To understand why former colonial powers still refuse to apologize, we should start with a simpler question: why did Holocaust accountability become unavoidable?

It was not because the suffering was unique, or the grief better argued. It was because the crime was made legible. Survivors and institutions built an evidence machine; archives, testimonies, millions of names. From that record came numbers, and from numbers came leverage. A crime with paperwork becomes a crime with consequences.

Colonial violence has no comparable ledger. The dead are dispersed into unmarked graves and sealed archives. Without names, violence remains ā€œhistorical.ā€ With names, it becomes actionable.

But the ledger is only half the story.

Imagine Nazi Germany had won the war. Would Berlin have apologized? Of course not. It would have called its cruelty ā€œorderā€ and carried on. Accountability is not a mood; it is a function of power. Germany admitted guilt not because it found its conscience, but because it lost and was forced to account.

After 1945, the victors designed a convenient moral architecture. Germany became the official warehouse for European evil. This allowed France and Britain to stand above the wreckage as liberators and judges. They wrote the postwar rules, and victors do not draft indictments against themselves.

Germany was occupied, its crimes excavated, and its debts enforced. Meanwhile, France and Britain faced no occupation. They preserved their self-image while keeping their colonial machinery running. The contrast was stark: Germany was dismantling an ideology while France and Britain were preserving empireā€™s administrative order, detention regimes, and the daily violence of bureaucracy, from Kenya to Malaya.

Yet France and Britain emerged as the worldā€™s moral instructors.

When decolonization finally arrived, it was not a gift from enlightened capitals. It was a forced retreat. Bankrupted by war and pressured by resistance, Europe did not ā€œgiveā€ independence; it stopped being able to afford the occupation. Empires fell the way a broke man drops a load he can no longer carry. But the sense of entitlement to the value remained.

This is why we get the budget version of apologies: regret without liability, empathy without debt. A real apology is a legal event. It invites claims, opens files, and sets precedents.

The missing ledger is now used as an escape hatch. European politicians point to corruption with practiced innocence: who would receive reparations? The corrupt elites? It is a constructed dilemma. Europe cites corruption to avoid paying; African elites cite colonial history to avoid governing. Both sides find cover in the stalemate. As long as the archives remain shuttered, everyone keeps their story intact.

So yes, a ledger is not the solution. But it is a weapon against the most cynical loophole: the claim that harm is too diffuse to repair. Names turn history into a claim. Anonymity turns atrocity into atmosphere.

That is why we must build our own infrastructure of memory. We do not need to beg for sympathy; we need to consolidate evidence to deny the world its favorite defense: plausible ignorance. Power protects reputations, not confessions.

Let me close with a story that says the quiet part out loud. In December 1944, African soldiers who had survived the front and German captivity returned to Senegal and asked France for their back pay. The answer was bullets. At Thiaroye, French troops massacred the very men who had helped save them.

They survived Europeā€™s war only to be killed by the empire they had served.

That is the arrangement in a single scene. The halo stays on. The bill stays unpaid. And the lecture continues.