Accra: President John Dramani Mahama's recent intervention at the United Nations has placed Ghana at the centre of one of the most morally charged global debates of our time: the question of reparatory justice for the transatlantic trafficking and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans. The Ghana-led resolution adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 25 March 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', while calling for measures of reparatory justice.
According to Ghana Web, the vote was striking: 123 states supported the resolution; only three opposed it; 52 abstained. In Ghana and across much of Africa and the Caribbean, the resolution has understandably been welcomed as a major step towards historical recognition. It affirms what many Africans and people of African descent have long argued: that the trafficking of enslaved Africans and their racialised chattel enslavement was not merely a dark chapter in world history, but a foundational crime whose consequences continue to shape global inequalities, racial hierarchies, cultural loss, and economic underdevelopment.
International reaction, however, has been more complex. The United States, Israel, and Argentina voted against the resolution. The United Kingdom and all 27 European Union member states abstained. Some critics objected to the language of 'the gravest crime against humanity,' arguing that it risks creating a hierarchy of historical atrocities. Others resisted the implication that present-day states might carry legal or financial responsibility for acts committed centuries ago, in a different legal order, by previous generations.
These objections should not be dismissed too quickly. Some are self-serving, of course. It is reasonable to say that many of the states and institutions now resisting reparatory claims are the successors of political and economic systems that benefited from slavery, colonialism, and racial exploitation. Entrenched interests rarely accept responsibility voluntarily. But precisely because the reparations debate is not occurring in a political vacuum, the case for reparatory justice must be made with unusual intellectual discipline. If the argument is philosophically weak, historically selective, or morally inconsistent, its opponents will use those weaknesses to resist even the most reasonable demands.
This is why Ghana's leadership matters. Ghana should not merely lead a louder reparations campaign. Ghana should also lead a more honest one. The Atlantic slave trade was not ordinary slavery The transatlantic slave trade was a vast crime against Africa. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, between the 16th and 19th centuries, 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. Millions of Africans were captured, sold, transported across the ocean, legally reduced to property, forced into plantation labour, and absorbed into racial systems that treated Blackness itself as a mark of servitude, inferiority, and disposability.
European and American states, companies, churches, banks, insurers, ports, plantation economies, and colonial legal systems bear major responsibility for creating, financing, racialising, legalising, and profiting from that Atlantic slave system. The Atlantic world did not merely purchase enslaved labour; it built a global economic order around it. Sugar, tobacco, cotton, coffee, shipping, insurance, banking, manufacturing, and imperial expansion were all bound up with the exploitation of enslaved African bodies.
The economic dimension matters. It is difficult to place a single credible figure on the total wealth generated by Atlantic slavery, because the benefits were spread across plantation ownership, shipping, insurance, banking, commodity refining, port infrastructure, manufacturing, and state taxation. But one figure is especially revealing: when Britain abolished slavery in most of its colonies in 1833, the British state provided £20 million in compensation to slave owners for the loss of what the law had treated as their 'property.' The formerly enslaved received no equivalent compensation. This fact alone captures one of the central injustices at the heart of the reparations debate: even abolition compensated for ownership rather than enslavement.
Nor is the question limited to governments. The Church of England, after investigating historic links between its financial inheritance and slavery-linked investments, committed £100 million to a reparative justice programme. An independent oversight group later argued that the ambition should rise towards £1 billion. The precise accounting remains contested, but the example is revealing: even major moral and religious institutions are now having to examine whether inherited wealth, institutional memory, and public repair are connected.
That is why the Atlantic case remains distinctive. It was not simply one slave trade among many. It generated a racialised plantation-colonial order whose effects can still be traced in the Caribbean, the Americas, Europe, and Africa. It created large African-descended populations outside Africa whose social, economic, and political struggles cannot be separated from slavery and its afterlives. It also helped generate modern anti-Black racism as a durable global structure. This was not incidental to slavery; it was part of slavery's moral and ideological architecture.
