Who will Safeguard Our Interests in the Fight for Reparations After Durban@25?

In her book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman describes that “...Slavery had established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone. If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of Black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long ago memory but because Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to healthcare and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment…”.^[1]

Hartman is pointing to the hold that slavery continues to have in the United States. She describes the preservation of the afterlife through structural forces with engineered outcomes. For example, the impact of government policies and laws such as eminent domain and redlining evidenced in the loss of Black farms and dismantled communities across the country.^[2] Additionally, there are statistical gaps between Blacks and Whites in socioeconomic metrics such as housing, education, health care, and employment showing Blacks losing ground.^[3] 

The afterlife of slavery continues to impact Black life beyond the socioeconomic metrics such as poverty and unemployment data to include Black political life. In the U.S Congress, the formation of both chambers, the Senate and House of Representatives along with the Electoral College can be traced to slavery, impacting the current state of voting rights.^[4] 

The protracted pursuit of human rights raised these issues 25 years ago in Durban, South Africa at the historic 2001 World Conference against Racism, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerances - more commonly known as the Durban Conference. It was here in Durban where, by consensus, the international community declared, and, “...further acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity and should always have been so, especially the transatlantic slave trade, which is among the major sources and manifestations of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and that Africans and people of African descent, Asians and people of Asian descent and indigenous peoples were victims of these acts and continue to be victims of their consequences…”^[5]

Before his assassination on 21 February 1965, Malcolm X voiced the necessity for Blacks to migrate from a civil rights or domestic approach, on the question of racism, to a higher plane of human rights within the international arena. His goal was to bring before the governing body of the United Nations, the issues of genocide and racism and charge the US of violating the human rights of Blacks residing within its own borders. He spoke frequently about human rights and using the United Nations: 

“...When you expand the civil-rights struggle to the level of human rights, you can then take the case of the black man in this country before the nations in the UN. You can take it before the General Assembly. You can take Uncle Sam before a world court. But the only level you can do it on is the level of human rights. Civil rights keeps you under his restrictions, under his jurisdiction. Civil rights keeps you in his pocket. Civil rights means you're asking Uncle Sam to treat you right. Human rights are something you were born with. Human rights are your God-given rights. Human rights are the rights that are recognized by all nations of this earth. And any time anyone violates your human rights, you can take them to the world court.”^[6]

Background: 2001 Durban Conference

The December 12th Movement (D12), along with the National Black United Front (NBUF), played key roles in organizing and mobilizing over 400 Black people - the Durban 400 - to travel to the 2001 World Conference in Durban, South Africa, to take an active role in the demand for reparations. Attorney Roger Wareham, December 12^th Movement explains, “Since 1989, through our involvement in the United Nations, in the human rights arena, we’ve tried to continue the legacy of Malcolm, the absolute necessity for us to place our struggle in the international arena.  If we are to progress, we can’t keep it within the confines set by the people who oppress us.”^[7]

After the 1997 announcement, they waged a public campaign to engage and organize Black communities around the country. In city after city, they held community forums informing Black folk with a clear analysis identifying three demands to be made in Durban: declare the transatlantic slave trade a crime against humanity, acknowledge the economic roots of racism, and ensure that compensation (reparations) is due. 

Their organizing efforts around the country mobilized a delegation of 400 Black working class people to make the trip to Durban where they joined African, Latino, Asian and Indigenous peoples on the global stage. In Durban, they were bonded together by the legacies of racism, slavery, apartheid and colonialism. Their experiences with racism helped to inform their goal of crafting a plan, a framework to address the multiple areas negatively impacted by racism. 

They came to Durban to change the narrative. To reject the notion about forgetting the past. To expose the linkage of their poverty and economic disparities to their respective colonial histories. To make the argument that their respective underdevelopment is rooted in slavery and colonialism. They came to highlight the widening gaps between the developing and developed,  a colonial past that profited from free slave labor, along with the exploitation and theft of natural resources and land. 

Back in 2001, Viola Plummer, Chair of the December 12th Movement said, “If this conference is to be meaningful to our struggle, then those of us who have been the victims of the longest sustained assault on a people’s humanity in history must give it leadership and direction.”^[8]

Together, they shared the stage where the developed and rich nations of the Western world were now under the bright spotlight, faced with demands from Africans and people of African descent. 

The Durban conference exposed the contradictions for the world to see, on the world stage. The imperial core vs. the periphery, the colonized vs the colonizers, and the creditors vs. the debtors. 

The significance of the 2001 conference is exhibited in the first time a declaration stated that slavery and the transatlantic slave trade were crimes against humanity; an action plan to address racism, as age-old myths and stereotypes were now dispelled with the outward demonstration of pan-African solidarity on the issue of reparations. Dr. Raymond Winbush described the U.N. World Conference Against Racism, “as probably one of the most important meetings since the Pan African congresses that took place in the 1940s.”^[9]

The DDPA

The Durban Declaration Programme of Action or the DDPA, is the document that was produced from the conference and is the first of its kind to address the issue of racism and racial discrimination in a concrete manner. The DDPA has the framework for a detailed action-oriented plan for actors in the international community to confront the issue in a tangible way. A wide range of areas affected by systemic racism experienced by Africans, people of African descent along with people of Asian descent and Indigenous peoples, are covered in the DDPA.^[10]

Mr. Wareham explains, “The Durban Conference and the DDPA set the foundation for the current reparations movement in the US and around the world. The DDPA is almost unknown in the US because since 2001, the US government has done everything in its power to disappear it...”^[11]

Along with promoting access to basic social services, including primary education, basic health care and adequate housing, the DDPA calls for states to, “...adopt or strengthen, as appropriate, national programmes for eradicating poverty” and “...to take steps to ensure equal access to comprehensive, quality health care affordable for all, including primary health care for medically underserved people…”.^[12]

In addition to addressing poverty and health care, the DDPA also includes actions for the international community to implement in areas such as the protection of worker rights, policing, racial profiling, and mass incarceration. The DDPA also includes electoral politics, particularly citing the role of elected officials and political parties as legislators. 

The Durban significance: The UN Anti-racism Ecosystem/Architecture

Over the years since the 2001 Durban Conference, the DDPA, if implemented, could have made a difference.

Meanwhile, as racism has escalated in the US and across the globe, the political will to implement the DDPA has not.^[13] In 2021, the global COVID-19 pandemic exposed governments' failures to address structural racism and discrimination, which created barriers to health services. Yet, (in 2001) the DDPA had enshrined nearly 50 references to end racial disparities to health and healthcare.^[14]

Despite the lack of political will, the post-Durban years have nevertheless seen an extraordinary expansion of their anti-racism framework designed to support and carry out anti-racism initiatives, resolutions, measures as well as DDPA’s implementation.^[15]

Making up the UN’s body of anti-racism and human rights mechanisms are the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, the Group of Independent Eminent Experts on the Implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, the Intergovernmental Working Group on the effective implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action and the Ad-Hoc Committee on the elaboration of complementary standards.^[16] 

In addition, there’s also the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in Law Enforcement, and the Permanent Forum on people of African Descent, working on reparatory justice for Africans and people of African descent.^[17] 

Since 2001, the UN points to a number of actions taken by various members of the global community in their fight against racism. For example, by 2021,

• 42 States have adopted or amended legislation prohibiting racial discrimination;

• 35 States have established equality bodies for combating racial discrimination and promoting equality;

• 26 additional States have ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, bringing the total to 182 States that are party to this Convention;

• 23 States and regional institutions have adopted national and regional policies against racism;

• And the International Decade for People of African Descent was pronounced for the period 2015-2024.

   

By 2026, the UN has reported states enacting a number of legislative measures, national action plans and other policies, along with creating monitoring bodies and complaint mechanisms to address racism. For example, Argentina, Colombia, Ireland, Mexico, South Africa, Spain and Turkey enacted laws prohibiting racial profiling and racial discrimination, while Argentina, Costa Rica, and Italy have adopted national action plans against discrimination, “aimed at the promotion of the rights of people of African descent”.^[18]

The Durban Significance: AU/UN Resolution

In March 2026, As the African Union’s lead official on reparations, Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama introduced, “Declaration of the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and Racialized Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime against Humanity” to the United Nations General Assembly.^[19]

The resolution, generated by the African Union and presented to the United Nations, builds on and advances the foundation set by the DDPA. 

The resolution, directs the international community’s attention not only towards the historical legacies of slavery and the slave trade but to today’s neocolonialism and imperialism that maintains the legacies’ afterlife. The different language in the resolution elevates the sense of urgency afforded to the reparations issue with a more severe description of the largest forced migration in history and one of the longest-running systems of organized mass human exploitation in recorded history. This resolution advances and goes further than the 2001 Durban Declaration Programme of Action where slavery was declared a crime against humanity, with more precise and specific language inserted. 

The vote and resolution reflects a paradigm shift in the Pan-African reparations movement at a moment where the resistance against neocolonialism and imperialism escalates and intensifies. There is now a different conversation taking place as myths are dispelled, racial stereotypes are dismissed and connections are made. 

This resolution was the product of African collaboration to produce new language, with a structural analysis that connects and places today’s material conditions, the afterlife between slavery and the TransAtlantic slave trade on the one hand, and the ecosystem of global finance (capitalist system) on the other.   

