'Ghana was the crime scene': The country leading the demand for slavery reparationsGhana has become Africa's leading voice in telling the world that Western nations owe reparations10 hrs agoAfrica
'Ghana was the crime scene': The country leading the demand for slavery reparations10 hours agoAleem MaqboolReligion editor, Accra, GhanaGetty ImagesThe captives were held in Ghana's Cape Coast Castle before being forced into ships to take them across the Atlantic Ocean This year has seen a dramatic change in tone in the global conversation about the…
This year has seen a dramatic change in tone in the global conversation about the transatlantic slave trade.
The demand for formal apologies, debt relief and financial compensation from nations and institutions that benefited from slavery has become increasingly forceful.
In March, a resolution was passed at the United Nations recognising slavery as “the greatest crime against humanity” – though the United States voted against the resolution and every European nation abstained from the vote.
The UK. It alongside Portugal dominated the transatlantic slave trade, has consistently rejected the idea of paying reparations, which is perhaps unsurprising given estimates of what Britain “owes” in damages to nations affected run into many trillions of pounds.
This resistance has not deterred the country that has become the leading voice on reparations: Ghana.
It was Ghana that tabled the UN resolution, and in June, a summit on reparations was held in its capital, Accra, with delegates from around 80 countries. This person concluded that recompense was long overdue.
“Ghana has always been a pan-African leader. We’re the first country to attain independence in sub-Saharan Africa and to prove that it is possible to fight imperial might, and win,” Foreign Minister Samuel Okuzeto Ablakwa tells me.
Ghana has been given special responsibility by the African Union to be “champion for reparatory justice” and it is clearly a role the country’s political leadership is taking seriously.
In part that is because concerning 10-15% of the estimated 12 million Africans who were forcibly removed from their homes, torn from their villages, and dehumanised on a scale never before seen, were from what is now Ghana. Even more were shipped from its shores.
“Ghana was the crime scene where these atrocities took place, so Ghana cannot afford to be silent on ensuring that we hold perpetrators accountable,” Ablakwa says.
The minister has urged a system of reparatory justice that funds educational grants, venture capital for young African entrepreneurs and research into enduring health matters that some argue may trace their roots back to the severe malnutrition and inhumane conditions of enslavement.
And though he insists that this is not about direct financial gain for African leaders, one of the demands laid out at the recent summit on reparations clearly talked of debt relief and debt cancellation.
He also wants individual institutions that benefited from the slave trade to be held accountable and pay compensation. Among these is the Church of England.
In the 18th Century, the Church’s missionary wing ran plantations and owned hundreds of slaves. It helped fund its work throughout the Americas and beyond.
Many Church of England clergy independently owned slaves, and a recent report by the Church’s endowment fund noted the institution made substantial investments in the slave trade from which it made enormous sums of money.
In July, the leader of the Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dame Sarah Mullally, visited Ghana in one of her first international visits in the role.
She travelled to Cape Coast Castle, one of the many coastal fortresses that had been run by the British, and where enslaved residents were held before enduring the brutal “Middle Passage” to the Americas.
As she toured the dungeons where slaves were held and walked through “the door of no return” through which they were forced before being loaded on to ships, Dame Sarah looked emotional and stopped to pray.
“I felt the weight of the depth of evil that the transatlantic slave trade was. You can’t help but be deeply moved by the horrific conditions that residents were kept in,” the Archbishop said.
She also prayed in a 17th Century chapel that was positioned directly above the dungeons.
“For me that is such a stark illustration of the way the Church was involved in the slave trade,” she says. “How can the church have sat above the horrors that were going on below?”.
“The Church of England has apologised for the part that we played in the transatlantic slave trade but we’ve also said there needs to be action that relates to that,” Archbishop Sarah said.
The Church has set up a £100m ($135m) social impact fund designed to benefit communities thought to continue to feel the enduring legacy of the slave trade today.
But within the Church, the establishment of the fund has encountered resistance, just as the global push for nations to pay reparations has done.
One of the key counter-arguments centres on the fact that some Africans were themselves complicit in the capture and sale of their fellow people.
But Foreign Minister Ablakwa emphatically rejects this narrative. “I think that there’s a strategy to divide and conquer and to create a very contrived confusion,” he argues.
He stresses that the entire architecture of chattel enslavement was curated by Western slave-owning powers. This person simply utilised local actors to help carry out their aims.
