Colonial reparations: from France to Germany and the Netherlands, how is Europe dealing with its past?

Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa created discussion and discord: on Tuesday night, during a dinner with foreign journalists in Portugal, the President of the Republic stated that “we have to pay the costs” of colonialism. He had already touched on the subject in 2023, also at the time of the Portuguese Revolution, but then without the prominence that it now has.

On Saturday, and politics was already boiling, especially on the right — which disagreed with Marcelo —, and the President came to delve deeper into this issue of colonial “reparations”, suggesting that “this should not be put under the carpet”, looking for solutions such as financing, forgiveness of debt and cooperation.

Furthermore: he advocated that Montenegro and the Government continue the previous work, of surveying the heritage assets of the former colonies in Portugal for later return.

The Government, which had not reacted since Wednesday, reacted on Saturday, in a conclusive statement: “No process or program of specific actions with this purpose was and is not at issue”.

But he recalled work already done: “The Portuguese State financed, in Angola, the Museum of the National Liberation Struggle; in Cape Verde, the museumization of the Tarrafal concentration camp; in Mozambique, the recovery of the slave ramp on the Island of Mozambique”.

Yes it is true. How true it is that the “cooperation” and “financing” that Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa proposed already exist. And they are the responsibility of previous governments.

The so-called Strategic Cooperation Programs, for example, currently being implemented, foresee the payment by 2027 of almost 1,200 million euros. These millions for projects in PALOP (Portuguese-speaking African Countries) and East Timor: 750 million for Angola, 170 for Mozambique, 95 for Cape Verde, 70 million for Timor-Leste, 60 for São Tomé and Príncipe and 19 for Guinea-Bissau.

The value includes a part in credit lines, but also projects in priority sectors, such as job creation, infrastructure modernization and, of course, Education and Health..

Even so, Portugal and Portuguese governments are lagging behind other European countries when it comes to “reparating” colonialism. At the forefront is, therefore, France and Macron — who has introduced the topic since 2017. And the action.

He was the first and greatest driver of the movement to restitute art objects and artefacts taken from the former French colonies.

Precisely in 2017, newly elected and on an official visit to Burkina Faso, Emmanuel Macron would say: “I belong to a generation for whom the crimes of our European colonization are indisputable and are part of our history. African heritage cannot be trapped in our museums”. They wouldn’t stay.

To the ancient kingdom of Benin (today the territory of Nigeria), for example, France returned 26 objects that would have been taken in a (colonial) context of violence, pillage and domination. Macron delivered and promised more: “I want this movement to continue.”

Yes, it continued. And France found a partnership in Germany.

These two countries, last January, promised to allocate 2.1 million euros to research objects from former colonies found in their museumsreturning them to their countries of origin in the future.

With or without investigation, Germany has already returned stolen objects and artefacts to Beninin 2022, but equally to Namibia, and it is expected that it will also be able to do so in relation to Tanzania colonized.

The German Minister for Foreign Affairs, Annalena Baerbock, argues that “as Germans and as Europeans, we must stop and reflect on what this really means”,

Still in Europe, Switzerland handed over 32 cultural objects to Egypt in 2018 and the Netherlands recently returned hundreds of objects, some from the 13th century, to Indonesiaformerly a colonial territory of the Dutch East Indies.

Indonesia was grateful, but expects more: “It’s not enough. They must show that they are willing to correct historical injustice as much as they can”, defended Lilian Goncalves-Ho Kang You, the woman in charge of the Restitution Commission.

“Shy” has been a major colonizer: the United Kingdom. The British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum returned 32 gold and silver pieces to Ghana, but returned them on loan for six years.

This is the settler’s “reparative” perspective. But there will, of course, be that of the colonized. And many countries have already come together to demand what they call “reparatory justice” from European governments.

CARICOMCaribbean Community, made up of 20 States, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago or Barbados, presented an action plan that, more than “returns”, it intends to carry out in-depth work in terms of combating the public health crisis, eradicating illiteracy or canceling international debts — all financed by the former colonizers.