When the African Union launched its 2025 theme – “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations” – at its 38th summit in Addis Ababa last February, it marked one of the continent’s boldest moves to demand accountability for centuries of slavery, colonialism, and exploitation.

This dynamic of exploitation is not merely a historical relic; it is perfectly encapsulated by the recent auction of a Martian meteorite. The NWA 16788 meteorite, the largest piece of Mars ever found on Earth, was discovered in Niger and later sold in a New York auction for over $5 million to an anonymous private collector.

Niger’s government has since launched an investigation, calling the sale “akin to illicit international trafficking.” This single event highlights a centuries-old pattern of cultural looting, where artifacts of historical and scientific importance have been taken from Africa with the profits leaving the country where they were found.

As Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has stated at the summit, “The demand for reparations is not about charity or financial aid. It is a call for justice.” This is a call that has been answered with vastly different outcomes, from rare success to outright denial. To understand this complex landscape, one must look no further than the disparate experiences of three nations: Libya, Namibia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The taboo surrounding reparations, though powerful, is neither absolute no unbreakable. A case in point is Italy’s 2008 Treaty of Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation with Libya, signed in Benghazi in August of that year, which serves as a unique and groundbreaking precedent – the first of its kind between a former colonial power and a former colony.

It was a direct acknowledgment of Italy’s “dark history” of colonial misdeeds, which included brutal tactics like aerial bombardment and the use of concentration camps where an estimated one million Libyans were........

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