STATEMENT BY DR. BARRYL A. BIEKMAN
Fourth Session of the UN Permanent Forum for People of African Descent
April 16, 2025 | United Nations Headquarters, New York

Chair,

Thank you for giving me the floor.

I speak today on behalf of the Kingdom of Kush and the African Union African Diaspora Sixth Region High Council; The  KROTOASA Foundation, the National Platform Dutch Slavery Past, Tiye International, the National Reparation Commission NL, EPAF-PAD Belgium, the Institution of Financial Unity, the Europe Pan-African Forum for People of African Descent, the Europe Pan-African Coalition on Reparatory Justice, the Guyana Reparations Commission, and many other civil society organisations, Pan-Africanists, scholars, and activists.

On April 15th, we gathered—hosted by the Kingdom of Kush and the African Union’s Sixth Region High Council—for a Rootssynergy Conversation on Land Rights and Reparatory Justice. What we heard were not just testimonies—they were cries of identity loss, forced displacement, and spiritual disconnection. Yet, we were also uplifted by the vital contributions of the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent and the AU’s Citizen and Diaspora Organisation (CIDO).

Chair,

Reparations are not optional. They are overdue legal and moral obligations. Land is not simply territory—it is memory, lineage, and legacy. Our commitment to Pan-African Indigenous Repairs reflects a call for Rematriation: the cultural, spiritual, and ecological restoration of what was taken. We assert our sacred covenant with Mother Earth, across the continent and the diaspora—recognized as Africa’s Sixth Region.

This includes land where African people were dispersed, and land that holds our memory—our rivers, mountains, forests, and sacred sites. Restoration is not symbolic; it is a fundamental healing process and an ancestral obligation.

In conclusion, I submit select paragraphs from our April 15th Declaration to this Forum and ask that it be considered in your consultation mandate. 

Chair, I close with a reminder:

“A nation without identity is a nation open to manipulation.”

Who defines us? Who defined terms like “Diaspora”? “Coloured”? “Khoisan”? These questions must guide our truth-seeking and justice-seeking work. The Khoe and San peoples, like many across our family, have endured over 400 years of dispossession. This cannot continue.

We call for urgent attention to land rights as a core issue within the Forum’s mission on Reparatory Justice.

Thank you. 

Dr. Barryl A. Biekman – AUADS Sixth Region High Council

On behalf of HRH Mansa Dr. Suliman Al Kushi – Kingdom of Kush

DECLARATION ON AFRICAN INDIGENEITY AND LAND REPARATIONS

Pan-African Roots Synergy – Conversation on Land Rights for Indigenous Africans
(Perspective of the Fourth Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (UN PFPAD))

April 16, 2025

Preamble

In the spirit of the 1900 London Pan-African Congress; the 2001 Durban Declaration and Programme of Action and the affiliated Resolutions and Declarations; the London Pan-African Declaration of April 9, 2025,

We the KROTOASA FOUNDATION, National Platform Dutch Slavery Past; Tiye International, National Reparation Commission NL; EPAF-PAD Belgium: Institution of Financial Unity; Europe Pan-African Forum for People of African Descent; Europe Pan-African Coalition on Reparatory Justice; Guyana Reparation Commission and many others from the Global Pan African Movement, Civil society organisation, Human Rights  Activist, Scientist and Scholars gathered on April 15^th , during a Roots Synergy High Level Conversation on Land rights,  African  and Reparatory justice  organised by the Kingdom of Kush and the African Union Sixth Region High Council.

hereby affirm our collective right as Indigenous African Peoples on the continent and people who have retained and recultivated their African Indigeneity in the diaspora to reparatory justice that centres land restitution, people-centered governance, and juridical recognition of our displacement and endurance through ongoing colonial structures and legacies.

