The African Union (AU) will mark Nov. 30 as the African Day of Tribute to African Martyrs and Victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Colonization, and Apartheid. At their February 2026 summit in Addis Ababa, AU leaders established the observance and adopted a resolution describing slavery, deportation and colonialism as genocide and crimes against the people of Africa.
The AU Commission chairperson said the organization would extend its 2025 reparations initiative into a 2026–2035 Decade of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations.
In a separate 2023 report, the Brattle Group estimated reparations for transatlantic slavery at $100 trillion to $131 trillion. It put the amounts owed by the United States and Britain at about $25 trillion each.
In Washington, the domestic reparations debate is set to return to a Democratic-controlled Congress. The Associated Press called the House for Democrats, who are on track to hold at least 228 House seats and 54 Senate seats when the 120th Congress is sworn in on Jan. 3, 2027. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., introduced H.R. 40 in January 2025 to create a federal commission to study and develop reparations proposals. An earlier version of the bill cleared the House Judiciary Committee for the first time in 2021, when Democrats held the House. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the committee’s ranking member, is expected to become its chairman in the new Congress.
The AU’s case for reparations rests partly on the claim that Europe took Africa’s natural resources. The AU-endorsed Algiers Declaration seeks to restore African sovereignty over the continent’s economic, cultural and natural resources and condemns “resource plundering” as a form of colonialism.
An article in AU Echo says Africa holds “30% of the world’s mineral reserves” but accounts for 3% of global trade. Leftists treat comparisons like this as proof of Western exploitation. The two figures measure fundamentally different things. Mineral reserves measure a stock of ore in the ground. Global trade measures the value of goods and services traded across borders over a given period.
