The writer
In March this year, history shifted.
For the first time, the United Nations General Assembly formally declared the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel slavery to be the gravest crime against humanity.
One hundred and twenty-three countries voted in favour.
Three countries (the United States, Israel and Argentina) voted against. Fifty-two countries abstained, including the United Kingdom and every member state of the European Union. The resolution called not only for remembrance, but for reparatory justice.
It was a remarkable moment.
Not because descendants of enslaved Africans needed the world to tell them what they have always known. But because international institutions finally acknowledged what centuries of Black memory have never forgotten: that the making of the modern world rested on the trafficking, dehumanisation and commodification of African bodies.
And perhaps this is why the moment should matter to the ordinary Ghanaian.
Not because reparations are some distant diplomatic conversation happening in New York. But because slavery and colonialism are not dead histories. They live among us.
They live in economies built on extraction. In educational systems that teach Shakespeare more thoroughly than Yaa Asantewaa. In generations of children who can recount the French Revolution but know little of the Haitian Revolution.
In museums across Europe displaying stolen African artefacts. In the persistent devaluation of Black bodies and Black lives.
Too often, our histories have been treated as footnotes, while Europe and America have remained the center of knowledge and civilization. Yet history itself reveals a profound injustice.
When slavery was abolished across the British Empire in 1833, it was not the formerly enslaved who were compensated. It was the enslavers.
The British government borrowed £20 million (an astronomical amount at the time) to compensate slave owners for the loss of what they considered their “property.” British taxpayers only completed repayment of that debt in 2015.
The descendants of the enslaved received nothing.
So if slavery has now been recognised as humanity’s gravest crime, the next question cannot simply be one of remembrance.
It must be one of repair.
But reparations should be understood far beyond money. Money matters. Material justice matters. Economic restitution matters. But repair is also about restoring sovereignty. Not merely the sovereignty of states, but the sovereignty of people. A people-centred reparatory project would mean restoring cultural sovereignty.
It would mean teaching the history of slavery, colonialism and resistance truthfully and comprehensively. Not as unfortunate episodes, but as world-shaping systems whose consequences continue today.
It would mean investing in African archives, museums, languages and artistic institutions.
It would mean returning stolen artefacts, but also restoring dignity to African bodies and identities wherever they exist, from Lagos to London, Kingston to Johannesburg, Bahia to Minneapolis. It would mean affirming that Blackness itself requires no justification.
Cultural restoration would also require freeing African imaginations from colonial hierarchies that taught generations to distrust themselves.
It would mean nurturing literature, cinema, philosophy, spirituality and knowledge systems rooted in African experiences rather than forever seeking validation elsewhere.
Economic reparations must similarly go beyond one-time payments. The world has maintained an extractive relationship with Africa for centuries. Gold, cocoa, rubber, diamonds, oil, cobalt and now lithium continue to leave the continent, while wealth accumulates elsewhere.
Repair therefore requires transforming the terms of global exchange. It means fair trade rather than extraction. Industrialization rather than perpetual dependency.
It means climate justice, technology transfer, debt reform and infrastructure. It would also mean economic systems that allow African societies to retain more value from what they produce.
Knowledge sovereignty must also become central to any reparatory vision. For centuries, Africa has been studied, interpreted and narrated by others.
Repair means building universities, research institutions and intellectual traditions capable of generating knowledge from African realities. It means investing in historians, scientists, philosophers, artists and storytellers. It means recognising that ideas themselves are forms of sovereignty.
And perhaps most importantly, repair must restore relationships. Relationships between Africans and the diaspora. Relationships fractured by slavery’s violence. Relationships between memory and healing. Relationships between justice and dignity.
From August 15 to 17, Ghana will host a high-level consultative conference on the next steps following this landmark resolution. There is something deeply symbolic about this. For centuries, Ghana’s shores were departure points to places where lives disappeared, places where names became numbers. Today, perhaps those same shores can become sites of return. Not return to a mythical past. But return to dignity.
Yet as Ghana seeks to lead this conversation globally, another question emerges.
A nation cannot demand recognition of slavery’s horrors abroad while reproducing exclusion at home. It cannot speak eloquently about the sanctity of African humanity before the world while simultaneously advancing laws that criminalise minorities and prescribe punishment for people simply because of who they are.
For the struggle against slavery was, fundamentally, a struggle about human dignity, about whose humanity counts, and about who deserves freedom. To defend one form of humanity while denying another is to misunderstand the moral lesson history offers us.
If slavery was humanity’s gravest crime because it reduced people into categories of less-than-human, then every society must be vigilant against reproducing new forms of exclusion in different language.
Perhaps this is the deeper invitation before us. Not merely to ask what the world owes Africa. But to ask what kind of Africa we are trying to repair toward?
For reparations are not simply about compensation. They are about imagination, about rebuilding the conditions for people to flourish, about restoring dignity, memory and possibility.
And if a crime does not rot, as African wisdom reminds us, then neither does the obligation to repair.
The question before us is no longer whether history happened. The world has finally acknowledged that.
The question now is whether we possess the courage to build a future worthy of that truth. And if we do, whose freedom, whose dignity, and whose humanity will we choose to include in that future?
Source: Akosua Hanson
Akosua Hanson is a Ghanaian culture curator, writer and artist exploring memory, identity and African futures.
