Reparatory Justice and Historical Honesty: Why Ghana must lead a more courageous conversation

With Accra hosting President John Dramani Mahama’s High-Level Consultative Conference on the next steps following the landmark United Nations (UN) resolution on the trafficking of enslaved Africans, Ghana has been placed at the centre of one of the most morally charged debates of our time: the question of reparatory justice for the transatlantic trafficking and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans.

The debate is now moving from declaration to implementation.

The resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly on March 25, 2026, was a significant diplomatic achievement. In its very title, it described the trafficking of enslaved Africans and their racialised chattel enslavement as “the gravest crime against humanity”.

It passed with 123 votes in favour, three against and 52 abstentions.

Ghana is right to welcome this as a major step towards historical recognition.

The transatlantic slave trade was not merely a dark chapter in world history, but a foundational crime whose consequences continue to shape global inequality, racial hierarchy, cultural loss and economic underdevelopment.

Yet if reparatory justice is to succeed, it must be argued with intellectual discipline.

This debate is not taking place in a political vacuum.

It asks powerful states, institutions and interests — many of which historically benefited from slavery, colonialism and racial exploitation — to accept responsibility for grave wrongs.

If the argument is historically selective or morally inconsistent, opponents will use those weaknesses to resist even reasonable demands.

That is why Ghana should not only lead a louder reparations campaign. It should also lead to a more honest one.

The Atlantic slave trade was historically distinctive. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, roughly 12 to 12.5 million Africans were forced aboard Atlantic slave ships, with around 10.7 million surviving the Middle Passage and arriving in the Americas.

This was not simply one slave trade among many. It created a racialised plantation-colonial order, generated immense wealth for states, companies, ports, banks and plantation owners, and helped produce the anti-Black racial ideology whose effects still endure.

One fact captures the economic injustice clearly. When Britain abolished slavery in most of its colonies in 1833, it paid £20 million in compensation to slave owners.

The formerly enslaved received nothing. Even abolition compensated ownership rather than enslavement.

Second, a serious reparations argument must acknowledge that slavery existed in Africa before European Atlantic expansion.

African societies contained many forms of captivity, dependency and servitude. Some differed significantly from Atlantic chattel slavery.

As historian Akosua Adoma Perbi shows in A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the 19th Century, some forms of indigenous slavery in Ghana involved domestic incorporation, social mobility and eventual assimilation into kinship structures.

But this difference must not be romanticised.

Indigenous African slavery still rested on coercion, dependency and loss of freedom.

Difference does not mean innocence.

Third, African elite participation cannot be brushed aside. In many places, African rulers, merchants and intermediaries captured, sold, taxed and profited from enslaved people.

European and American institutions were responsible for creating, financing, racialising and exploiting the Atlantic plantation order.

African elites were responsible for their part in supplying human beings into that system.

To recognise one is not to excuse the other.

The same honesty is needed when confronting the Arab/Islamic, trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean slave trades, precisely because acknowledging them strengthens rather than weakens the case for Atlantic reparations.

If they are ignored, critics will understandably ask why the reparations debate focuses only on the Atlantic trade.

The answer is not that those other histories do not matter.

It is that the Atlantic case is more practically pursuable: it has clearer surviving institutional defendants, stronger records, identifiable descendant communities and continuing harms that remain traceable today.

The same moral consistency should also apply within Africa itself, from the historical reality of trokosi ritual servitude in Ghana to the documented persistence of modern slavery in Mauritania.

Finally, reparations should not be reduced to money alone.

That is especially relevant to Ghana’s forthcoming consultative process, which could help advance acknowledgement, education, institutional truth-telling and other practical forms of repair even where immediate financial agreement remains difficult.

Acknowledgement, apology, education, memorialisation, institutional truth-telling and truth-and-reconciliation-style processes may be the most realistic first steps.

They do not replace financial claims, but they can build the moral and political ground for them.

If Ghana is to lead this debate, it should do so with courage, clarity and consistency, grounding its case in truth, acknowledgement and practical forms of repair.

Reparatory justice becomes stronger, not weaker, when it refuses selective memory.

That is the conversation Ghana is well placed — and morally obliged — to lead.

The writers are a renowned Ghanaian recording artist, activist and social commentator and a cultural entrepreneur with a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics, specialising in international relations and international history.