Dear European, Do You Know What Your Comfort Cost?
Editorial FN
Open Letter · 13 min read (Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash)
To the ordinary people of France, Belgium, Britain, Portugal, Germany, Spain, Italy; and every European nation whose history touches Africa’s:
We are not writing to your presidents or your parliaments. They have heard the arguments. They know the history. And on the 25th of March 2026, when the United Nations General Assembly voted on a resolution declaring the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and the racialized chattel enslavement that followed the “gravest crime against humanity,” 123 nations said yes. Every EU member state, and the United Kingdom, abstained.
We are writing to you instead, because we believe you are capable of something your governments, in that moment, were not: honesty.
We are not speaking about the honesty of confession. We are not asking you to flagellate yourself for things that happened before you were born. But the honesty of seeing clearly. Of looking at what your nations built, what they are still building, and asking: is this right? Is this who we want to be?
Not Taught in School
You were probably taught that colonialism was a chapter in history that was regrettable perhaps, complicated certainly, but closed. A thing of the past. You may have learned about the slave trade as a dark period that ended with abolition, a story of moral progress in which Europe eventually did the right thing.
What you were almost certainly not taught is what it cost in concrete, calculable, present-day wealth. The Industrial Revolution that built modern Europe’s castles, factories, railways, banking systems, and universities was financed in significant part by the forced labour of enslaved Africans and the extraction of colonial territories. The comfortable Europe you were born into did not emerge from European ingenuity alone. It was built, in substantial part, on a foundation of African bodies and African land.
A pattern, not just a past
Consider Niger. For decades, uranium extracted from Nigerien soil by French-linked mining operations has powered French nuclear reactors, while Niger itself has remained among the world’s poorest countries by most development measures. We’re not presenting this as a single documented cause-and-effect case study. The economics of resource extraction, royalty structures, and national development are genuinely complicated, and serious people disagree about how much of Niger’s poverty traces to any one arrangement. But the broad pattern: a former colonial power drawing a strategic resource from one of its former colonies while that colony remains desperately poor, is not in dispute, and it’s one version of a story that repeats across the continent.
“France’s economic relationship with its former West African colonies did not end with independence. It evolved.”
Fourteen African nations (from Senegal to Cameroon, from Togo to Chad) still use a currency, the CFA franc, that was designed in 1945 to keep colonial economies bound to Paris. For decades, the foreign exchange reserves of these sovereign nations were held inside the French Treasury. Reforms over the past several years have changed parts of this arrangement, particularly for West Africa’s currency zone. We’d encourage any reader to look into the current state of these reforms for themselves, because they are genuinely in motion. But for Central Africa, France continues to hold a portion of these reserves. The broader point stands: a monetary arrangement designed under colonial rule has outlived colonial rule itself.
This is the system your taxes support, indirectly, through the policies your governments choose. This is the system your elected officials effectively defended when they abstained from a UN resolution asking, at minimum, for moral recognition of its origins and enduring effects.
What’s It to You?
We are not asking you to feel guilty. Guilt is personal. It is about what you individually did. You did not enslave anyone. You did not sign the treaties that carved Africa into colonial territories. You did not design the CFA franc or set the terms of any mining concession.
However, you live in the prosperity those actions helped produce. You benefit daily, and mostly invisibly, from an economic order shaped by centuries of extraction, some of which continues in altered form today. When your governments speak at the United Nations on your behalf, they speak in your name; so we are asking you to feel responsible.
Think of it this way. If you discovered your family home was built, a generation ago, on land taken dishonestly from a neighbour whose children are consequently living on the streets, what would you do? You didn’t take the land. But you have a choice about what to do with that knowledge. You can look away. You can say it happened before your time and isn’t your problem. Or you can decide to be the kind of person who says: this isn’t right, and I’ll use whatever I have to help make it right.
We are not asking Europe to be ashamed of being European. We are asking Europeans to be worthy of the values they claim (liberté, égalité, fraternité) and to extend them fully to people they have historically been extended to only in name.
