How Europe Underdeveloped AfricaLast week we suggested that reparations for the Jews have been the most extravagant in memory.

But Koreans too have received reparations from Japan for their cruel colonisation and exploitation of their women.

The most dramatic case of restitution is that of the Japanese-Americans. During World War II, the Roosevelt administration deemed American citizens of Japanese extraction to be a risk to the US national security in that they were capable of forming a fifth column on behalf of Japan. The US government rounded them up and put them in virtual concentration camps.

The ethic of the 'yellow peril' was in high gear. After the war, the victimised Japanese-Americans sought compensation on the grounds of wrongful internment. Ultimately, the US Congress conceded that their plight was indeed an unjustifiable and shameful stain on the American history. It authorised monetary reparations to the victims and their survivors.

In contrast, African-Americans have sought restitution for enslavement and racial victimisation since the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Their conviction of a debt owed is captured in the popular demand for 40 acres and a mule. Although their holocaust case is by far the oldest and strongest, the African-Americans' reparations cause has not borne fruit.

Against this background, bitter complaints have been launched. "Compensation and reparations seem rational to observers in one case after another until the principle is applied to Blacks' suffering. Suddenly, what is rational becomes absurd; what is compelling for Jews or Koreans becomes comic or 'uneconomic' for Blacks."

If justice delayed is justice denied, African-Americans may have a claim for additional reparations on the grounds of justice deferred.

A decade ago, Africa threw its weight behind the cause of reparations for Blacks universally. Encouraged by the Japanese-Americans' victory of 1989 in the US, African-Americans revived their own crusade with renewed vigour. From the 1990s they have pushed the reparations crusade right up to Capital Hill in Washington, DC. The current demand is for compensating African-Americans as the most immediate responsibility of the United States.

The African-American energy, plus rethinking of claims by Walter Rodney in his book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, prompted the Organisation of African Union heads of state in its 1992 Summit to establish the Group of 12 Eminent Persons (GEP) in 1992. Specifically, GEP's mission was to explore the 'how-to' campaign for Black reparations worldwide. The GEP is convinced that the damage done to Black people is not a thing of the past but is here and now.

Curiously, Africa's entry into the reparations' landscape has had ambivalent consequences to the fortunes of the campaign. It has made the case larger and smaller at the same time.

Politically, enlargement is a 'good thing' in that it gives the crusade a global dimension. However, political globalisation is also a 'bad thing' from the point of view of litigation. According to legal experts, Black Americans' quest for racial redress has so far fallen short of fulfilment on the grounds that their case is too vast, too overwhelming.

What is urgently needed now is a winning precedent on the legal front. Haiti's recent demand and the case of apartheid's victims are legal winners to the extent that, by comparison, they are smaller and limited in scope. In the sense of precedent-setting, they are the global reparations crusade in microcosm.

US President George Bush's visit to Africa in 2003 included a stopover at Goree Island.

This was the notorious rendezvous off the coast of Senegal, where captured African slaves were assembled before embarking on the treacherous Middle-Passage voyage to the New World. Inevitably, Goree Island remains an emotionally-charged, historic monument to the Global Africans, especially African-Americans.

Was Bush's stopover a presidential hint of official admission of America's "collective guilt" in the diabolical human trade? Could this be a prelude to a political acknowledgement that America does indeed owe a debt of reparations to its citizens of African descent for slavery and racial victimisation? Time will tell.