The United Nations General Assembly is set to vote on Wednesday on a resolution that seeks to formally designate the transatlantic African slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity,” a move supporters say represents an important step toward healing and justice.
Ghana’s President John Mahama, a leading advocate within the African Union for slavery reparations, visited the UN headquarters to rally support for what he described as a “historic” initiative.
Speaking at the UN on Tuesday, he said the resolution “allows us as a global community to collectively bear witness to the plight of more than 12.5 million men, women and children, whose homes, communities, names, families, hopes, dreams, futures and lives were stolen from them over the course of 400 years.”
He also described the initiative as “a safeguard against forgetting,” while criticising recent political efforts in the United States aimed at restricting books on slavery and related topics to “stop teaching students about the truth of…slavery, segregation and racism.”
The draft resolution states that it “declares the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity.”
It further draws attention to the enduring consequences of slavery, including “the persistence of racial discrimination and neo-colonialism” in modern society.
– ‘Not ranking suffering’ –
Amma Adomaa Twum-Amoah, the African Union’s Commissioner for Health, Humanitarian Affairs and Development, said that “to name these atrocities clearly is to remove the last veils of ambiguity from the historical record.”
“It is to say that what was done to Africans was not a tragic accident of history, but the result of deliberate policies whose legacies structure today’s inequalities,” she continued. “Justice begins with calling things by their proper names.”
Beyond recognition, the resolution also calls on countries historically linked to the slave trade to participate in restorative justice efforts.
Ghanaian Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa said, “The perpetrators of the transatlantic slave trade are known, the Europeans, the United States of America.”
“We expect all of them to formally apologize to Africa and to all people of African descent.”
He added that one possible avenue for restorative justice is that “all the looted artifacts are returned to the motherland.”
He also called for continued efforts to confront structural racism and said that “compensation” could be considered for those affected.
Addressing concerns raised by some member states about the wording of the resolution potentially creating a “hierarchy” of suffering, Ablakwa clarified the intent behind the language.
“We are not ranking suffering when we say that the transatlantic slave trade represents a ‘gravest crime against humanity,’ it is not to introduce a hierarchy,” he said.
“What we are saying is that if you look at all of the atrocities that have happened in the history of humanity, none have been this systemic, this prolonged, over 300 years, and the lingering consequences of that,” he said.
“We are not ranking pain. We are not saying that our pain should be valued more than your pain.”