This declaration is rooted in binding international law, customary rights, historical obligations, and living memory, advancing a holistic framework of Pan-African Indigenous repairs (Re-PAIRs) as developed by the International Network of Scholars and Activists for African Reparations (INOSAAR). We recognize INOSAAR’s groundbreaking scholarship, research, and policy advocacy that conceptualizes reparations as inseparable from cultural, spiritual, and environmental restoration.

Foundational Principles

Reparations are not an option. They are overdue obligations. And land is not just territory, it is our temple, our timeline, and our inheritance. Through recognizing the necessity of Pan-African Indigenous Repairs, we affirm our unwavering commitment to holistic Rematriation that addresses cultural, spiritual, and environmental dimensions of colonial crimes and the colossal harms they continue to unleash across generations. We are creating sacred pathways to restore African Indigeneity and rebuild our ancestral covenant with that part of Mother Earth to which we have blood memory, spiritual connections, and unbreakable ties—the African continent and the entire global diaspora, recognized as the Sixth Region of Africa.

This restoration proclaims African bloodlines throughout humanity and affirms that our sacred relationship to land extends to all territories where African people have been forcibly dispersed, while centering the reclamation of our direct, living relationship with African soil, waterways, forests, mountains, and sacred landscapes. Such reconnection is essential not only to healing the profound wounds of displacement but to fulfilling our ancestral mandate as stewards and protectors of these territories that hold our origins, our spiritual technologies, and our African Indigenous futures.

We commit to transforming how we see, relate to, and treat land—rejecting colonial frameworks of ownership, extraction, and domination in favour of ancestral understandings of land as living relation, as spiritual entity, and as the foundation of our collective being. True reparatory justice requires not just the return of land, but the restoration of sacred relationships with land that honour her inherent dignity and rights.

I. Legal Identity as Indigenous African Peoples

We affirm that Indigenous African Peoples on the continent and People of African Descent who have retained and recultivated their African Indigeneity in the diaspora, despite being forcibly displaced through the Trans-Atlantic trafficking of African People, chattel slavery, colonial domination, and apartheid, remain Indigenous African Peoples whose sovereignty continues despite centuries of disruption. This identity is rooted in sustained cultural traditions, ancestral knowledge systems, spiritual continuity, and resistance to colonial impositions that persist into the present day. We recognize that those in the diaspora did not stop being Indigenous but rather have recultivated a Pan-African Indigeneity through conscious reconnection with ancestral ways of being and knowing.

The status of Indigenous African Peoples requires legal recognition under international human rights law. Instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, Article 26) provide a framework for restitution of land and resources, asserting that Indigenous peoples hold rights to territories they have ‘traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired.’

We honour the sacred Ancestral Trust that binds past, present, and future generations of African peoples in an unbreakable covenant of responsibility and care for land, culture, and community. This Ancestral Trust represents the intergenerational obligations that Indigenous African communities have maintained despite colonial disruption.

We urge all relevant international bodies, including the African Union, United Nations including the Permanent Forum For People of African Descent, and CARICOM, to formally adopt this designation. This will ensure that the enduring claims of African and African-descendant peoples are not erased, but legally enshrined as a foundation for reparatory justice that acknowledges the continuous nature of colonial harm.

II. Territorial Restitution and Transformative Land Relationships

We declare that land restitution is central to, but not sufficient for, comprehensive reparatory justice. Beyond the physical return of stolen territories, we must fundamentally transform the way we see, relate to, and treat land. The theft of land under enslavement, colonisation, neocolonial exploitation, and structural adjustment programs constitutes a continuing violation of international law. However, the deeper harm lies in the imposition of extractive, commodified relationships with land that replaced sacred, reciprocal, and kinship-based understandings.

We demand not only the restoration of ancestral lands through mechanisms that prioritise the lived experience, oral memory, and customary jurisprudence of displaced African communities, but also the revitalization of Indigenous African ontologies that recognize land as living ancestor, spiritual entity, and communal relation rather than private property.

We call for the institutionalisation of the Pan-African Land Reclamation and Restitution Registry (PALRR), which will utilise geospatial technologies, archival research, and community verification to identify, document, and initiate claims for land restitution within a framework that honours traditional land stewardship practices and sacred relationships with territory.