The foreign minister points out that when the laws, insurance policies, and financial architectures of the trade were being drafted, “there was no African at the table”.
“We denounce and totally reject those claims that Africans are as guilty and complicit as those who masterminded this whole atrocity,” he says.
Yet, within Ghana itself, the conversation around African complicity is far more nuanced, and for some traditional leaders, acknowledging the past is a vital prerequisite part of healing.
King Tackie Teiko Tsuru II, the Ga Mantse, leader of Ghana’s Ga people, lately took the step of publicly apologising for his ancestors’ involvement in the slave trade.
“I think that the transatlantic slave trade was the greatest crime against humanity, and ancestors also took part as players in that trade,” says the king.
The Ga people became middlemen who traded with Europeans. They sold gold, ivory and ultimately enslaved Africans, often those captured in local conflicts, in exchange for the manufactured goods brought mainly by the British and Dutch, including textiles, alcohol and guns.
But the king felt he needed to say sorry not just for his own people’s complicity, but the complicity of other Africans too.
“I stand on the same point of apologising on behalf of all traditional authorities and my ancestors and forebears for the part they also played in the slavery of our brothers and sisters.
“It has affected lives and societies up to now, and to be able to go forward, you have to look at your past. It dawns on us to admit our fault and correct it,” he says.
The king believes strongly in the need for those who benefited from the slave trade to pay reparations and acknowledges that he, too, needs to commit to making financial amends.
“I believe that it underpins a state of moral courage and credibility.”
For the Ga Mantse, admitting fault does not dilute the guilt of European empires; rather, it solidifies Africa’s moral standing and sets an example as to how to move forward.
But Ghana is leading the way in another aspect of trying to heal the damage done by the slave trade. The country has run a high-profile campaign inviting the African diaspora – particularly African-Americans – to visit the continent.
It has been promoted as a means of bringing people together in the shared story of their traumatic past, with “reparations” quite literally focussing on “repair” at a highly human level.
Yaw Asare, now a Ghanaian PhD student at Howard University, previously worked within the President of Ghana’s Diaspora Office. It ran the campaign.
Initially, the gathering of black people from throughout the globe was, he felt, “a beautiful, profound experience devoid of capitalist motives”. But he says in some respects the initiative shortly morphed.
“The Ghana Tourism Authority also latched on to it and then used it to enhance their tourism project,” Asare explains, saying the initiative started to become less concerning “repair” and more about hitting tourism quotas.
Asare says the campaign has often viewed the returning diaspora simply as a means of foreign cash flow, raising costs and negatively altering local economies.
“Now (local) people are finding that they cannot afford basic things,” Asare says, describing how local Ghanaians were economically sidelined.
More devastatingly, he feels the commercialisation of the initiative overshadowed the deep, psychological work that is desperately needed for locals as well as “returning” members of the diaspora.
“We are dealing with humans, we are dealing with people. We cannot reduce them to, ‘come see this site, pay this entrance fee’,” Asare says.
He also questions – in an initiative that was partly supposed to be concerning addressing the trauma of Africans in the diaspora – why they were required to pay entrance fees at the same rates as European tourists at, for example, the coastal castles where slaves were trafficked.
He says all of this means a missed opportunity to address deep-rooted trauma some of which he feels is etched into the highly geography and psychology of modern Ghana.
“Go to Jamestown (in Accra), people are huddled together because there is the fear of ‘if I live far away, I could be taken’,” Asare says, pointing to how centuries-old worries dictated why people built their houses so closely together.
Jamestown is one of the oldest districts in the city, a community originally built around a British coastal fort where slaves were brought, traded and then sent on ships to the Americas.
For Asare, true reparatory justice must prioritise human connection and healing over financial transactions.
“We have to remove the band-aid and then look at the sore, the gaping wound that’s present,” Asare says concerning what he sees as real “reparations”. “And see how we can dress it and nurse it and heal”.
In the UK you can watch more on Ghana’s reparations debate on Global Eye on Monday at 19:00 on BBC 2
Additional reporting by Catherine Wyatt
‘The gravest crime against humanity’: What does the UN vote on slavery mean?
The pressure on the Church of England to ditch its slavery reparations plan
African and Caribbean nations call for formal apology for transatlantic slavery
Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.
Follow us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica