The African Union (AU) will mark Nov. 30 as the African Day of Tribute to African Martyrs and Victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Colonization, and Apartheid. At their February 2026 summit in Addis Ababa, AU leaders established the observance and adopted a resolution describing slavery, deportation and colonialism as genocide and crimes against the people of Africa.

The AU Commission chairperson said the organization would extend its 2025 reparations initiative into a 2026–2035 Decade of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations.

In a separate 2023 report, the Brattle Group estimated reparations for transatlantic slavery at $100 trillion to $131 trillion. It put the amounts owed by the United States and Britain at about $25 trillion each.

In Washington, the domestic reparations debate is set to return to a Democratic-controlled Congress. The Associated Press called the House for Democrats, who are on track to hold at least 228 House seats and 54 Senate seats when the 120th Congress is sworn in on Jan. 3, 2027. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., introduced H.R. 40 in January 2025 to create a federal commission to study and develop reparations proposals. An earlier version of the bill cleared the House Judiciary Committee for the first time in 2021, when Democrats held the House. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the committee’s ranking member, is expected to become its chairman in the new Congress.

The AU’s case for reparations rests partly on the claim that Europe took Africa’s natural resources. The AU-endorsed Algiers Declaration seeks to restore African sovereignty over the continent’s economic, cultural and natural resources and condemns “resource plundering” as a form of colonialism.

An article in AU Echo says Africa holds “30% of the world’s mineral reserves” but accounts for 3% of global trade. Leftists treat comparisons like this as proof of Western exploitation. The two figures measure fundamentally different things. Mineral reserves measure a stock of ore in the ground. Global trade measures the value of goods and services traded across borders over a given period.

The automobile is a good example of the gap between the price of a raw material and the price of the finished product. The World Steel Association reports that the average vehicle contains about 900 kilograms of steel, which takes roughly 1.4 tonnes of iron ore to produce. In late October 2026, iron ore sold for about $90 a tonne at China’s Qingdao port. At that price, the ore needed to make the steel in an average car would cost about $130.

Data from Japan’s Finance Ministry show that the average Japanese car exported to the United States in 2025 was valued at 3.92 million yen, or about $26,000. The iron ore accounts for about half of 1% of the car’s export price, and the rest is value added by Japanese engineering, manufacturing and assembly. Differences in innovation, marketing, industrial development and technology, rather than exploitation or colonialism, explain why Japan is richer than any African country.

Cobalt is another example. It had almost no economic value to the African countries that held its deposits until European innovation created industrial demand for it. Congo mined an estimated 73% of the world’s cobalt in 2025, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. In 2020, it exported $2.36 billion worth of cobalt.

In the first 10 months of that same year, China exported $12.5 billion worth of lithium-ion batteries. By 2025, China’s lithium-ion battery exports had reached $76.8 billion, according to Chinese customs data. A country that exports ore earns the market price of the ore. Countries that refine it and manufacture batteries, cars and electronics earn the value they add at each stage of production.

Foreign investment helped turn Congo’s deposits into producing mines. Chinese-majority-owned mines produced 72% of Congo’s mined cobalt in 2025, according to the Cobalt Institute’s 2025 market report, prepared by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Two of Congo’s largest cobalt operations, the Tenke Fungurume mine and the Kisanfu project, passed from U.S.-based Freeport-McMoRan to China’s CMOC in 2016 and 2020, respectively. Across Africa, European investors still hold the largest stock of foreign direct investment, followed by the United States and China, according to UNCTAD, the United Nations trade and development agency.

Congo’s mining sector generated an average of $5.54 billion a year in government revenue from 2018 to 2022, roughly one-third of the government’s domestic revenue, or less than $60 per Congolese citizen per year, according to the International Monetary Fund. Congo’s GDP per capita in 2024 was about $711, which puts extreme poverty above 80%.

Congo’s 2018 Mining Code raised royalties on strategic minerals such as cobalt and coltan from 2%–3.5% to 10% and gave the state a 10% stake in every mining project at no cost. Yet corruption keeps much of that money from reaching ordinary Congolese.

Congo scored 20 out of 100 on Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, well below the global average of 42, and ranked 163rd out of 182 countries. The Carter Center found that roughly $750 million of the $1.1 billion owed to Congo’s state mining company, Gécamines, from 2011 through 2014 could not be reliably traced to the company’s accounts. The Natural Resource Governance Institute gave Congo’s management of mining revenue a score of 26 out of 100 in its 2021 index, placing it in the lowest category, “failing.”

Congo fits a broader pattern among resource-rich countries. In an IMF working paper, economists Carlos Leite and Jens Weidmann found that abundant natural resources create opportunities for rent-seeking and help explain differences in corruption across countries. A UN University research paper lists Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, Mauritania, Myanmar, Sudan and Zimbabwe among the countries that received failing ratings in the 2021 Resource Governance Index.

The AU’s reparations campaign targets former European colonial powers. At the same time, Congo’s government is asking the United States to invest more in its mining sector. Congo can exercise sovereignty over its mineral resources and set the terms for foreign investment. But if those terms require all profits to stay in Congo, American companies would have no financial incentive to put their capital at risk.

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