We embrace the concept of Rematriation as defined by INOSAAR scholars (Frith, Hope Scott, Stanford-Xosei, 2022) as “the historical and spiritual restitution needed to repair the violations suffered by the descendants of those who were forcibly removed from Afrika,” which includes the right to re-embrace, “return and belong to ‘Pan-Afrika’.” This Indigenous concept refers to restoring a people to “a spiritual way of life, in sacred relationship with their ancestral lands, without external interference”.

We acknowledge the need for Indigenous Rematriation for peoples on the continent of Africa who have been internally displaced by colonial borders, land appropriation, and forced relocations. Many Indigenous African communities continue to be alienated from their ancestral territories within the continent itself and require pathways to return to and reconnect with their traditional lands, sacred sites, and customary governance systems that colonial and postcolonial states have disrupted.

We uphold the right of Indigenous Africans on the continent to Rematriate to reformulations of their Indigenous polities, which are referred to as Sankofahomes, and propose the expansion of citizenship-by-descent initiatives across African nations, enabling African-descendants to return to and resettle in ancestral territories, supported by the AU Sixth Region protocols.

III. Reparatory Economy – From Capital Extraction to Ubuntunomics

The current global economic order is built on the extractive exploitation of African peoples and lands and represents ongoing colonial structures in new forms. Reparatory justice requires a fundamental restructuring of this paradigm, including our fundamental relationship with land as more than a resource to be owned and exploited. We therefore commit to the adoption of Ubuntunomics, an economic philosophy rooted in the African principles of interdependence, reciprocity, collective care, and ecological balance.

Ubuntunomics challenges capitalist privatisation of land and proposes community stewardship, cooperative enterprise, and localised wealth generation as models of reparatory economic development. It rejects the colonial notion of land as commodity and restores the Indigenous understanding of land as relation, teacher, and sacred trust. Ubuntunomics draws from and aligns with the maternal gift economy, recognizing that both systems prioritize generosity, reciprocity, and care over accumulation and extraction, rooting economic relations in communal well-being rather than individual profit.

We further affirm the development of a Pan-African Reparatory Economic Zone, integrating traditional ecological knowledge, food sovereignty, and circular economies to regenerate land, reestablish kinship economies, and restore collective prosperity in alignment with African Indigenous knowledge systems. This zone will operate according to principles that recognize Mother Earth’s inherent dignity and the sacred right of land to flourish as a living entity, rather than merely serving human economic interests.

In alignment with the London Declaration of April 9, 2025, we embrace the vision of a repaired Africa as Maatubuntuman– a Pan-African polity governed by the principles of truth, justice, balance, reciprocity, and harmony (Maat) coexisting in in Ubuntudunia a world of Ubuntu values where humanity is realized through our interconnectedness. This represents both our ancestral legacy and our decolonial future, where land relations, economic systems, and governance structures are reoriented toward collective well-being rather than extraction and domination.

