Ghana’s President, John Dramani Mahama has rejected arguments that slavery should be judged by the social norms of its time, calling such claims “loud and wrong.”
Speaking Tuesday at a High-Level Special Event on Reparatory Justice at the United Nations headquarters, Mahama said the transatlantic slave trade was a crime that must be recognized and rectified.
“People will sometimes put a disclaimer to say that you cannot use the social norms to judge the actions and events that took place in the past. Well, such people are loud and wrong,” Mahama said. “Just because everybody is doing something doesn’t make it right. Slavery is wrong now, and it was wrong then.”
The event, themed “Reparatory Justice for the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and the Racialised Chattel Enslavement of Africans,” comes amid growing international calls for reparations and acknowledgment of slavery’s long-term impact on African communities and the diaspora.
Mahama noted that while Africans were enslaved for centuries, there were always abolitionists who opposed the injustice. He added that the slave trade was “designed to deny African people their humanity” and rooted in a racial hierarchy “with no basis in fact or science that placed whiteness above blackness.”
