Reparations, great, but greed will repeat slavery
Thursday, September 25, 2025 and Wednesday, March 25, 2026 are two dates that will potentially etch themselves on the memory of Africans. On these two days, an African President addressed the world.
It was not the first time an African President was taking his turn at the podium of the UN General Assembly, but something felt different.
It was like Kwame Nkrumah all over again on the world stage, not the least intimidated by “world powers”. He spoke not to powers but his equals.
At the UN on September 25, 2025, the spirit of Nkrumah entered John Dramani Mahama, Ghana’s President and AU Champion for Reparations. He trained his eyes on the so-called super-powers seated before him. Eyeball to eyeball, he told them that "the future is African."
He operationalised that future: one, a permanent Security Council seat for the continent; two, a larger global voice; three, Africa’s resources must serve the continent’s population rather than merely being extracted for external benefit.
This week, specifically on March 25, 2026, the Ghanaian President, speaking with the combined voices of the 1.57 billion people of the continent, asked the 193 members of the United Nations to accept that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was the “most horrendous crime that took place in the history of mankind”.
The Mahama resolution is asking UN member states to consider apologising for the slave trade and contributing to a reparations fund.
Europe and America shifted uneasily in their seats.
Dear reader, if you are not familiar with the history or your parents haven’t told you, here are the facts: between the 16th and 19th centuries, as many as 12-15 million people were captured in Africa and taken to the New World, primarily the Caribbean and Brazil, where they were forced to work as slaves. On the slave ships, we sat chained in our excreta and urine for months.
At the UN on March 25, we in Africa were not under any illusions, so we were not surprised that the US voted against the resolution.
I am not sure if anybody knows why Argentina and Israel voted with America in opposition, but we can understand why the UK abstained. Among the “super-powers”, Great Britain was a prominent culprit in the slave trade.
If Europe and America have to cough up billions of dollars to appease Africa’s anger, our ask from the UK will be big.
It is not the first time people-groups and countries have demanded reparations from perpetrators of past evils.
Per the Luxembourg Agreement (1952), Germany paid reparations to Israel for the horrors of the Holocaust.
Israel was given three billion Deutsche Mark (DM) for refugee resettlement and DM 450 million for other victims, plus compensation for individual losses.
In 2011/2013, the Netherlands was ordered by court to pay compensation to widows of Indonesian freedom fighters executed by Dutch forces.
In 2013, the UK paid more than £19 million to over 5,000 Kenyans who suffered abuse during the 1950s Mau Mau uprising.
After World War I, the defeated nations ̶ Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Ottoman Turkey ̶ were forced to pay reparations for war damages.
This was in 1919.
Like the African (Mahama) call at the UN this week, the Caribbean Group had also stirred over a decade ago. In 2013, Caribbean Heads of Government established the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC) with a mandate to prepare the case for reparatory justice for the region’s indigenous and African descendant communities who were victims of Crimes against Humanity (CAH) in the forms of genocide, slavery, slave trading, and racial apartheid.
To date, CARICOM has not secured direct monetary reparations, but through its 10-Point Plan, the CRC has forced European nations to confront the legacy of slavery, leading to formal apologies and commitments for future engagements from various institutions.
Some ask: in what ways did slavery or colonialism affect the development of Africa and the Caribbean?
One of them is Europe’s deliberate decision to retard the technology available for development within our countries.
Ill equipped
For 400 years, the trade and production policies of Europe could be summed up in the British slogan: “not a nail is to be made in the colonies”.
A direct result of this policy is that Africa (and CARICOM member states) were rendered technologically and scientifically ill-equipped within the postmodern world economy.
The effect of slavery and colonialism has been that Africans were turned against ourselves.
Culturally, millions of Africans were demeaned in their own eyes.
We felt so inferior that Africans have become more European in our minds, adopting European values.
Mental slavery has cost us more than anything else.
It has affected our economies: the change of taste has meant that the average African prefers European food and clothes, for example.
However, we cannot speak about the trans-Atlantic slavery without speaking to ourselves.
The inhumanity of slavery should remind Africans that our greed has been our undoing.
We were and are still too greedy. In our greed, we are selling Africa off to the highest European/American/Chinese bidder.
