In April 2025, London will once again become the locus of Pan-African thought and political agitation as it hosts “The London Conference, 125 Years Later: Pan-Africanism and Dialogue on Reparations” at SOAS University of London. Organised by the Republic of Togo in coordination with the African Union (AU), this event marks a historic return to the city where the seeds of Pan-Africanism were first sown in 1900.
That inaugural gathering — held from 23 to 25 July 1900 and convened by figures such as Henry Sylvester-Williams and W.E.B. Du Bois — represented a landmark moment in anti-colonial thought. It unified African and diasporic voices against the depredations of empire, enslavement, and racial subjugation. Today, 125 years later, the conditions that inspired the original Pan-African Conference remain tragically resonant: economic exploitation, racial injustice, and the global denial of historical accountability continue to impede the liberation of African and Afro-descendant peoples.
The 2025 conference, which will feed directly into the 9th Pan-African Congress in Lomé, Togo later this year, centres on a theme that is as urgent as it is long overdue — reparations. It arrives at a time when the question of redress for slavery, colonisation, and their lingering legacies has regained global traction. Despite decades of mobilisation, numerous UN declarations (notably the 2001 Durban Declaration), and recent acknowledgements of slavery’s criminality, reparations remain largely rhetorical.
The African Union, having declared 2021–2031 the Decade of African Roots and the African Diaspora, has officially adopted “Justice for Africans and people of African descent through reparations” as the theme for 2025. The London Conference will be a central pillar of that campaign. It seeks to transform historical pain into political substance, offering not just remembrance, but resolve.
Structured around two pivotal panels, the half-day symposium at SOAS aims to bridge the intellectual and moral lineage between the 1900 and 2025 conferences. The first panel will revisit the philosophical and political architecture of early Pan-Africanism, assessing its trajectory in the face of modern imperialism, racism, and global inequality. The second will confront the reparations question head-on — exploring transformative and compensatory models of justice, legal innovations, and the moral obligations of former colonial powers. Each panel features eminent historians, civil society leaders, political actors, and legal experts, moderated to ensure both rigour and balance in debate.
This London convening is not isolated. It is a pre-congress event aligned with five other preparatory sessions already held across Africa and the diaspora, including in Brazil, South Africa, Mali, Tanzania, Morocco, and Congo. These have addressed themes from economic Pan-Africanism and technological sovereignty to memory, restitution, and diasporic development.
In particular, the 2024 Bahia pre-congress placed reparations within a framework of restorative justice — underscoring that this is not merely a financial or legal debate, but a moral and existential imperative for African peoples globally. Togo’s leadership in this Pan-African renaissance exemplifies a new wave of diplomatic activism by African states in confronting post-colonial inertia.
The question is no longer whether reparations are due — that argument has long been won among African and diasporic communities. Rather, it is about how they are to be realised, structured, and defended within international law and multilateral governance. Reparations today must account not only for past atrocities but also for ongoing structures of racial capitalism, systemic inequality, and epistemic erasure.
This moment is, therefore, not just commemorative but catalytic. It is a clarion call to mobilise, not mourn. To engage in sincere dialogue — not with the aim of appeasement, but of justice. To interrogate the international order not as passive observers, but as architects of new frameworks grounded in equity and historical truth.
Tickets to the conference are free and open to the public. Attendees are expected to include parliamentarians, diplomats, legal scholars, students, journalists, artists, and representatives of civil society from across the world. The goal is clear: to enrich the dialogue on reparations with concrete proposals, to amplify the voices of the historically marginalised, and to build momentum toward policy, not just rhetoric.
For registration, visit Eventbrite.
In 1900, Pan-Africanism began as a dream. In 2025, it returns to London as a demand.