IV. Legal Precedents and Instruments

1. UNDRIP (Article 26): Land and cultural rights for Indigenous peoples.
2. Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (2001): Recognition of slavery as a crime against humanity.
3. The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (Banjul Charter), which specifically provides in Article 21(1) that “All peoples shall freely dispose of their wealth and natural resources. This right shall be exercised in the exclusive interest of the people. In no case shall a people be deprived of it.” Further, Article 21(2) states: “In case of spoliation, the dispossessed people shall have the right to the lawful recovery of its property as well as to an adequate compensation.”
4. Article 20 of the Banjul Charter affirms that “All peoples shall have the right to existence. They shall have the unquestionable and inalienable right to self-determination.” This establishes the foundation for Indigenous African communities to reclaim their territories and governance systems.
5. The African Union Agenda 2063, which calls for the restoration of African cultural identity, common heritage, values and ethics as central to Africa’s development and transformation.
6. The African Convention on the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (revised version), which recognizes the right of local communities to participate in land and natural resource management.
7. The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Protocol), which ensures women’s equal access to and control over productive resources and land.
8. African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights Resolution 224 (2012) on a Human Rights-Based Approach to Natural Resource Governance.
9. The AU Framework and Guidelines on Land Policy in Africa, which calls for recognition of the land rights of vulnerable groups including Indigenous communities.
10. The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which we apply to cultural genocide and ethnocide perpetrated against African peoples through the deliberate destruction of cultural, linguistic, and spiritual practices.
11. Emerging international legal frameworks on ecocide that recognize the deliberate destruction of ecosystems as a crime against humanity, Mother Earth and future generations.
12. Traditional African legal systems and customary laws governing land tenure, which predate colonial imposition and continue to provide legitimate frameworks for land governance across the continent.
13. ICJ and IACHR case law affirming state liability for historical injustices.
14. International frameworks recognizing continuous harm and intergenerational trauma from colonial structures.

These instruments provide the international and African legal terrain on which we now stand to press our demands for comprehensive reparatory justice.

V. Mechanisms for Land Justice Implementation

We commit to the immediate activation of multi-layered mechanisms to deliver land justice at local, regional, continental, and international levels. These include:

1. The establishment of an AU-UN Joint Commission on Reparatory Land Justice composed of state and non-state actors, including legal scholars, traditional leaders, and civil society organisations.
2. National Land Reparations Councils to be formed in every African Union member state, tasked with adjudicating domestic claims and coordinating with diaspora returnees.
3. Creation of Continental Indigenous Rematriation Councils to address the needs of Indigenous African communities on the continent who have been internally displaced by colonial borders, conservation areas, extractive industries, and development projects.
4. Legal recognition of Indigenous African governance structures as key interlocutors in land-related legal processes, including chiefs, elders, women’s councils, and youth assemblies.
5. The development of a continental database to track, map, and monitor land dispossession, restitution progress, and policy gaps across jurisdictions.
6. Creation of Pan-African Indigenous Repair Centers for knowledge documentation, language revitalization, and cultural restoration.

VI. Framework for the Pan-Afrikan Reparatory Justice Framework for Holistic Rematriation/Repatriation (PARJFHRR)

Recent advances in genetic ancestry testing have further validated the collective memory of displacement carried by African-descendant peoples. While DNA does not define identity, it provides scientific corroboration of our ancestral ties to distinct geographies, clans, and cultural lineages across West, Central, and East Africa. These biological records now join oral traditions, treaties, and historical archives as admissible forms of evidence in land claims and Rematriation cases. Genetic mapping must be democratized, not as a consumer luxury, but as a right of return technology, facilitating documentation for reparatory justice and legal citizenship-by-descent programs.

The Kingdom of Kush, re-established in 1993 on unclaimed land between Egypt and Sudan (Bir Tawil), represents a living experiment in territorial restoration for displaced African peoples. Recognised by multiple states and built upon international law under the Montevideo Convention, the Kingdom provides both symbolic and strategic anchoring for the African Diaspora’s right to Rematriation. It also serves as a jurisdictional nucleus for AU Sixth Region engagement, legal reintegration, and cultural governance. We call upon the African Union and United Nations to engage with Kush not as anomaly, but as precedent, an emerging model for Indigenous African sovereignty rooted in ancestral reclamation.

We affirm the necessity of codifying reparatory justice through a binding Pan-African treaty known as the Pan-Afrikan Reparatory Justice Framework for Holistic Rematriation/Repatriation (PARJFHRR) inspired by the Global Afrikan Peoples Parliament and Maatubuntumitawo-GAFRIC.

