Ghana’s president tells the UN that the slave trade cost “sweat, tears, blood, and horrors” to build the US and Europe.
Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo remarked during the UN General Assembly that no amount of money could ever fully make up for the tragedies of the slave trade, but the West must nevertheless pay reparations as an expression of regret.
Akufo-Addo warned international leaders on Wednesday in New York that “the world should not pretend” that the economic and social issues the African continent is currently facing have nothing to do with the historical injustices that have shaped the global order.
“Much of Europe and the US have been built from the vast wealth harvested from the sweat, tears, blood and horrors on the transatlantic slave trade [between the 16th and the 19th centuries] and the centuries of colonial exploitation,” he claimed.
After having “their natural resources looted and their peoples traded as commodities” for such a long time, the president continued, it is understandable why African nations are struggling to create thriving societies.
Akufo-Addo admitted that current Europeans and Americans “aren’t the ones that engaged in the slave trade.” He did, however, make the distinction that the forcible migration of Africans across the Atlantic was “state-sponsored and deliberate and its benefits are clearly interwoven with the present-day economic architecture” of the Western nations behind it.
The leader of Ghana argued, “Reparations must be paid for the slave trade,” but was cut off by cheers.
“No amount of money will ever be able to make up for the horrors, but it would make the point that evil was committed, that millions of productive Africans were ripped from the embrace of our continent and forced to work in the Americas and the Caribbean without receiving payment for their labour,” he said.
Akufo-Addo continued, “The topic of reparations will be further discussed at a dedicated conference to be held in Ghana’s capital Accra in November under the auspices of the African Union.”
On the eve of Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Day, Ghana, a country with a population of about 33 million, honours Francis Kwame Nkrumah, a well-known opponent of colonialism who served as both the country’s first prime minister and president after it gained independence from Britain in the late 1950s. He gave his speech on the eve of this holiday.
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The UN released a report on Tuesday with recommendations for countries on a number of actions, including monetary compensation, to address colonialism and the enslavement of African descendants.
According to the research, “no state has comprehensively accounted for the past and addressed its contemporary legacies” for having “violently” removed an estimated 25 to 30 million people from Africa.
The UN also emphasised in the paper that those legal responsibilities cannot be revoked on the grounds that a great deal of time has passed and it is difficult to identify the offenders and victims of the slave trade.
