Apartheid Reparations and the Contestation of Corporate Power in Africa

The joint activist and juridical movement for reparations against corporations that profited from apartheid is finally making progress within the generally hostile US judicial system, using the ‘Alien Tort Claims Act’ and public pressure. By way of an update on the struggle, this briefing first reviews the core evidence presented by plaintiffs representing tens of thousands of black South African victims of apartheid (Khulumani et al. 2002), considers the rebuttals by corporations (Morrisson and Foerster 2008), and then turns to an update on the apartheid lawsuit and similar initiatives which demand that the ‘historical debt’ associated with oppression be repaid by those who profited, with interest.