What the Abstention Actually Means
To be precise about what happened: the EU’s official explanation of its vote objected to specific things: the use of the word “gravest” in the resolution’s title, which it argued implied an unfounded legal hierarchy among crimes against humanity, and to what it called selective historical references in certain paragraphs of the text. The EU also stated, in the same breath, that its abstention “should not be interpreted as leniency” toward slavery, and pointed to its existing anti-racism strategy as evidence of ongoing commitment.
We take the EU’s stated legal objections at face value. But we think they’re beside the point, and here’s why: a resolution with no binding legal force, asking for moral recognition of an atrocity whose consequences persist today, does not require perfect legal precision to deserve a “yes.” A body genuinely committed to reckoning with this history had room to vote yes while noting its legal reservations. Instead, it chose to abstain. It chose caution over clarity. We think that choice is itself a kind of answer.
One hundred and twenty-three nations voted yes anyway. Belgium whose King Leopold II ran the Congo as a private enterprise, in a period whose death toll historians estimate at anywhere from several million to as many as ten million Congolese, abstained. Portugal the country that launched the transatlantic slave trade, abstained. Britain whose Industrial Revolution drew heavily on the cotton and sugar of enslaved Africans, abstained.
This is Where You, the ordinary European Come In
Here is what we have learned from history: governments rarely change their positions on justice because justice is right. They change because their citizens demand it. Slavery was not abolished because European governments had a moral awakening. It was abolished because abolitionists (many of them ordinary people with no political power of their own) made the moral and political cost of continuation too high to bear.
Your government will not choose reparatory justice, will not loosen the CFA franc’s grip on African monetary sovereignty, will not return looted cultural artefacts sitting in national museums, unless enough of you say, loudly and consistently, that this is not done in your name.
What You Can Do
We could ask you to do a dozen things. We’re asking for three, because we’d rather you do three well than five half-heartedly.
1. Ask your government to vote yes next time. This resolution or one that is similar to it will return to the UN. Write to your representative. Ask them directly why your country abstained, and ask them to commit publicly to voting yes at the next opportunity. Make it a question a politician has to answer on the record.
2. Ask where your national museum’s African collections came from. The British Museum. The Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, built on objects taken from the Congo. Ask your government, in writing, whether it supports restitution and what that means for the collections they currently hold.
3. Ask why the CFA franc still exists in its current form. Ask your French, Belgian, or EU representative to explain, plainly, why a monetary arrangement designed in 1945 to bind colonial economies to Paris still governs the reserves of sovereign nations in 2026. Push for a real answer, not a procedural one.
If you do only one of these, do the first. It costs you an email and it puts something on the record.
We believe you are better than your governments’ abstention
We do not write this letter in anger at the French people, the Belgian people, or the British people. We have lived among you. We have studied in your universities, worked in your hospitals, built your buildings, taught your children, and added to the culture of every city that has welcomed us. You are not your governments, and you are not only your history — any more than we are only ours.
But history does not end simply because it becomes inconvenient to discuss. The uranium beneath Niger’s ground doesn’t care that its story is politically awkward. The nations still operating inside a French monetary architecture don’t experience that arrangement as an abstraction. The people whose grandparents’ belongings sit in a museum case in Brussels don’t have the luxury of moving on from a story that hasn’t ended.
We are asking you to be the Europeans your own stated values say you already are — not the Europe that abstained on March 25, but the Europe that means it when it says liberté is for everyone, not just those born on the right side of a colonial border.
One hundred and twenty-three nations have said what was done to Africa was the gravest crime against humanity. Your governments stood to one side. We are asking you to step forward.
With the dignity of those who know their worth, Feelnubia Written in June 2026 · On behalf of Africa and her diaspora
Open Letter · Europe · UN Resolution · Reparations · CFA Franc · Decolonisation · Conscience · Justice Feelnubia · Reconnecting Africa with its story, one read at a time.
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