 This treaty shall:

1. Enshrine the principle that African-descendants have an inalienable right to return to and reclaim ancestral land, including the right to reclaim relationships with and to land as part of their indigenous communities from which they have been dispossessed.
2. Recognize the indigenous land rights of Africans on the continent, affirming their right to Rematriate to reformulations of their indigenous polities (Sankofahomes).
3. Establish mechanisms to support Indigenous African communities on the continent who have been internally displaced by colonial borders and land appropriation to return to their ancestral territories.
4. Specifically recognize and support African diaspora communities that are cultivating connections with emerging Sankofahomes on the continent, including those establishing Maatubuntujamaas (communities governed by principles of truth, justice, balance, and reciprocity) throughout the diaspora.
5. Affirm that the return of those in the diaspora is essential to safeguard the indigeneity of African communities and restore Africa to its rightful place in the world. Our return will strengthen Africa’s ability to restore true sovereignty, ensuring that we are not just returning to a neocolonial Africa but collectively drawing on our people’s might to dismantle the harmful structural violence of artificial borders imposed during the Berlin Conference of 1884-5 and other colonial impositions that continue to fragment our continent and identity.
6. Establish that the right to Africa belongs to all Africans, both at home and abroad, as a fundamental principle of Pan-African Indigenous sovereignty.
7. Provide legal and institutional frameworks for restitution, reparations, and legal redress.
8. Mandate African Union, CARICOM, Latin American states in particular to harmonise domestic laws with treaty provisions.
9. Include monitoring bodies to enforce compliance, protect rights of returnees, and penalise illegal land occupation or transfer.
10. Integrate INOSAAR’s framework of Pan-African Indigenous repairs that combines cultural, spiritual, ecological, and pedagogical dimensions of reparatory justice across the entire global African family, encompassing continental Africa and all diasporic communities worldwide.
11. Establish legal recognition of African Ancestral Trust as a legitimate framework for land governance, cultural preservation, and intergenerational sustainability. The African Ancestral Trust represents the sacred covenant whereby land is held not as private property but in trust for past, present, and future generations. It embodies the principle that current generations are stewards rather than owners of land, with obligations to ancestral spirits and future descendants. As Amilcar Cabral affirmed, “But, we, Africans, firmly believe that the dead continue living by our sides, we are a society of dead and living.” This truth forms the foundation of the African Ancestral Trust, recognizing that land governance must honour this continuity between generations. This framework rejects the colonial concept of land as alienable commodity and restores indigenous governance models where land is communally held, spiritually significant, and managed according to customary laws that ensure sustainable use and equitable access. This Trust system should be protected under African and international law as a legitimate governance model for reparatory land justice.

We categorically condemn and reject all attempts to deny African Ancestral Trust and the unconscionable practice of requiring African peoples to pay compensation to colonizers or their descendants for the return of stolen lands. Such demands represent a perverse inversion of justice, whereby the victims of theft are required to purchase what was forcibly taken from them. We denounce this as a continuation of colonial extraction and an assault on the fundamental principles of reparatory justice. No legitimate claim to compensation exists for those who profited from the systematic dispossession of Indigenous African peoples, and we refuse all legal, political, and economic mechanisms designed to perpetuate this injustice under the guise of property rights or economic stability.

This Pan-African Reparations Treaty shall be informed by Indigenous African legal traditions, African philosophical systems, and best practices in human, peoples and Mother Earth rights law, drawing from the grassroots community-based models of collective/community self-repairs.

VII. Education, Culture, and Sacred Heritage

We declare education, cultural restoration, and sacred heritage as non-negotiable pillars of reparatory land justice, recognizing the cognitive injustice of epistemicide against African knowledge systems. We explicitly acknowledge the cultural genocide and ethnocide perpetrated against African peoples through the deliberate destruction of languages, spiritual practices, governance systems, and knowledge traditions. These acts were not incidental but strategic components of colonization designed to sever our connections to land and identity, and they require specific forms of redress beyond material compensation. To counter these deliberate acts of erasure and reclaim our severed connections, we call for the following measures:

