In this photo taken on April 27, 2020, crowds of supporters of the ruling party gather for the start of the election campaign, in Bugendana, Gitega province, Burundi. (PHOTO / AP)

Burundi wants Belgium and Germany to pay US$43 billion in reparations for harm done during decades of colonial rule over the nickel-producing East African nation.

Burundi also wants Belgium and Germany to return archival material and objects stolen between 1899 and 1962, Senate President Reverien Ndikuriyo told senators in the capital, Gitega, on Thursday

The move follows similar calls for compensation by the Democratic Republic of Congo after Belgian King Philippe in June offered his “deepest regrets” over his nation’s colonial past in the Congo. While the killing of George Floyd in the US sparked some introspection about racism in the West, in sub-Saharan Africa much of the analysis has focused on the legacy of colonialism.

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Burundi also wants Belgium and Germany to return archival material and objects stolen between 1899 and 1962, Senate President Reverien Ndikuriyo told senators in the capital, Gitega, on Thursday. In 2018, the Senate appointed a panel including historians and anthropologists to investigate the impact of colonialism in the nation.

Much of Burundi’s present-day political challenges can be traced back to a decree by Belgian King Albert I to classify the population along three ethnic groups, according to Aloys Batungwanayo, a historian and doctoral researcher at the Lausanne University.

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“It is this decree that has led to conflicts in Burundi and the region because some of the population was excluded from the ruling class because of the decree,” Batungwanayo said in the commercial hub Bujumbura on Friday.

Brutal Past

Other than the ills of colonization, Burundi accuses Belgium of fomenting dissent in the country in the recent past and sheltering the plotters of an attempted coup in 2015.

On its part, the European nation may seem to be confronting its brutal past as lawmakers have agreed to set up a panel to look at Belgium’s colonial history in Congo, Rwanda and Burundi.

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But while King Philippe seems contrite about King Leopold II’s atrocities in Congo and for the suffering and humiliation in the subsequent Belgian colonial period, his expression of regret to Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi in June was short of an official apology.