AA / Peter Kum
In a series of tweets, Ghana’s president on Tuesday reiterated his remarks made at a Monday summit in Accra on racial reparations and healing, a speech in which he pleaded for reparations to be paid. to the African continent.
“It is time that Africa, whose 20 million sons and daughters had their freedoms curtailed and were sold into slavery, also received reparations,” noted President Nana Akufo-Addo.
During this summit, which is jointly organized by the African Union (AU) Commission, the African Fund for Transitional Justice, the African American Institute (AAI) and Global Black, with funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, the Ghanaian leader said the effects of the slave trade were “devastating” to the continent and the diaspora and that the entire period of slavery set back “the economic, cultural and psychological progress of the ‘Africa”.
According to Akufo-Addo, the entire African continent deserves “an official apology from the European nations” involved in the slave trade for the crimes and the damage that this trade caused to the population, to the psyche, to the soul. image and character of Africans around the world.
In another tweet, the President of Ghana stressed that no amount of money might undo the damage caused by the transatlantic slave trade and its centuries-spanning consequences, adding, “We must heal from the wrongs of the past in order to capitalize on the opportunities that await us in the future”.
According to the Ghanaian newspaper Graphic, President Akufo-Addo also said at the summit that the Caribbean community had taken the lead in the debate on reparations and therefore urged the AU to engage with Africans in the diaspora and to “form a united front to advance the cause of reparations”.
Citing some examples of reparations paid to back up his plea, President Akufo-Addo recalled that when the British ended slavery, all owners of enslaved Africans received reparations of £20 million, that’s the equivalent of £20billion today, but enslaved Africans themselves didn’t get a dime.
Also in the United States, he noted, slave owners received $300 for each slave they owned, but the slaves themselves received nothing.
“Take the case of Haiti, which had to pay $21 billion in reparations to French slaveholders in 1825 for the victory of the great Haitian revolution, the first in the Americas and the Caribbean where slaves were released,” he said in one of his tweets.
As a reminder, slavery is a very old story, but it has never been so current. A phenomenon born during Antiquity, and of which we only really became aware in the 18th century.
Black or sub-Saharan Africa has experienced slavery since ancient times, like all other regions of the world. This traditional slavery has taken on a dimension that is all the more important since black Africa has ignored land ownership until the modern era.
Three hundred years of slavery, from the 16th century to the 19th century, have left their scars.
“It’s clear that the wound continues to fester. Whether or not we want to remove the bandage and understand why,” recalled New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, best known for the 1619 Project which features the slavery as one of the central elements of the history of the United States, which addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations during the commemoration of the transatlantic slave trade, at the beginning of April 2022.
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