The UN General Assembly is set to vote on Wednesday on a resolution declaring the transatlantic African slave trade “the gravest crime against humanity", a move advocates say represents a step towards healing and justice.
John Mahama, one of the African Union’s most vocal supporters of slavery reparations, visited the United Nations to promote the “historic” measure.
Speaking at the UN on Tuesday, Mahama 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.”
Describing it as “a safeguard against forgetting", Mahama criticised recent moves in the United States to ban books on the subject, aimed at “stopping students from learning the truth of… slavery, segregation and racism".
The draft resolution “declares the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity", while also highlighting the enduring legacy of slavery through “the persistence of racial discrimination and neo-colonialism” in contemporary society.
‘Not ranking suffering’
Amma Adomaa Twum-Amoah, the African Union’s Commissioner for Health, Humanitarian Affairs and Development, said, “To name these atrocities clearly is to remove the last veils of ambiguity from the historical record.”
She added, “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. Justice begins with calling things by their proper names.”
The resolution goes beyond acknowledgement, calling on nations involved in the slave trade to engage in restorative justice.
“The perpetrators of the transatlantic slave trade are known: the Europeans and the United States of America,” Ghanaian Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa told AFP.
“We expect all of them to formally apologise to Africa and to all people of African descent.”
One potential pathway for restorative justice, he said, is the return of “all the looted artefacts to the motherland". He also suggested addressing structural racism and providing “compensation” to those affected.
Acknowledging criticism that the resolution could be seen as creating a “hierarchy” of suffering, Okudzeto Ablakwa said:
“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. 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 with the lingering consequences that continue today.
“We are not ranking pain. We are not saying that our pain should be valued more than your pain.”
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