This reparations resolution is significant not simply because it addresses historical slavery, but because it links slavery's afterlife to contemporary structures of imperialism, neocolonialism, debt, and global capitalism, thereby reframing reparations as a struggle over present political and economic relations rather than solely historical injustice.

Yet, 25 years later, the significance of the Durban conference and the DDPA gets lost amidst ongoing obstructionist tactics designed to disappear the DDPA while relying on media driven narratives that focus on the question around antisemitism. 

In an October 2021 report prepared by the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, E. Tendayi Achiume, addresses the anti-semitism issue, “,...The document as it stands thus reflects an international consensus that affirms the rights of Israelis and Palestinians, deplores antisemitism, neo-Nazism and other forms of intolerance and calls for an end to violence against both Israelis and Palestinians…”^[20] and, the report goes on to say, “...The mention of the conflict between Israel and the State of Palestine in the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action should not be equated with an antisemitic preoccupation with Israel, as is done by some commentators. In the two mentions of Israel in the document, Member States affirmed Israel’s right to security and its capacity to resume the peace process and to “develop and prosper in security and freedom”.^[21]

25th Anniversary Events - August 29th

The Durban Conference 25th anniversary provides a unique opportunity to reach an entire generation who are just coming to reparations, maybe unaware of what happened in Durban, why it’s important and how it connects to their daily lives.

The December 12th Movement initiated a call to action for reparations organizations, groups, activists, organizers to host events on August 29th to highlight the 2001 Durban Conference, the historic declaration, the DDPA, and its significance as the catalyst to today’s reparation movement.

Mr. Wareham explained, “The Durban Conference and the DDPA set the foundation for the current reparations movement in the US and around the world. The DDPA is almost unknown in the US because since 2001, the US government has done everything in its power to disappear it...”.

Reparations organizers hosted rallies, teach-ins, webinars, conferences and film screenings of the Durban 400 documentary in New York, New Jersey, South Carolina, Kansas City, Detroit, Washington D.C, Chicago, St. Louis, Atlanta and in London. 

In the days leading up and after the 29th, there were online webinars, and panel discussions not only about the 2001 Conference but also shedding light on the material conditions Black people are experiencing today. Their presentation made the critical link here to the ongoing organizing and education work taking place on a local level by local reparations organizations, task forces and commissions.   

The events provided an opportunity for Black people to learn about what happened in Durban, and why, to talk and grapple with the DDPA. A chance to hear reflections from those who attended the conference. To discuss and grapple with the different ways they connect to the current conditions of working people and how reparations can best address those conditions. To direct attention towards the crime that took place - American chattel slavery. To shed light on the conspiracy, on the extensive collaboration needed to build the American political economy that enabled their role in the global capitalist economy. To remind folks that slavery was the economic roots to the American political economy. 

Event programming included political speakers analyzing the recent developments, making the connections between the Durban Declaration, the recent UN resolution advanced by the African Union to the reparations work taking place across the country. An analysis that not only advances an understanding of reparations and human rights, but their connection to the global Pan-African struggle for reparations.

Across the country, Black people are engaged in discussions about reparations, and responding to questions about reparations; how do you see reparations? How does reparations impact your life, your living and material conditions? 

They are engaged to talk about how reparations can truly transform our quality of life with compensation that extends beyond cash compensation. And to identify those priority issues aligned to their material reality; issues such as mass incarceration, housing, health care, land, or employment for example.

Conclusion

In the 25 years since the 2001 Durban Conference, there’s now a different conversation, a new narrative that has emerged on the reparations issue. Across the world, in the Caribbean, on the African continent, and in the US, there’s a discussion that is more transformative, that extends beyond cash compensation. 

There is now a sense of urgency. It is driven by the declining material conditions produced by structural forces maintaining the American political economy as well as the global ecosystem of banks, financial institutions, and multinational corporate interests. This sense of urgency is also driven by the on-going contradictions evidenced in the US refusal of accountability in the criminal enterprise of slavery while portraying the role of a law and order nation. 

In the days and months beyond Durban 25 commemorative events, the reparations movement here and abroad will raise questions and concerns, grapple, and debate the issues that have continued, unabated and those that emerged over the last 25 years. 

Inside the United Nations, there will be a battle to address and mobilize the political will for full and effective implementation of the DDPA. But the real battle will take place outside the UN, where as Mr. Wareham said back in 2001, “If we don’t safeguard our interests, in terms of the issues crucial to our own existence, then nobody else will.” 

The same holds true twenty-five years later…

Charles Brooks is an independent journalist and writer who attended the 2001 Durban Conference.  He currently posts his writing work on his site, The Brooks Blackboard where he writes about the conditions and decisions that impact Black political life. Over the years, he has written extensively about political issues for a number of Black publications such as the Final Call, The New York Amsterdam News, Black Star News and African Sun Times.  See here for a brief description of my writing life.

Endnotes