I am a historian. And a historian’s duty is not to validate emotion, it is to follow the evidence, even when the evidence is inconvenient.
Ghana has walked to the floor of the United Nations and made a case that stirs the conscience of the world that the descendants of those who profited from the transatlantic slave trade owe Africa. The moral electricity in that argument is undeniable. Twelve to fifteen million human beings dragged from this continent. Civilisations interrupted. Generational wealth stolen before it could be built. The grief is legitimate. The anger is earned.
But I am a historian. And a historian’s duty is not to validate emotion, it is to follow the evidence, even when the evidence is inconvenient. So before Africa accepts the applause of the world for this bold demand, let us ask the questions that the applause is drowning out.
Who exactly is supposed to pay?
Britain? France? Portugal? Fine, but pay whom? A farmer in the Volta Region? A Ghanaian entrepreneur in Kumasi? A Black American in Atlanta whose ancestors were enslaved on Ghanaian soil? The Jamaican state? The question of the recipient is not administrative detail, it is the entire architecture of the claim. You cannot demand reparations without defining who was harmed and in what measurable proportion. The moment you try, the coalition fractures.
And who is doing the paying?
A 28-year-old British nurse, born to immigrant parents from Nigeria, is now expected to carry the financial guilt of a merchant who traded in human cargo three centuries before she was born? We must be honest, the argument that nations bear the sins of their ancestors has precedent, Germany and the Holocaust, Japan and its wartime atrocities but in those cases, the same state institutions that committed the crimes continued to exist. The British Empire that ran the slave trade is not the same legal or moral entity as the United Kingdom of 2025. This does not end the conversation. But it must begin it.
Now here is the provocation Africa is not ready for.
The European slave trader did not know the interior of Africa. He sat on the coast, at Cape Coast Castle, at Elmina and he waited. It was African kings, African warriors, African merchants, our own ancestors who raided villages, marched captives to the shore in chains, and negotiated the price. The Asante Kingdom grew into one of the most powerful empires in West African history partly on the revenues of the slave trade. The Kingdom of Dahomey built its entire military economy around capturing and selling neighbouring peoples.
These are not colonial myths invented to deflect blame. These are documented historical facts that Ghanaian, Nigerian and Beninese historians have themselves written.
So when Ghana stands at the UN demanding reparations, the honest follow-up question is, will the Ghanaian state also reckon with what the predecessors of this nation did to other Africans? Will the descendants of Asante slave-trading elites, some of whom still hold inherited wealth and social status today contribute to the reparations fund? Or is accountability only a demand we make of others?
Was the trade even a crime at the time?
This is where legality and morality diverge dangerously. The transatlantic slave trade was legal, sanctioned by the laws of Britain, Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands and the African kingdoms that participated. You may find that morally repugnant. Good, so do I. But reparations as a legal instrument requires establishing wrongdoing under the laws that existed. The abolitionists themselves, Wilberforce, Equiano, the formerly enslaved men and women who testified before Parliament had to change the law because slavery was in the law. Retroactive legal culpability is a weak foundation for a financial claim of this magnitude.
How much, and calculated how?
Figures thrown around range from hundreds of billions to over fourteen trillion dollars. By what formula? Lost wages compounded over four centuries? The modern value of extracted labour? Generational trauma indexed to GDP loss? There is no agreed methodology, and without one, the demand is a moral statement dressed in the language of economics. Powerful for a speech. Insufficient for a courtroom or a treaty.
And now the question that should unsettle everyone most: Is the slave trade truly the primary reason for Africa’s underdevelopment today?
It is a reason. A profound one. The demographic haemorrhage alone, losing millions of people at the peak of their productive years across four centuries reshaped the political and economic landscape of this continent in ways we are still mapping. But let us not be intellectually dishonest in our grief.
Colonialism came after abolition and arguably did more structured damage, dismantling governance systems, drawing borders that split ethnicities and lumped enemies together, extracting resources under administrative force. The Cold War then turned African nations into battlegrounds for American and Soviet ideology, funding coups and propping up dictators who looted their own countries. The IMF’s structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s and 90s forced African governments to dismantle health systems and education budgets in exchange for loans. France, to this day, holds monetary sovereignty over fourteen African nations through the CFA Franc, a colonial currency arrangement that persists. Western corporations continue to extract minerals, oil and agricultural produce under agreements that leave the majority of profit outside the continent.
If reparations are paid tomorrow and nothing else changes, Africa’s underdevelopment continues. Because slavery ended. The extraction did not.
So what is my position?
The moral case for reparations is real and it deserves serious global engagement. No serious historian dismisses the scale of what was done or the long shadow it casts. But the reparations debate, as currently framed, is incomplete and an incomplete demand is easy to deny.
Africa cannot demand full accountability from Europe while refusing to hold a mirror to itself. Ghana cannot lead this charge while the historical role of its own predecessor kingdoms in the trade remains a subject we whisper about rather than teach.
The conversation must be broad enough to include not just who owes Africa but what Africa owes itself in governance, in intra-continental solidarity, in the courage to name every dimension of this wound, not only the ones that point outward.
The world is watching Ghana’s moral ambition. The question is whether that ambition is matched by the intellectual honesty the argument demands because History does not reward the comfortable version of itself.
Published By: Sir Phylose – 0543839775
