Description
This contribution looks at a decade of pan-African organising for reparations in the 1990s, illustrating how reparations discourse evolved from continental Africa to the imperial metropole of Britain. Focusing on the pivotal decade between Lagos 1990 and Durban 2001, it analyses how reparations served as both a point of reference for grassroots organising and as a framework for anti-colonial worldmaking between Nigeria, Barbados, South Africa, Jamaica, and Britain. While grassroots organising has spearheaded the cause for reparations, the 1990s are the starting point for the institutionalisation of a movement. Reparations become a tool to negotiate international relations and anti-colonial worldmaking, uniting pan-African policymakers across the world. Rather than approaching reparations through normative frameworks, this contribution foregrounds the geopolitical dimensions of reparations as a tool for negotiating international relations and anticolonial worldmaking. Drawing on archival research and interviews, and engaging with scholarship by Forrester and Getachew alongside Nkrumah and Garvey, the paper takes seriously the agents and claims of reparations as anticolonial politics, offering a new analytical angle that centres the movement's transformative potential in reshaping global power relations.
