In his weekly letter on Monday, President Cyril Ramaphosa added his voice to a growing campaign for slavery and colonialism reparations, arguing that "much of the wealth of former colonial powers today is the result of the deprivation of Africa's people" and that redress must take the form of "sustained, direct, material investment in Africa's development".

The push for reparations against Western nations for their participation in slavery and colonialism in Africa has gathered serious momentum. The African Union designated 2025 as the Year of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations. In November last year, Algiers hosted an International Conference on the Crimes of Colonialism in Africa.

Then in March this year, Ghana led a successful resolution at the United Nations (UN) General Assembly – passed 123 to 3, with 52 abstentions – declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity. The UN’s press statement regarding the resolution stated: “Applause erupted in the UN General Assembly Hall on Wednesday as Member States adopted a resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity.”

RW Johnson, a regular columnist for The Common Sense, has set out in detail why the case for reparations has serious holes. Johnson writes: “Nobody wishes to defend the Atlantic slave trade which was, indeed, a crime against humanity. But there are many problems with giving it such pride of place.”

A few of Johnson's arguments are worth highlighting. To start, slavery and colonialism are as old as recorded history. The Greeks colonised the Mediterranean, Rome enslaved Britons, Gauls, and Germans, and the Mongols colonised and enslaved the Russians, yet nobody is demanding reparations from Rome or Ulaanbaatar. Within Africa itself, Johnson points out, West African chiefs were trading slaves across the Sahara long before Europeans arrived, often Muslim chiefs enslaving non-Muslims.

The call for reparations also conveniently leaves out the Muslim slave trade altogether: the trans-Atlantic trade lasted around 300 years; the Muslim slave trade in Africa lasted roughly 1 300 years.

The bigger problem is vast sums of money that are being demanded from the Western world, which run from $33 trillion to $777 trillion. As Johnson notes, "No Western politicians will even begin to consider bankrupting their countries in order to placate these quixotic demands." The unpopularity of modest welfare cuts in Britain, France, and the United States (US) suggests the fate of cuts thousands of times larger. Western aid budgets are already shrinking, even Sweden has trimmed its aid spending to redirect funds to Ukraine.

The irony for South Africa is that this moral campaign comes just as the world is moving away from the rules-based liberal order and into a multi-polar order built far more openly on power. The liberal order, for all its faults, created space for weaker states to appeal to law, rules, development finance, market access, and diplomatic sympathy. The multi-polar world that South Africa and its BRICS partners have so often welcomed does not run on solidarity, it runs on leverage. The assumption that wealthier states owe weaker ones a hearing are precisely features of a liberal order now being dismantled.

That is what makes Ramaphosa’s argument so revealing. In his letter, he said reparations “should include increased foreign direct investment and market access for the African countries affected by slavery”, as well as “skills and technology transfer”.

The irony cuts deeper here. South Africa is asking for investment, market access, and technology from the very Western partners it has spent years alienating, particularly the US. At the same time, Pretoria has built one of the most hostile investment climates for Western capital in the emerging-market world. Yet it now expects those same Western governments to help underwrite Africa’s development through reparations.

For South Africa, the harder truth is the one Johnson states plainly: there is no alternative to pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps.