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. 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 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.

Slavery existed in Africa before the Atlantic trade

A serious reparations argument must acknowledge that slavery existed in Africa before European Atlantic expansion. 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.

African participation and African responsibility

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 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 from the trade as if they were simply forced participants with no meaningful choice.

This cannot be brushed aside with the phrase “participation is not responsibility.” It is true that participation does not always entail responsibility. A person may participate under coercion, ignorance, incapacity, extreme necessity or without meaningful agency. But responsibility is difficult to imagine without some form of participation, whether direct, indirect, institutional or negligent. The real question is therefore whether the circumstances that might excuse participation apply to African elites who captured, sold, taxed or profited from enslaved people. In most cases, they plainly do not. The more honest distinction is therefore not between participation and responsibility, but between participation and equal responsibility.

African elites who captured and sold human beings were responsible for their part in the system. European and American institutions were responsible for creating, financing, transporting, insuring, legally codifying, racialising and exploiting the Atlantic plantation order. These are different forms and degrees of responsibility. To recognise one is not to excuse the other.

European responsibility does not erase African elite responsibility. African elite responsibility does not erase European and American responsibility.

There is also a broader class dimension that should not be ignored. Slavery was not simply something done by one race to another, even though Atlantic chattel slavery developed a specifically anti-Black racial structure that must not be diluted or obscured. It was also often something organised by elites against the vulnerable. Those elites were African and non-African, European and non-European; those exploited, oppressed and enslaved were also African and non-African, European and non-European. The Atlantic slave trade had a specifically anti-Black racial structure, but the deeper pattern of elite power extracting wealth from vulnerable human beings crosses racial and civilisational boundaries.

The key question is apportionment: who captured, who sold, who transported, who financed, who insured, who legislated, who exploited, who inherited benefit, and who still lives with the damage?

This is the kind of question a mature reparations movement should be willing to ask.

Why only the Atlantic trade?

There is another question that cannot be avoided. If reparations are justified simply because Africans were enslaved, why is the discussion focused so heavily on the transatlantic slave trade? What about the Arab/Islamic, trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean slave trades? What about Ottoman slavery? What about Barbary slavery in North Africa, which enslaved Europeans as well as others? What about Roman slavery and other systems of human bondage across world history?

These questions are often treated as hostile distractions. They should not be. They are serious questions, and a credible reparations argument must answer them.

The answer cannot be merely that the transatlantic trade is the one we choose to remember. If the claim is about African enslavement as such, then non-Atlantic slave systems cannot honestly be excluded. The trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean trades were large, long-lasting and brutal. They also extended over a far longer period than the Atlantic trade, beginning in the centuries after the rise of Islam in the 7th century and continuing through to the 19th century and, in some places, the early 20th century. Estimates are less precise than for the Atlantic trade, but historians commonly place the trans-Saharan trade in the millions, while recent scholarship estimates the Indian Ocean African slave trade at around five million people. Some broader, contested estimates for African enslavement in the Islamic world across the trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean routes run into the range of 12 to 15 million over more than a millennium. The Arab/Islamic world was therefore deeply implicated in systems of African enslavement. These histories deserve far more attention than they often receive.

If, however, the reparations claim is specifically about the Atlantic plantation-colonial system, then that specificity must be stated and explained. Otherwise, the perception will be that the Arab/Islamic and other non-Atlantic slave trades are being quietly glossed over or brushed aside without a credible answer. Worse, the campaign may then be perceived, however unfairly, as a demand that white people compensate Black people, while non-white perpetrators and beneficiaries are quietly air-brushed out of the picture. That perception would weaken the argument for reparatory justice in relation to the transatlantic trade, because critics would understandably ask: why this slave trade and not the others?

