Colonial memory rekindled by the movie “Reparations: The Colonial Debt”
On August 16, 2025, Bamako hosted the premiere of the documentary “Reparations The Colonial Debt”, directed by Senegalese filmmaker Ibrahima Sow. This powerful work, enriched with testimonies from experts and historical archives, shines a light on the crimes of colonialism and proposes legal mechanisms for African nations to demand reparations from former colonial powers.
The film strongly recalls that “colonial powers reaped enormous profits from African soil, leaving behind ruined economies, ethnic conflicts, and widespread poverty“. This truth finds a particular resonance in Benin, long known as the “Slave Coast”. From the port of Ouidah, hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were deported across the Atlantic, fueling a trade that allowed Europe to build its wealth at the expense of shattered African lives.
This historical connection explains the importance of the current debate in Benin. For several years, the country has been engaged in a process of remembrance, notably through the restitution by France, in 2021, of twenty-six works of art plundered during colonization. This act, hailed as a symbolic step, also revived the broader issue of financial and moral reparations.
Ibrahima Sow’s documentary also illustrates the continuity of plunder, through the contemporary exploitation of African resources. As Malian sociologist Aminata Dramane Traoré recalls: “The triangular trade served as the basis for the primitive accumulation of capital in Europe… All Western industrialization was built on the work of African slaves“. Her words echo the realities in Benin, where the story of the transatlantic slave trade remains a national trauma.
Like Senegal, which is now shedding light on the Thiaroye massacre, or Togo, which will host a continental event on reparations in December 2025, Benin is called to play a key role in this pan-African dynamic. Its history, marked by the slave trade and colonization, gives it a particular legitimacy in the claim for historical justice.
“We have a duty, not just a right, but a duty to demand reparations“, reminds Malian researcher Fodé Moussa Sidibé. A call that resonates strongly in Benin, where memory, justice, and sovereignty must now conjugate to transform the past into a lever for the future.