Ghana leads global push for slavery reparations as Western nations resist

Ghana has stepped into a role few nations have dared to claim: the global voice demanding that the West finally reckon with slavery's debt. This year, the conversation shifted. Where once reparations were whispered about in academic circles, they are now being tabled at the United Nations, debated in parliaments, and—most pointedly—being refused by the very nations that grew wealthy from the trade.

In March, a UN resolution passed recognizing slavery as "the greatest crime against humanity." The United States voted against it. Every European nation abstained. Britain, which alongside Portugal dominated the transatlantic slave trade for centuries, has consistently rejected the idea of paying anything back. The math is staggering: estimates of what Britain alone owes run into many trillions of pounds. The resistance is understandable, if morally indefensible.

Ghana tabled that UN resolution. In June, it hosted a summit on reparations in Accra with delegates from around 80 countries. The conclusion was unanimous: recompense is long overdue. Ghana's Foreign Minister Samuel Okuzeto Ablakwa frames it plainly: "Ghana was the crime scene where these atrocities took place, so Ghana cannot afford to be silent on ensuring that we hold perpetrators accountable." The African Union has given Ghana formal responsibility as "champion for reparatory justice," and the country's leadership is taking that mandate seriously. Between 10 and 15 percent of the estimated 12 million Africans forcibly removed from their homes came from what is now Ghana. Many more were shipped from its shores.

Ablakwa's vision of reparatory justice extends beyond direct payments. He is calling for educational grants, venture capital for young African entrepreneurs, and research into enduring health issues that some scholars trace back to the malnutrition and inhumane conditions of enslavement. He also wants individual institutions held accountable—including the Church of England. In the 18th century, the Church's missionary wing ran plantations and owned hundreds of slaves, using the profits to fund its work across the Americas. Many Church clergy independently owned slaves as well. A recent report by the Church's endowment fund documented large investments in the slave trade that generated enormous sums.

In July, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dame Sarah Mullally visited Ghana in one of her first international trips in the role. She toured Cape Coast Castle, one of many British coastal fortresses where enslaved people were held before the brutal Middle Passage to the Americas. Walking through the dungeons and the "door of no return," she appeared visibly moved. She prayed in a 17th-century chapel positioned directly above those dungeons—a physical manifestation of the Church's complicity. "How can the church have sat above the horrors that were going on below?" she asked. The Church of England has since established a £100 million social impact fund intended to benefit communities still bearing slavery's legacy. But the fund has encountered internal resistance, much like the global reparations push itself.

One common counterargument holds that some Africans were complicit in the capture and sale of their own people. Ablakwa rejects this framing sharply, arguing it is a deliberate strategy to "divide and conquer." He points out that when the laws, insurance policies, and financial architectures of the slave trade were being drafted, "there was no African at the table." Yet within Ghana itself, the conversation is more textured. King Tackie Teiko Tsuru II, leader of the Ga people, recently made a public apology for his ancestors' involvement in the trade. The Ga became middlemen, trading with Europeans—selling gold, ivory, and enslaved Africans captured in local conflicts in exchange for manufactured goods like textiles, alcohol, and guns. The king felt compelled to apologize not just for his own people but on behalf of all traditional authorities. "To be able to go forward, you have to look at your past," he said. For him, African admission of fault does not diminish European guilt; it strengthens Africa's moral standing.

Ghana has also launched a high-profile campaign inviting the African diaspora—particularly African-Americans—to return to the continent. The idea is to heal through human connection, to repair at a deeply personal level. But the initiative has revealed a painful tension. Yaw Asare, a Ghanaian PhD student who previously worked in the President's Diaspora Office, watched the campaign transform. What began as "a beautiful, profound experience devoid of capitalist motives" became something else when the Ghana Tourism Authority latched on. Prices rose. Local Ghanaians were economically sidelined. Returning diaspora members were charged the same entrance fees at slave castles as European tourists. The commercialization, Asare argues, overshadowed the deep psychological work that genuine reparations demands. In Jamestown, one of Accra's oldest districts built around a British fort, people still live clustered together—a settlement pattern born centuries ago from the fear of being taken. "We are dealing with humans, we are dealing with people," Asare says. "We cannot reduce them to, 'come see this site, pay this entrance fee.'" True reparatory justice, he insists, must prioritize healing over transactions. "We have to remove the band-aid and then look at the sore, the gaping wound that's present, and see how we can dress it and nurse it and heal."