Should African states be compensated by Western powers? If so, how feasible is it and what are the plausible achievement such a move would achieve? These are the sort of questions that some delegates were left pondering at the end of the Earth Summit held sometime ago in South Africa.

Although the topic was not on core agenda of the summit, some delegates argued that sustainable development could never be achieved before the correction of wrongs carried out during slavery and colonialism.

It is however not the first time that such a call has been raised. Way back in 1999, delegates attending the 12 World Council of Churches assembly held in Zimbabwe also agreed to launch a campaign for the cancellation of debts owed by developing nations to the West.

But many Pan-Africanists believe that the cancellation of debt should not be regarded as purely humanitarian but should be implemented with the full knowledge of the genocidal crimes committed by Western powers during slavery, the scramble for Africa and colonialism.

The campaign for Africans to be compensated is strengthened by what Germany did when she paid reparations to the victorious allies for the destruction of lives and property after the Second World War. Germany also paid compensation for crimes inflicted upon the Jewish race and in 1998 the British government paid about $1,5 billion to the Maori people of New Zealand for the land confiscated during British colonial rule.

Thus in an article titled "The Question of Compensation: A Third World Perspective," political scientist Norman Girvin asks: "Who has compensated African peoples for the millions seized and killed in the service of the European slave trade, or for the land, cattle and minerals expropriated by European slave trade, or for the land, cattle, minerals expropriated by Europeans and the millions of people who died in the process?" Girvin further argues that the acts committed by European powers did not include genocide and property deprivation but that the current poverty and demoralizing economic impotence of the Third World today in most cases can be back to the destructive effects of the European impact.

It is true so say that by today's standards, the level of material and technological development of the Third World were low at the time of the European impact. But the poverty of the ghetto, the slum and the general well being of Africans is immeasurably worse, qualitatively and quantitatively, than the poverty of the self-sufficient and self-regulating communities of the past.

The adverse effects of the European conquests are also echoed by historians like Walter Rodney in "How Europe Under-developed Africa," especially when he says: "When one tries to measure the effect of European slave trade on the African continent, it is very essential to realize that one is measuring the effect of social violence rather than trade in any normal sense of the word." Indeed, large numbers of humans were deliberately massacred to terrorize them into submission to the European conquest. Cattle looted and slaughtered to make the indigenous people depend on European employment. In the Congo, for example, there was a thriving agricultural and industrial sector supporting at least 20 million people. This was, however, plundered by the exploitation of the "Leopoldian System."

It is estimated that at least 10 million people died in the Congo as a result of the Belgian colonial wars, more than the number of Jews killed in Hitler's concentration camps, yet no compensation has ever been considered. In Hitler's concentration camps, over six million Jews were perished. So the call for the cancellation of debts is not a call in the wilderness but one that is being carried out with the full understanding that African countries' state of economies cannot be separated from the effects of slavery and the subsequent colonialism.

The cancellation of debt can thus be taken as an indirect way of compensating Third World countries for it is true to say that much of the prosperity that the West enjoys today is as a result of the sweat and blood of Africans forcibly taken from their motherland to go and provide cheap labor in the Americas and other Western countries. It is very crucial that there be cancellation of debt for it has become a death trap for most African countries. But this would not be enough.

Africans, even those in the US, the Caribbean, and the Diaspora need to come together united and work out mechanisms and demand that the West should compensate African people for the sins of slavery and colonialism.