• Schools, colleges, and universities across Africa and the diaspora must be decolonised to include critical Pan-African Studies, Indigenous land histories, and resistance narratives as a direct counteraction to educational systems that were purposefully designed to alienate African peoples from their Ancestral lands and cultural heritage.
• Language revitalisation programmes shall be launched to restore ancestral languages suppressed through African chattel enslavement and colonialism, acknowledging that linguistic diversity is integral to maintaining harmonious relationships with land.
• Cultural institutions, museums, and archives must return stolen artifacts and human remains to their rightful communities as a fundamental act of reparatory justice and spiritual healing.
• Ancestral lands shall be designated as protected spiritual zones, beyond economic exploitation, preserved for ritual, healing, and legacy.
• Indigenous African knowledge systems and spiritual practices shall be validated, protected, and centered in all reparatory frameworks as living alternatives to extractive epistemologies.
• We call for the establishment of Ancestral Trust Repositories that document, safeguard, and transmit Indigenous African knowledge, cultural practices, and ecological wisdom for future generations, ensuring that these living archives remain under the governance of Indigenous African communities.
• Create mechanisms for the recovery, restoration, and revitalization of cultural and spiritual technologies that were criminalized, demonized, and nearly eradicated through colonial legal frameworks and missionary activities.
• Establish truth and reparatory justice processes that document the full extent of cultural genocide and ethnocide perpetrated against African peoples, including the criminalization of spiritual practices, forced religious conversion, and the destruction of sacred sites.

VIII. Restoring African Gender Complementarity and the Mother Principle

We reaffirm that reparatory land justice requires restoring indigenous African gender paradigms that were systematically attacked by colonial impositions. The African Mother Principle of female-male equity establishes balance, complementarity, and mutual respect between genders as foundational to community governance and cosmic harmony. We recognize the leadership roles African women have always maintained as cultivators, knowledge-keepers, community anchors, and spiritual authorities—roles that colonial systems deliberately undermined to fragment African social cohesion.

1. Return to indigenous African gender complementarity systems that honour both female and male principles and leadership in balanced governance and decision-making models, rejecting colonial patriarchal impositions.
2. Restore and widely implement matrilineal wisdom traditions and governance models beyond where they were historically practiced, recognizing their value for all contemporary African contexts. We acknowledge that many African societies traced descent, inheritance, and spiritual authority through maternal lines, and affirm that these systems offer powerful alternatives to colonial patriarchal models. We further recognize the maternal gift economy—based on principles of generosity, reciprocity, and care rather than accumulation and extraction—as a vital economic paradigm for reparatory justice that complements and enriches Ubuntunomics, together forming a holistic framework of Indigenous African economic relations that should be implemented across all African communities.
3. Elevate African Womanist, Motherist, and indigenous feminist leadership philosophies and approaches within legal, diplomatic, spiritual, and political frameworks as expressions of pre-colonial and contemporary African social organization.
4. Ensure just and equal land ownership, stewardship rights, and governance participation for women across all implementation mechanisms, acknowledging women’s traditional roles as primary cultivators and land guardians in many African societies.
5. Provide restituted resources and funding for women-led cooperatives and regenerative economies rooted in Maat (truth, justice, balance, harmony) and Ubuntu (collective flourishing), revitalizing economic models that preceded colonial extraction.
6. Incorporate gender-responsive measures into all restitution frameworks to address intergenerational trauma and structural exclusion perpetuated by colonial disruption of gender systems.
7. Center the African Mother Principle in all aspects of rematriation, recognizing that true restoration and regeneration of African Indigeneity requires healing the deliberate colonial rupture of gender complementarity that was central to African social, political and spiritual systems.

