Ghana cannot demand justice from the world while avoiding justice at home. That is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of the government’s recent motion at the United Nations to classify the Atlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity.

Don’t get me wrong; I fully support the motion, but as a historian undergoing training at a U.S. university that has recently established a committee to investigate its role in the slave trade, I feel compelled not to moralize but to account, hold accountable, and be held accountable for the historical truth.

History is not only what was done to them or to us. It is also what was done in our name, by our ancestors. A nation that can look unflinchingly at the full complexity of its past, the violated and the violators, the raided and the raiders, is precisely the kind of nation equipped to lead a global conversation about repair.

Penance and corrective justice at home are not guilt attribution.
In 2006, the United Nations General Assembly, through Resolution 61/19, formally recognized the transatlantic slave trade and slavery as among the gravest violations of human rights in history. The resolution marked the bicentenary of the British Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 25 March 1807 and inaugurated an international framework for commemoration.

Since then, remembrance has increasingly intersected with calls for reparative justice. Ghana’s current initiative, supported by the African Union and building on earlier advocacy by former President Nana Akufo-Addo, places Africa not merely as a site of historical suffering, but as an active claimant in contemporary debates over justice, restitution, and historical responsibility.
This intervention is important and justified.

European powers bear primary responsibility as architects, financiers, and principal beneficiaries of the transatlantic system. That is not in dispute. But if Ghana’s intervention is to carry genuine intellectual and moral weight, it must be accompanied by a more thorough and honest engagement with Africa’s own historical position within that system. Political authorities, commercial intermediaries, and local actors across West Africa were implicated in varying degrees, often within asymmetrical structures of coercion, opportunity, and survival.

Ghana’s post-independence historiography and public discourse have tended toward strategic silence on this question, justified on the grounds that revisiting such histories risks reopening social divisions or undermining national cohesion. But the avoidance of difficult pasts does not eliminate their consequences. It merely displaces them.

The historical record demonstrates that the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 did not end coerced labor or human trafficking in the Gold Coast. It merely transformed them. For decades thereafter and intensifying during the colonial period (circa 1890–1930), populations from the northern territories were subjected to systematic capture, pawning, and forced relocation.

Lacking access to the European weaponry that had concentrated power in the south, they were conscripted as cheap labor for emerging cash-crop economies in the coastal belt, entrenching a system of domestic slavery that operated independently of the Atlantic markets. Merchants from the south, including Cape Coast, Asante, and Volta, sailed through the Volta River to Salaga to buy slaves for their plantations and mines.

The erasure of identity that the president of Ghana, John Dramani Mahama, rightly condemned in his recent UN address on Tuesday, March 24, 2026, where enslaved Africans were stripped of their names and ethnic identities, did not begin on the plantations of the Americas.

It began on the coast of West Africa as recently as the 1930s. The Atangas, Awelenas, Assibis, who became “Kofi,” Agyemangs, Mawuli, and the Hassanas, who became “Adwoa,” were subject to a process of identity erasure that was already a codified practice among local merchant elites long before the transatlantic voyage.

These are not distant abstractions. The descendants of those raided northern communities are still with us. They are still unevenly positioned within national narratives. And they are obviously absent from the commemorative machinery surrounding initiatives like the Year of Return in 2019, the Diaspora Summit in Accra in December 2025, and the current UN advocacy in March 2026. When Ghana speaks at the United Nations about the crimes of the slave trade, whose history is being represented and whose is being left out?

The contrast with Benin is instructive and should be humbling. In the late 1990s, President Mathieu Kérékou of Benin publicly recognized the historical role of the Kingdom of Dahomey in the slave trade and issued a formal apology. His administration followed this with direct diplomatic outreach to the African diaspora in the United States, not to deflect blame from European powers, but to build a more honest and reciprocal relationship with diaspora communities.

The result was significant. Kérékou’s acknowledgment did not weaken Benin’s case against European culpability. It strengthened it by demonstrating a maturity of historical consciousness that commanded respect both at home and abroad. It also opened space for dialogue with diaspora communities that was not predicated solely on external blame. But Ghana has attempted no such equivalent internal reconciliation.

African American students and diaspora communities are not naive about this history. They understand that Europeans initiated, financed, and industrialized the transatlantic slave trade. They support demands for reparations from Western governments and institutions. But they also ask, as they have asked me directly, why Africans sold them. That question is not a deflection or an attempt to absolve European responsibility.

It is a legitimate historical inquiry that deserves a serious answer, not diplomatic evasion. The diaspora’s moral expectations are not limited to European capitals. They extend to Accra.

Ghana’s intervention at the United Nations has the potential to reshape global conversations about slavery and reparations. It deserves to succeed. But its credibility will depend, in part, on whether it is matched by an equally serious engagement with the histories that lie closer to home.

That means acknowledging the role of Akan, Ewe, Ga, and Nzema merchant elites and political authorities in supplying the Atlantic trade. Of course, it won’t be disingenuous, not to mention the Gonja and Doagomba kingdoms, whose raiding of weaker polities helped sustain Asante tributary demands.

It means reckoning with the complicity of individuals in the upper regions who conspired with slave raiders to deliver their neighbors into bondage. It means recognizing the particular suffering of northern communities that were raided and exploited for generations. And it means creating commemorative and educational spaces that represent all of Ghana’s slave trade histories, not only those that are comfortable or diplomatically convenient. Some resisted. Some accommodated the system for profit or power. Others paid with their lives. But a choice existed

Silence, in this context, is not neutral. It is a choice. And it is a choice that risks limiting both the analytical clarity and the ethical force of the very claims now being advanced on the world stage. Benin shows us that acknowledgment does not weaken the case against European culpability. It strengthens it. Ghana should have the courage to do the same.