There is an answer, but it should be given candidly. The Atlantic case is distinctive because it has clearer surviving institutional defendants; a stronger documentary record; identifiable African-descended communities in the Caribbean and Americas; a racialised plantation-colonial order that shaped modern anti-Black racism; and continuing social, economic and political consequences that remain traceable today. It is also, frankly, easier to pursue. The institutions, records, claimant communities and continuing harms are more readily identifiable than in many older, longer, more dispersed non-Atlantic slave systems.

That practical reality does not make non-Atlantic slavery morally irrelevant. It clarifies why a particular reparations claim may focus on the Atlantic system while still recognising the need for a broader historical reckoning.

Where do reparations begin and end?

This leads to the wider problem of limiting principles.

Human history contains many forms of enslavement, conquest, forced labour, caste subordination, imperial domination and mass atrocity. This is not an argument against historical justice, but against the absence of criteria: if reparations are justified for every historical wrong without clear limiting principles, the claim becomes almost infinite. If reparations are justified only for the wrongs committed by politically convenient enemies, the claim becomes selective and morally weakened.

A serious reparatory justice framework therefore needs clear criteria. These criteria should not be mistaken for a claim that other historical wrongs do not matter. They are, in large part, pragmatic considerations: ways of building an effective campaign that has some chance of success against formidable odds, including the resistance of powerful states, institutions and vested interests that benefited from slavery, colonialism and racial exploitation. In that sense, reparations advocates may accept that broader moral arguments exist in relation to other forms of slavery throughout history, while still focusing strategically on cases where responsibility, benefit, harm and repair can be made visible and actionable.

Such criteria might include:

an identifiable grave wrong;

identifiable perpetrating institutions;

identifiable claimant communities;

documented historical benefit;

continuing harm;

institutional continuity;

practical forms of repair.

These criteria help explain why modern claims are often directed at states, companies, churches, banks, universities, royal institutions, ports and other bodies, rather than at entire peoples. Reparations should not be framed as a debt owed by all Europeans to all Africans. That is crude racialised blame. The stronger argument is institutional responsibility: those who organised, financed, legalised, profited from or inherited benefit from slavery and colonial exploitation should be part of a serious process of repair.

This also matters for ordinary people, both historically and today. The vast majority of British people alive now bear no personal moral guilt for slavery, and many ordinary British people at the time were not meaningful beneficiaries of it either. They too were often exploited by the same elite structures that enriched themselves through empire, enclosure, industrial capitalism and colonial extraction. There is a plausible sense in which poor Europeans and enslaved Africans were both, in very different ways, victims of ruling-class power. This does not collapse racial slavery into class exploitation, but it does caution against framing reparations as though whole peoples were perpetrators or beneficiaries in the same way as the elites, institutions, families and commercial interests that organised, financed and profited from the system.

That does not absolve the British state or British institutions. But it does mean reparations should be framed carefully. The target should be state and institutional responsibility, not inherited racial guilt.

Reparations are not only money

The reparations debate is often weakened by the assumption that reparations mean immediate large-scale financial compensation and nothing else. Financial compensation may indeed have a place, especially where specific institutions can be shown to have profited from slavery and where specific communities continue to suffer measurable harm. But if the entire debate is reduced to money, it will encounter maximum resistance at the earliest stage.

Repair can take many forms. Acknowledgement is a form of repair. Apology is a form of repair. Public recognition is a form of repair. Historical education, curriculum reform, memorialisation, museum restitution, archival access, institutional truth-telling, debt relief, development partnerships, cultural restoration and truth-and-reconciliation-style processes can all be part of reparatory justice.

These non-financial forms may be the most realistic first steps. They do not replace financial claims, but they can build the moral and political ground on which more difficult questions may later be addressed. Truth often has to precede settlement. Recognition often has to precede restitution.

A Ghana-led reparations process should therefore avoid narrowing the debate too quickly to compensation alone. It should define repair as a process, not a single payment.

Ghana must also look inward

If Ghana is to lead this debate globally, it must also be willing to apply the principle of reparatory justice inwardly.

