IJR Contributes to Pan-African Reparations Dialogue at Global Africa People-to-People Forum 2025
On 24 July 2025, the African Union Economic Social & Cultural Council (AU ECOSOCC) hosted the fifth edition of the Global African People-to-People Forum, a dynamic space for meaningful dialogue and partnerships between Africans on the continent and in the Global African Diaspora.
Launched in 2021 through a collaborative effort between AU ECOSOCC, the Citizens and Diaspora Organisations Directorate (CIDO), the Caribbean Pan-African Network (CPAN), the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), and the Emancipation Support Committee of Trinidad and Tobago (ESCTT), the Forum has become an important space to build bridges, amplify African voices, and develop solutions to shared challenges.
This year’s gathering aligned with the African Union’s 2025 theme: Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Pan-African Solidarity and Reparations. The Forum showcased perspectives and recommendations on how the African continent and the Caribbean community can work collectively to address historical and structural injustices that continue to shape the realities of African people across the globe.
In his opening remarks, Mr Louis Cheik Sissoko, Presiding Officer of AU ECOSOCC, stressed the power of dialogue in advancing justice and reparations. “Reparations must be woven into the fabric of our Africa,” he said. “It must live in policy, in education, in development financing, and in collective memory.”
Echoing these sentiments, Ambassador David Comissiong, Chairperson of CPAN, described the Forum as a space “to reason together, to focus our collective minds on the difficult issues that we face as African people.” He underscored the urgency of common action in the face of ongoing global crises and praised the Forum’s role in fostering unity among African peoples.
The Forum featured four rich panel sessions:
- Reparations in Action: A Cross-Cutting Outcome of AU/CARICOM, the UN 2nd International Decade for People of African Descent, and the AU Year of Activities.
- Confronting the Legacies of Colonialism and Enslavement During the UN 2nd International Decade for People of African Descent.
- Civil Society Contribution to the First AU/CARICOM Summit.
- Strengthening the AU Sixth Region Initiative to Advance AU/CARICOM 2025 Outcomes and the UN 2nd Decade for People of African Descent.
The Institute for Justice and Reconciliation’s (IJR) Head of Peacebuilding Interventions, Prof Tim Murithi, participated in the fourth panel session. He offered a compelling reflection on the spiritual dimension of reparations, tracing it back to 15th-century “papal decrees” by Pope Nicholas V that laid the ideological groundwork for the conquest, colonisation, and enslavement of African peoples.
“That was the language that was used in the doctrine of discovery, saying that Africa was a terra nullis – an empty land, laying the foundations for the conquest and exploitation,” Prof Murithi said. “This what we are trying to reverse at the moment.”
During this period, the African continent was transformed into “a zone of extraction, a human reservoir of extraction of African bodies for Europeans and American plantations,” he explained. Prof Murithi emphasised that reparations are not only material or legal, but deeply spiritual.
“This devaluation of human dignity of Africans is what we are dealing with today and has continued in many ways in the last five centuries. It manifests within ourselves as self-hate. The African people are the few people around the world who have been socialised to hate themselves.”
He called for a new ethos to guide the Pan-African and Global African reparations movement—one rooted in unity, spiritual restoration, and transformative justice. “We need bold, African solutions. The rule makers of yesterday have become the rule breakers of today,” he said.
Prof Murithi also challenged the Pan-African community to move beyond preaching to the converted: “We need to take this global campaign for reparations to the heartlands, to the homes of the descendants of the enslavers as well, and this is where the diaspora already lives so it is an important function for them to play.”
“In the spirit of Pan Africanism, we also need to look within ourselves and heal ourselves because we are also divided as Africans and the people of African descent.”
He reflected on a pivotal moment during the AU ECOSOCC convening in Addis Ababa earlier this year, when a participant from the Bahamas raised concerns that Africa had “forgotten” the diaspora. “Today, we are engaging as people as a family. Mother Africa and her children, across the planet you are reunited once again,” Prof Murithi noted.
Calling for sustained organising rather than despair, he closed with an impassioned reminder: “We must reimagine and restore the humanity of African people. We cannot fail because the struggle does not end. Let us not agonise; let us organise!” as the First President of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah stated. Quoting Nelson Mandela, he concluded: “It always seems impossible until it is done!”
Through IJR’s participation, the Forum reaffirmed the importance of justice, memory, and unity in the ongoing struggle for reparations, and the role civil society must play in transforming words into meaningful change to improve the livelihood and wellbeing of Africans and People of African Descent.