Ghanaian activist, Oliver Barker-Vormawor has written an open letter to journalist Manasseh Azure Awuni, stressing that Africa’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade does not undermine the moral or legal case for reparatory justice.

In the letter, Barker-Vormawor acknowledges Awuni’s point that African merchants and rulers acted as intermediaries in the trade, but he warns against conflating participation with causation.

“Yes, African rulers and merchants were involved, but the system itself—the Code Noir, the British and American Slave Codes, the asientos, was conceived and controlled by European powers,” he wrote.

He draws a parallel to Holocaust history, noting that some Jewish police units, though implicated in enforcing Nazi rules, do not diminish the moral claim for reparations.

“Treating the middleman as the architect is to confuse a distorted market response with the market’s creation,” Barker-Vormawor explains.

The scholar concludes by challenging narratives that use African complicity to deflect accountability from states and institutions that built wealth on enslaved labor.

“Honest history should enlarge the scope of accountability, not be weaponised to shrink it,” he wrote, underscoring the continuing relevance of these discussions in Africa’s reparations debate.