Esther Stanford-Xosei

Portrait of Esther Stanford-Xosei, jurisconsult (legal specialist in jurisprudence), reparationist, (reparations activist), dynamic community advocate and historian.

Esther is a modern day abolitionist and freedom fighter, passionate about law, justice and education and using those as tools in resisting forms or oppression and injustice. Carrying on the legacy of African freedom movements, she is preoccupied with African self-determination from a contemporary Black Nationalist perspective.

She is a champion of reparations as repair, sighting self-repair as being the cornerstone of any people’s process of self-empowerment and restoration of agency (control, empowerment, self-determination). Ultimately transforming, ourselves, families’, communities’, nation and the world in order to leave this earth better than we found it.

Despite public perception of the reparations movement, for her it is not about victimhood and begging for money but about restoring a people’s human right to be repaired and for them to take charge of that process of doing so. Her work is recognition of continuing harm that is a result of slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, and the looting of resources and stopping that harm today. By stopping forms of injustice, she believes we can begin the process of reconstruction and repair. Her focus is on stopping the extraction of wealth and recourses today as a first step to reclaiming what is owed yesterday.

She is an advocate for the collective protection of Global Pan-African nationhood and the elevation of the feminine principle as part of the transformation process. She has dedicated her life to the struggle, motivated by her desire to leave a better future for future generations.

Esther is currently completing a PhD in the history of the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations in the UK at the university of Chichester.