Africa, whose people and resources were plundered for centuries by Europe, failed today to get the outright apology and reparations it had been demanding from the West for its suffering.
Marathon talks at a UN conference on racism finally clinched a last-minute deal between the European Union and Africa on the thorny issues of redress and reparations for the slave trade and colonialism.
But the agreement reached in Durban fell far short of African demands for a formal apology for the sins of the past and financial reparations to help bridge the gap between Africa and the West - a gap that Africans attribute to colonialism.
"It (the deal) is the minimum that we wanted," said Kenya's UN ambassador Amina Mohamed.
"It's a disappointment...it really falls short of what we wanted," Bonaventure Motale, Zambia's attorney general, who was a delegate at the talks, told Reuters.
Africa based its demands for reparations and an apology on the grounds that Europe's economies benefited from the extraction and exploitation of Africa's raw material and people, stunting African development as a result.
"Europe developed on the resources drawn from Africa...the demands that we made were only fair," Mr Motale said.
The EU balked at a formal apology, which it feared would trigger law suits. It also refused reparations and said it did not want to link aid or debt relief to historical grievances.
But the Europeans did yield to the Africans' insistence that slavery be branded a crime against humanity, with the trans-Atlantic slave trade held up for special censure.
The trans-Atlantic traffic saw millions of Africans shipped in chains in appalling conditions to the Americas.