IX. Strategic Global Mobilisation

We will mobilise the full force of the global African community to advance, defend, and enforce this declaration including:

1. Launching a coordinated international campaign linking African reparatory justice with broader anti-colonial, Indigenous, land, and climate and ecological justice movements.
2. Partnering with grassroots movements, legal and educational institutions to train the next generation of African, African diaspora and Afro-descendant legal defenders.
3. Establishing All-Party Parliamentary Commissions of Inquiry for Truth & Reparatory Justice and Pan-African Reparatory Justice Centers in African, Caribbean and Abya Yalan (so-called Americas) nations and diaspora communities to document colonial harms, facilitate land claims, support returnees, and support the coordination of rematriation processes.
4. Convening a bi-annual Pan-African Land and Reparations Summit to assess implementation and recalibrate strategy.
5. Collaborating with the INOSAAR network of Pan-African Indigenous Repairs practitioners to document and share community-based models of self-repair and Rematriation from West Africa, across Abya Yala, the Caribbean, and Europe.

We move as a unified force, with memory as our map, Indigenous African law as our compass, and holistic justice as our destination.

X. Planet Repairs: Holistic Restoration of Environmental, Spiritual, and Intergenerational Justice

We embrace the concept of Planet Repairs as developed by INOSAAR scholar-activists (Frith and Stanford-Xosei, 2024), which “recognizes the need to safeguard the rights of past, present and future generations in the context of a climate emergency and the destruction of sacred natural spaces that began with enslavement, colonialism, mass industrialization and capital accumulation.”

Planet Repairs highlights the interconnections between reparatory, environmental, spiritual and cognitive forms of justice to “repair holistically our relationship with, and inseparability from, Mother Earth, the Environment and the Pluriverse giving due recognition to Indigenous Knowledges.” This framework pushes beyond the speculative financial-legal model of reparations, bringing efforts to address both racial and environmental injustices into alignment.

We assert that land justice is inseparable from environmental reparations, as colonial exploitation has resulted in the degradation of African ecosystems and the disruption of Indigenous stewardship practices. We explicitly acknowledge ecocide—the deliberate destruction of ecosystems and sacred natural sites—as a distinct colonial crime requiring specific forms of redress. The systematic devastation of African biodiversity, waterways, forests, and soil through extractive industries, monocropping, and toxic contamination constitutes an ongoing assault on our relationship with Mother Earth that must be remedied through comprehensive ecological restoration and reparation.

True repair necessitates a profound transformation in how humanity perceives and interacts with land—not as property to be owned, but as a living entity with inherent rights and dignity.

1. Establish ecological reparations funds to address climate injustice, environmental racism, and the disproportionate burden placed on African communities.
2. Revitalize Indigenous African agricultural practices, seed sovereignty initiatives, and traditional conservation methodologies.
3. Implement legal protections for sacred natural sites and biodiversity hotspots connected to African spiritual systems and practices.
4. Create frameworks for the return of land management to Indigenous African communities with proven histories of sustainable stewardship.
5. Develop African-centered climate adaptation strategies that prioritize local knowledge and resilience practices.
6. Recognize and protect the special relationship between Indigenous African communities and their sacred landscapes as integral to cultural continuity and spiritual well-being.
7. Establish legal frameworks that enforce the Rights of Nature and Mother Earth from Indigenous African and Pan-African perspectives, rejecting the commodification and objectification of land in favour of people-centered governance models.
8. Hold corporations, colonial powers, and neocolonial regimes accountable for ecocide committed against African lands, waters and ecosystems, demanding ecological restoration and compensation for environmental harms.

Conclusion

Let it be declared, on this day, April 15, 2025, that the global African family reclaims its ancestral right to land, jurisdiction, and governance. Let every generation know that this declaration is not a plea, it is a legal and spiritual demand rooted in centuries of resistance and vision.

We solemnly declare the fundamental and inalienable right to Africa for all Africans, both at home and abroad. This right encompasses the legitimacy of Indigenous African People on the continent to reformulate their Indigenous polities as Sankofahomes, and the right of people of African ancestry and heritage who have retained and recultivated their African Indigeneity in the diaspora to return and reconnect with their ancestral homelands in all dimensions—physically, spiritually, and culturally.

Reparations are not an option. They are overdue obligations. The time for Pan-African Indigenous Repairs is now!

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