This does not mean equating Ghana’s internal histories with the Atlantic slave trade. It means recognising that moral seriousness cannot be selective. If Ghana argues that Britain and other European powers cannot absolve themselves of slavery simply by pointing to abolition, then Ghana and other African states cannot necessarily absolve themselves of responsibility for recent or contemporary slavery-like practices simply by pointing to prohibition.

The example of trokosi is important. Trokosi ritual servitude, historically practised in parts of Ghana and reported in some accounts to have persisted residually, involved girls or young women being dedicated to traditional religious shrines, often as atonement for alleged wrongdoing by relatives. Ghana outlawed ritual or customary servitude in 1998. That legal step was necessary and important. But abolition is not the same as reparation.

If victims of trokosi lost childhood, schooling, freedom, family life, dignity, health, income or social standing, are they entitled to recognition, rehabilitation, compensation, education, medical support, public acknowledgement and institutional repair? If not, why not?

That question matters because it tests the universality of the reparatory principle. If the victims of historical slavery deserve repair, then living or recent victims of slavery-like practices also deserve serious attention.

Mauritania presents an even sharper contemporary challenge. Slavery was only formally abolished there in 1981 and criminalised in 2007, yet organisations including Anti-Slavery International and Walk Free’s Global Slavery Index continue to report descent-based slavery and slavery-like conditions. Walk Free’s 2023 Global Slavery Index estimated that around 149,000 people were living in modern slavery — a category that includes forced labour and forced marriage as well as descent-based slavery — in Mauritania in 2021 — approximately 32 people per 1,000 of the population. If African states demand accountability from Europe and America for historical slavery, should Africa not also demand urgent accountability where forms of slavery persist on the continent today?

This is not an argument against reparations for the Atlantic slave trade. It is an argument for consistency.

Ghana’s authority would be strengthened, not weakened

Some may fear that acknowledging African complicity, non-Atlantic slave trades, trokosi or Mauritania will weaken the reparations case. The opposite is true.

A weak argument avoids difficult facts. A strong argument absorbs them.

Ghana’s moral authority would be strengthened by acknowledging complexity: African suffering, European and American structural responsibility, African elite complicity, Arab/Islamic and other non-Atlantic slave trades, contemporary slavery-like practices, and the distinction between symbolic guilt and practical repair.

The world does not need another slogan about the historical injustices of transatlantic slavery. It needs a more serious conversation about responsibility, complicity, inherited benefit, continuing harm and the practical forms that repair should take.

Ghana is uniquely placed to host that conversation. This country carries the memory of the Atlantic trade through sites such as Cape Coast and Elmina. It also carries the symbolism of Pan-African return, diaspora reconnection and postcolonial leadership. Ghana’s name itself invokes an older West African civilisation, reminding us that African history is deep, complex and not reducible to victimhood.

That complexity is not a weakness. It is the very reason Ghana can lead.

Towards a more credible reparatory justice

President Mahama’s UN initiative has opened an important door. The next step is to walk through it with courage, clarity and consistency.

Reparatory justice should not be rooted in racial resentment. It should be rooted in truth. It should not treat all Europeans as guilty or all Africans as innocent. It should identify institutions, structures, beneficiaries, victims, continuing harms and realistic forms of repair. It should recognise that financial compensation may be only one part of a wider process that includes acknowledgement, apology, education, restitution, development, memorialisation and truth-telling.

Above all, reparatory justice must refuse selective memory.

If Ghana leads this debate honestly, it can do more than demand reparations. It can help redefine what reparations mean: not revenge, not racial guilt, not political theatre, but a disciplined process of historical truth, institutional accountability and moral repair.

It is a conversation Ghana is well placed — and morally obliged — to lead.

About authors

Okyeame Kwame is a renowned Ghanaian recording artist, activist and social commentator.

Steven Peake is a cultural entrepreneur with a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics, specialising in international relations and international history.