion, imperialism and linguistics, among others.

The research should also expand its scope by incorporating studies conducted in various regions across the globe where Africans were forcibly taken as enslaved individuals.

This includes, not only the Americas, particularly Latin America, where large populations of African descent were established, but also Europe and Asia, where African slaves were also present and had significant impacts on local economies and cultures.

By exploring these diverse geographical contexts, we can gain a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the global dynamics of the African diaspora and the enduring legacies of slavery.

UNESCO also needs to be aware of the difficulties inherent in such projects where history as a subject of study and teaching in Africa has declined drastically since the 1980s. This is something that will shape many aspects of the project, and needs to be addressed carefully.

UWN: What is the significance for Africa of establishing a new alliance of university chairs for studying the slave trade, especially for Africa?

JLN: It is crucial for the continent of Africa to form an alliance of university chairs to study the history of enslavement and the transatlantic slave trade.

The Atlantic slave trade has negatively impacted Africa’s development for four centuries across economic, cultural, political and judicial dimensions, and its legacy continues to affect the continent today. It also influenced knowledge production in Africa, favouring Western epistemology.

Researching issues of the transatlantic slave trade and enslavement of Africans through an alliance of university chairs within African universities is to acknowledge our common search for humanity and knowledge production and engage with Western epistemology on an equal footing that has denied the continent’s contribution to the project of modernity.

Establishing a new alliance of university chairs for studying the transatlantic slavery is significant for offering a critique of the modernity project, which had the propensity to conceal its exploitation of the colonised people and their resources, while making convincing claims for maintaining imperial domination.

UWN: What are some of challenges that such an initiative may encounter and how do you suggest dealing with them?

JLN: This is a multifaceted topic that has been central to world history for over three centuries. It requires a very wide-ranging research initiative. This needs to incorporate an understanding of many African societies, of the different European empires, and of the history and impact in the Americas.

Diverse expertise will be necessary, including language skills, indigenous knowledge systems, and indigenous historiographies. It is also a multidisciplinary task to analyse many different background factors such as maritime, medical, economic and environmental history.

The first challenge would be the primary source materials that make the study of the enslavement of Africans and the Atlantic slave trade study possible. This is lacking in many parts of Africa.

The second challenge would be the approaches to be adopted for the magnitude of this study. The third challenge would be the themes to be included in the study.

The fourth challenge would be to foster a coherent study on the continent that reflects the common endeavour of the new alliance. The fifth challenge would be the weak institutionalisation of the study of history in many parts of the continent, following decades of structural adjustment – however, these chairs might also help to begin to address this issue.

The use of primary sources before and at the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade is important. For this, historians need to use oral traditions from Africa and, second, primary sources from Asia (Chinese, Persian, Arab) and Europe.

The approaches to be adopted for the study are necessarily interdisciplinary – history, law, history of art, anthropology, archaeology, literature, politics, linguistics, and so on.

This is why the themes to be included in the study, in addition to those mentioned already, include a focus on personal histories, governance, freedom and abolition, arts, family units, linguistics, migration, gender and border studies.

To maintain a coherent study of the Atlantic slave trade for the new alliance in Africa, there is a need to create an agreed research statement from all the universities involved and a Council of Chairs created to implement and communicate the object of studies and research to be carried out. Chairs must speak at least one African and then one European or Asian language.