When French President Emmanuel Macron sat across from Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama in Paris in April, the conversation that unfolded was not merely diplomatic theatre it was a reckoning with centuries of unresolved history.
Following their meeting, Ghana’s Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa announced that Macron had indicated France was open to discussions on reparations, including the return of looted artifacts, addressing global economic inequities, and dismantling structural racism.
For Ghana, a country that has positioned itself at the vanguard of the global reparations movement, that diplomatic moment was significant. But it also raises a deeper, more urgent question one that Ghana’s policymakers, educators and civil society have yet to adequately answer: What is slavery doing to our children today?
The question is not rhetorical. It is scientific, sociological and profoundly political.
A Crime That Did Not End With Abolition
Across Africa, the continent’s flourishing civilizations were systematically destroyed by slavery and the colonial regime. Ordered systems of governance were dismantled. Precious artifacts and symbols of cultural meaning were either looted or destroyed, engendering a sense of cultural discontinuity that has fuelled alienation and a loss of identity.
African languages are at risk of extinction, reflecting the long-term effects of the colonial education system and what scholars describe as psychological colonization the suppression of indigenous languages, religions and cultural practices.
The slave trade, which for centuries primarily targeted Africa’s young and most able workforce, fundamentally altered Africa’s economic trajectory, stunted economic growth and long-term development, setting the region down a lasting path of external dependency which has become the root cause of intergenerational poverty and systemic inequality.
This is not ancient grievance. This is lived, inherited reality.
As the Guyanese political activist and academic Walter Rodney argued in his seminal 1972 work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, when measuring the effect of European slave trading on Africa, one is measuring the effect of social violence not trade in any conventional sense. That violence did not terminate when the ships stopped sailing. It mutated into poverty, into institutional fragility, into psychological wounds passed quietly from parent to child across generations.
Ghana’s Moment And Its Obligation
Ghana has earned its place at the centre of this global conversation. Ghana’s President Mahama, appointed African Union Coordinator for Reparations, led efforts that culminated in March 2026, when Ghana, with AU backing, presented a resolution to the UN General Assembly. On March 25, the UN General Assembly passed that resolution, recognizing the enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity.
123 countries, including Russia and China, voted in favor, while 52 countries including the UK, Germany and France abstained. That abstention by France is telling. A Cameroonian geopolitical analyst noted that Europe abstained to avoid assuming what he called “intergenerational responsibility” and to sidestep reparations. Europe understands that acknowledging intergenerational harm opens the door to material accountability.
Yet Ghana, which is leading the charge for that acknowledgment internationally, has not yet developed a structured domestic programme to study, document or address how that intergenerational trauma manifests in the lives of Ghanaian youth today.
That gap is a serious policy failure.
What Intergenerational Trauma Looks Like
Intergenerational or transgenerational trauma is the psychological and sociological transmission of the consequences of extreme suffering from one generation to the next. Research on communities that experienced mass atrocities from Holocaust survivors to indigenous peoples subjected to colonial violence has shown consistently that trauma does not die with those who lived it. It is transmitted through parenting styles shaped by fear and shame, through economic deprivation that limits opportunity, through community narratives of helplessness, and through the erosion of cultural identity that strips young people of a stable psychological foundation.
Opponents of reparations argue that modern states differ from those of the colonial period, that too much time has passed, and that it would be unjust to hold individuals or governments accountable for actions committed decades or centuries ago. But this argument willfully ignores the intergenerational trauma wrought by slavery that continues to hold back the development of entire societies in Africa.
In Ghana, the evidence, while not always labeled as such, is visible. The persistent underperformance of communities closest to the former slave routes. The identity crises among urban youth caught between Westernized education systems and indigenous cultures that were deliberately degraded. The disproportionate poverty in regions whose populations were historically most ravaged by the trade. The distrust of state institutions distrust rooted in the historical betrayal by African elites who collaborated in the capture and sale of their own people.
These are not accidents of development. They are the echoes of slavery.
The Project Ghana Must Commission
Ghana does not need to wait for reparations to begin healing. What is needed immediately is a structured, government-supported research initiative calls it the National Project on Slavery’s Living Legacy tasked with mapping how the transatlantic slave trade continues to shape the psychological, economic and cultural realities of Ghanaians alive today, particularly young people.
Such a project should be aligned with developmental objectives tackling debt challenges, poverty alleviation, inequality and unemployment recognizing that the exploitation of Africa and the enslavement of millions made former colonial powers wealthy, and that redress must take the form of sustained investment in Africa’s development.
But the internal knowledge work must come first.
This project should include: a multi-generational survey of communities in the Central Region, Volta Region and Northern Ghana most historically connected to the slave trade; psychological assessments examining self-esteem, trust in institutions, and cultural identity among youth; an audit of how Ghana’s school curriculum addresses the slave trade and its aftermath; and a public engagement programme that brings this history out of academic journals and into national consciousness.
The return of historical artifacts and the revitalization of African languages at risk of extinction should also be part of this national programme connecting the external reparations conversation with an internal cultural restoration agenda.
Macron’s Shift Is an Opportunity, Not a Destination
France was the first country to declare the transatlantic slave trade a crime against humanity, but has not formally apologized for its involvement or committed to reparations. Macron himself ruled out reparations as recently as 2017, calling instead for reconciliation. His recent openness to dialogue, however tentative, represents movement but movement driven by African diplomatic pressure, not French moral initiative.
Ghana must not allow that pressure to dissipate into endless diplomatic conversations that produce little for ordinary Ghanaians. The greatest leverage Ghana possesses in the reparations debate is not rhetorical it is evidential. When Ghana can point to rigorously documented, peer-reviewed research showing exactly how slavery continues to impoverish, traumatize and limit the potential of its citizens today, the moral and legal case for reparations becomes immeasurably stronger.
That is the project Macron’s shift should inspire. Not gratitude. Not patience. Research. Documentation. National reckoning.
Conclusion
The transatlantic slave trade is not a chapter that closed. It is a wound that was never properly cleaned, and now festers quietly beneath the surface of modern Ghanaian life in its poverty statistics, its mental health crises, its youth unemployment figures, and its fractured cultural confidence. Ghana has shown the world that it can lead on justice. Now it must show its own people that it is serious about healing.
The new generation did not choose this inheritance. But they are living it. Ghana owes them the dignity of at least trying to understand it.
Mustapha Bature Sallama.
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal investigation and Intelligence Analysis.
International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP
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