Ghana stood before the United Nations this month to demand the world reckon with the Atlantic slave trade — but a Johns Hopkins historian argues the country cannot lead that conversation while dodging an equally uncomfortable one at home.
President John Dramani Mahama addressed the UN on March 24, 2026, condemning the erasure of identity that enslaved Africans suffered when they were stripped of their names and cultural roots. The speech builds on advocacy that former President Nana Akufo-Addo championed and draws support from the African Union as part of a broader push to have the transatlantic slave trade formally classified as a crime against humanity. The initiative has genuine moral weight behind it. European powers financed, architected, and profited from the transatlantic system — that historical record is not contested. What is contested, by the writer of this piece at least, is whether Ghana’s advocacy is as complete as it needs to be.
The UN General Assembly laid groundwork for this moment back in 2006, when Resolution 61/19 recognised the transatlantic slave trade as among history’s gravest human rights violations, marking the bicentenary of Britain’s 1807 Abolition Act. Since then, the push for reparative justice has intensified globally. Ghana positioned itself at the centre of that movement through the Year of Return in 2019 and the Diaspora Summit in Accra in December 2025. Yet the PhD candidate in History — who writes from a U.S. university currently investigating its own ties to slavery — argues that something crucial is missing from Ghana’s commemorative and political machinery: an honest accounting of the role that West African political authorities, merchant elites, and local intermediaries played in feeding the Atlantic trade.
The historical record is specific. Merchants from Cape Coast, Asante, and Volta navigated the Volta River to Salaga to purchase people for coastal plantations and mines. After Britain abolished the transatlantic trade in 1807, coerced labour did not end in the Gold Coast — it transformed. Through the colonial period and into the 1930s, northern communities were raided, pawned, and forcibly relocated to serve emerging cash-crop economies in the south. The identity erasure that Mahama condemned at the UN — the stripping of names and ethnic belonging — was already a practised instrument among local merchant elites long before any enslaved person boarded an Atlantic vessel. The Atangas and Awelenas who became “Kofi” and “Adwoa” lost those names on the Ghanaian coast, not only on American plantations.
The contrast the writer draws with Benin is pointed. In the late 1990s, President Mathieu Kérékou formally acknowledged the Kingdom of Dahomey’s role in the slave trade and apologised to the diaspora. That acknowledgement did not soften Benin’s case against European culpability — it sharpened it, earning the country moral credibility that deflection never could. Diaspora communities, the writer notes, support reparations demands directed at European governments, but they also ask directly why Africans sold them. Ghana has no serious answer prepared.
The descendants of those raided northern communities are still here, still unevenly represented in national narratives, and conspicuously absent from the commemorative events surrounding Ghana’s reparations push. Their history is Ghana’s history too.
