French PM Manuel Valls has ruled out the reparations for slavery in an article published as he toured three west African countries. Valls called instead for a students’ exchange program between Europe and Africa and a “memory that is shared and at peace”. Slavery was a “disaster on a grand scale”, he wrote, a “crime against humanity” as “France has fully acknowledged” in a law passed in 2001. But “memory should not divide. It should, on the contrary, close fractures and bring people together,” he went on, citing black anti-colonial writers Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire to argue that slavery was “irreparable” and thus rule out financial reparations by the West.
