From tools for advocates to thundering calls for transformation, the PPF’s March 30 conference drew 97 participants from 36 countries into a shared determination: that reparations are not charity, not goodwill — but a political imperative whose time has come.
The Pan-African Progressive Front (PPF) successfully hosted a landmark online conference on March 30, 2026, bringing together 97 voices from across 36 countries to engage with the most pressing questions of reparative justice and colonial accountability. Held from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM GMT, the event served as a deliberate precursor to the highly anticipated Geneva Forum on Reparations and Colonial Accountability — not merely a warm-up, but a strategic act of preparation designed to ensure that African and diaspora voices arrive in Geneva with unified purpose and concrete tools.
The conference created a platform for scholars, activists, and progressives to engage in meaningful dialogue on historical injustices and the urgent need for reparations. Participants emphasised the importance of unity, justice, and liberation as guiding principles for the Pan-African movement — principles that were not invoked as abstractions, but tested against the hard realities of legal frameworks, economic structures, and the persistent legacies of empire.
Equipping the Movement: A Toolkit for Advocacy
Among the practical contributions of the conference was a significant announcement from Sumaila Mohammed, Head of the Economics Department of the Pan-African Progressive Front. The PPF Secretariat, he revealed, has developed a manual — a dedicated toolkit — ahead of the Geneva Forum, designed to equip advocates with the resources they need to take the issue of reparations forward in concrete, actionable terms.
“Now, whilst we give people the tools to advance their advocacy, it is also important to look at the platform to promote it.”
— Sumaila Mohammed, Head of Economics, Pan-African Progressive Front
The toolkit reflects a broader strategic orientation that ran through the entire conference: that advocacy, to be effective, must have an infrastructure. Moral clarity is necessary but not sufficient. What the movement requires, in addition to righteous anger and historical evidence, is the organisational capacity to translate that clarity into policy, into legal claims, and into the kind of sustained pressure that produces institutional change.
Rewriting History: The Demand for Educational Decolonisation
The conference’s session on the necessary political, legal, and historical foundations for reparative justice, led by Comrade Kwesi Pratt Jnr., returned to a theme that has become central to the PPF’s intellectual project: the relationship between what Africans are taught about their own history and the capacity of the reparations movement to make its case to the world.
Kwesi Pratt’s challenge was directed not only at former colonial powers, but inward — at the institutions, curricula, and habits of mind that colonialism has left behind on the continent itself. Justice, he argued, requires truth; and truth requires the courage to revise what has been taught.
“There is a challenge for every African. We need to establish institutions which will decolonize, which will remove the slave mentality from our educational institutions. And that’s a big task that we ought to perform after the passage of this resolution. It’s important also to get our historians to go to work, to check the records. To check the records, all the records available everywhere on the transatlantic slave trade. To check the numbers, to check those who died, those who were thrown into the sea, the living conditions of people in North America at the time, how much slave labor was worth, and so on.”
— Comrade Kwesi Pratt Jnr., PPF Online Conference, March 30, 2026
The call to ‘check the records’ is as much a legal argument as a historical one. Reparations claims, wherever they are made — in domestic courts, at international tribunals, or before bodies like the Geneva Forum — require documentation. The work of historians is therefore not ancillary to the legal and political struggle; it is foundational to it. Pratt’s intervention reminds the movement that the archive is a site of contest, and that winning there is a precondition for winning anywhere else.
Imperialism’s Three Levels: N’Diaye’s Structural Analysis
One of the most analytically rigorous contributions of the conference came from Comrade Yancouba Djole N’Diaye of Guinea-Bissau, whose address on Anti-Imperialism and Reparations offered a framework for understanding why the reparations struggle cannot be separated from the broader project of dismantling imperial structures.
“Because imperialism has operated — and continues to operate — on three fundamental levels: First, it has denied our history, presenting Africa as having no past. Secondly, it has exploited our present, organising structural dependency. And thirdly, it seeks to shape our future through mechanisms of global control.”
— Comrade Yancouba Djole N’Diaye, Guinea-Bissau, PPF Online Conference, March 30, 2026
From this three-part diagnosis, N’Diaye drew a correspondingly expansive understanding of what reparations must mean in practice:
“In this context, reparations must be understood as: the restitution of stolen history, the reconstruction of African sovereignty, the reorganisation of power relations on a global scale. Reparations do not simply mean compensation. Reparations mean transformation.”
— Comrade Yancouba Djole N’Diaye, Guinea-Bissau, PPF Online Conference, March 30, 2026
The word ‘transformation’ is doing substantial work in this formulation. It signals a refusal to accept a version of reparations that leaves the underlying structures of inequality intact — a version in which former colonial powers write a cheque and the architecture of domination continues undisturbed. For N’Diaye, as for many at this conference, reparations that do not alter power relations are not reparations at all.
Sovereignty as Strategy: Adamou’s Political Challenge
Comrade Soumana Adamou of Niger brought a complementary but distinctly strategic perspective to the conference through his presentation on Reparations as a Political Struggle: Mobilising African Sovereignty in the Post-Colonial World. His argument was directed at the movement itself — at the habits of advocacy that, however well-intentioned, may be undermining the very claims they seek to advance.
“Indeed, we must now abandon denouncing past crimes while simultaneously demanding public apologies or compensation from former colonial powers. This stance perpetuates the continent’s weakness and continued dependence. Furthermore, how can one demand justice from one’s oppressor when one still depends on them for security, currency, or the exploitation of resources? The real challenge, therefore, is to transform activism into an instrument of political liberation.”
— Comrade Soumana Adamou, Niger, PPF Online Conference, March 30, 2026 Adamou’s analysis draws a sharp line between denunciation and liberation. Denunciation — the cataloguing of crimes, the demand for apology, the appeal to conscience — has its place in the movement’s history. But it is not, by itself, sufficient. The structural dependencies that bind African nations to their former colonisers must be named and addressed as part of the reparations project, not deferred until after some imagined moment of formal settlement. Sovereignty, in Adamou’s framing, is not the reward for winning the reparations argument; it is the condition that makes winning possible.
The conference concluded with a statement from the Deputy Head of the Pan-African Progressive Front that captured both the ambition and the discipline of the movement’s next steps. His remarks were directed not only at the participants present, but at the wider world whose attention the Geneva Forum is designed to command:
“We believe that our event will come alongside the time of the second session, so that whatever we discuss will be heard by the whole world. And so within this frame, this conference we are looking at in Geneva is not going to be like any other conference. This is going to be a strategic convergence of all the interested parties. And we believe that it is in Geneva that we can converge the history. We bring in the law, we look at the politics, and then we look at the advocacy, and we look at how we can have a working mechanism to take this idea of reparations much further.”
— Michael Mensah, Head of Political Affairs, Pan-African Progressive Front speaking after the event, PPF Online Conference, March 30, 2026
The phrase ‘strategic convergence’ is deliberate and precise. The Geneva Forum is not intended to be a conference about reparations in the abstract. It is intended to be a moment at which history, law, politics, and advocacy meet — and from that meeting, produce a working mechanism capable of taking the idea of reparations beyond the realm of demand and into the realm of implementation.
As the world turns its attention toward Geneva, the PPF’s March 30 conference has set the terms of engagement with admirable clarity. The movement knows what it is asking for. It knows why it is asking. And, increasingly, it knows how to win.
Written by Princess Yanney, Journalist, Writer & Media Analyst
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