President John Dramani Mahama has urged the United Nations to officially recognize the transatlantic slave trade as the “greatest crime against humanity” and to back global calls for reparations.
Addressing the 80th UN General Assembly in New York, Mahama—who also serves as the African Union’s Champion on Reparations—announced Ghana’s plan to table a motion at the UN to acknowledge slavery’s devastating impact on Africa and its diaspora.
“The slave trade must be recognised as the greatest crime against humanity,” Mahama declared. “More than twelve and a half million Africans were forcibly taken against their will and transported to create wealth for the powerful Western nations.”
He stressed that recognition must be followed by action.
“We must demand reparations for the enslavement of our people and the colonisation of our land that resulted in the theft of natural resources, as well as the looting of artefacts and other items of cultural heritage that have yet to be returned in total,” he said.
President Mahama also reminded world leaders of the historical injustice in which reparations were once paid to slave owners rather than to the enslaved.
“Let us not forget: governments paid reparations to slave owners for the loss of their ‘property’—and that ‘property’ referred to enslaved human beings,” he noted. “Where, then, is the justice for the victims?”