European Christian societies developed theological, legal, and cultural arguments that made the enslavement of Africans appear compatible with their own religious and moral claims. If Africans were recognised straightforwardly as fully equal human beings, then their hereditary enslavement would have been harder to justify within Christian moral language. The denigration of Black people therefore became part of the justification for their enslavement: Africans were represented as heathen, inferior, uncivilised, naturally servile or less than fully human. Over time, these justifications hardened into racial ideology, law, culture, and social practice. That ideology did not disappear with abolition.
It survived in segregation, colonial rule, racial exclusion, economic hierarchy, and the continuing devaluation of Black life, especially in parts of the Atlantic world such as the United States. But to say that the Atlantic slave system was distinctive is not the same as saying it was historically simple.
A serious reparations argument must acknowledge that slavery existed in Africa before European Atlantic expansion. For context, we must consider the form of servitude that existed in pre-colonial Akan communities of present-day Ghana. The Akan term for an enslaved person was 'odonko'. Etymologically, 'odonko' is derived from two Twi morphemes: '?do' meaning 'love/affection' and 'nk?' meaning 'will not go/depart'. Thus, 'odonko' can be rendered as 'love will not depart.'
This linguistic construction suggests a social reality distinct from Atlantic chattel slavery. As historian Dr. Akosua Adoma Perbi notes in A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana From the 15th to the 19th Century. Based on the etymology and Perbi's analysis of Akan domestic slavery, it is reasonable to hypothesize that many 'odonko' in Akan households experienced conditions of integration and reciprocal obligation. Historical records indicate they could acquire property, marry into lineages, and that their descendants were often assimilated as free members of the abusua (Family).
This may explain why some 'odonko' chose to remain within their host households even after opportunities for manumission arose. However, this interpretation does not negate the coercive origin of their status. The term reflects the social outcomes of the institution, not its moral justification. African societies contained many different systems of captivity, dependency, pawnship, forced labour, household slavery, military enslavement, and incorporation of outsiders into kinship structures. These systems varied greatly across regions and periods. Some allowed forms of assimilation, manumission, or social mobility over time. Others were harsh, violent, and exploitative.
It would be wrong to minimise, sanitise, or gloss over indigenous African slavery. The fact that some African systems differed from Atlantic chattel slavery does not make them benign. Loss of freedom, coercion, social death, forced labour, and sexual vulnerability were real harms wherever they occurred. At the same time, it would also be wrong to collapse all forms of slavery into one undifferentiated category. The arrival of European demand, Atlantic shipping, plantation capitalism, and racialised colonial law transformed the scale, character, and consequences of enslavement.
Existing African systems of captivity were drawn into an expanding Atlantic market that rewarded war, raiding, kidnapping, brokerage, and human export. The most serious historical position is therefore neither that Europeans invented slavery in Africa, nor that the Atlantic slave trade was simply a continuation of older African practices. Slavery existed before the Atlantic trade. But the Atlantic system transformed it.
This brings us to one of the most difficult questions: African elite participation. Any argument that African rulers, merchants, and intermediaries were not complicit in the transatlantic slave trade cannot be taken seriously. In many places, African actors captured, bought, sold, taxed, transported, and profited from enslaved people. Some rulers used the trade to strengthen states, acquire weapons, consolidate power, and enrich courts or commercial networks.
This does not mean every African participant acted with the same degree of freedom. Some may have been drawn into the trade by commercial temptation, diplomatic pressure, regional insecurity, military competition, or fear that rival states would gain an advantage if they refused. European demand altered incentives and intensified conflict. But seduction, bribery, pressure, and strategic calculation are not the same as the absence of agency.
In many coastal and inland contexts, Europeans depended on African brokers, rulers, and merchants to supply captives and secure trade. They usually lacked the ability to penetrate the interior and seize people at scale without African cooperation. There were certainly unequal pressures and violent dynamics, but it is difficult to treat African elites who profited