A Reckoning at the UN: Ghana Challenges the Legacy of Enslavement

On 25 March 2026, Ghana stood before the UN Security Council and named what centuries of diplomatic silence refused to — the Transatlantic slave trade as the gravest crime against humanity. I write this from Lisbon, Portugal — a country that abstained from that vote, and a country that started the slave trade.

Colonialism has never been a shared story. For some, it built empires, accumulated wealth, and cemented decades of global power. For others, it meant dispossession, trauma, and impoverishment that persist to this day. Nowhere is this divergence more starkly written than in the history of the Transatlantic slave trade — a four-century forced migration that fundamentally reshaped the global economy and left enduring scars across Africa and its people. Africans and indigenous populations suffered extraordinary psychological trauma, sexual violence, and economic devastation at the hands of European colonial powers. Yet for centuries, this crime was met with historical distance rather than moral clarity — and for many powerful nations, that distance remains a deliberate choice.

Transatlantic Slave Trade

The Transatlantic slave trade was not merely a historical transaction but a barter trade used to buy human slaves by giving other resources like ships, cotton, etc. It was the largest forced displacement of human beings in recorded history, spanning nearly 400 years — approximately 1517 to 1867.

The scale of atrocity is staggering. Roughly millions of Africans were forcibly enslaved and transported across the Atlantic. During the journey, a few died due to inhuman conditions during long voyages.

The geographic distribution of enslaved people reflects the breadth of this system: two-fifths were taken to Brazil, the largest single destination; then to the British, French, Spanish, and Dutch Caribbean; and the remaining to British North America, the future United States.

A Triangular Trade

The Transatlantic slave trade operated as a three-part economic loop — a system of structured exploitation.

From Europe to Africa, merchants exported manufactured goods in exchange for enslaved African people. The Middle Passage that followed was a nightmare of deliberate inhumanity. Enslaved people were packed into ships under conditions that defied comprehension, their humanity systematically erased. From the Americas back to Europe, ships returned carrying raw materials produced by enslaved labour for plantations, generating enormous wealth for European traders and merchants.

Divide: Development and Devastation

This economic system produced a stark and enduring divergence.

The Western world prospered. European wealth accumulated rapidly, fuelling industrialisation and the comfortable modernity we associate with the West today. Africa suffered profoundly. The continent endured centuries of internal conflict, crampled economies, and suffered political instability. The extraction of more than 12 million people represented not only a loss of life but also lost knowledge, leadership, and potential on a generational scale, which is not wrong to call a huge brain drain event.

Nearly three centuries later, slavery was formally abolished in 1888, but still Africa continues to grapple with the structural legacies of this trade — poverty, political instability, and resource exploitation — while the wealth extracted remains concentrated in the Global North. The debt remains unpaid in the Global South.

Ghana's Resolution UN Resolution A/80/L.48

Ghana's resolution carries profound symbolic and political weight. Formal recognition by the United Nations Security Council places this truth in the permanent historical record — and creates a foundation for future accountability.

But the voting revealed Western hypocrisy. The United States, Israel, and Argentina voted no. Most European nations abstained — among them Portugal, the country that initiated the African slave trade.

The resistance is not surprising. For nations whose founding prosperity was built on this trade, acknowledging it as the gravest crime against humanity requires confronting their own complicity. The abstentions are particularly calculated — a refusal to defend slavery openly, while refusing equally to accept responsibility for it. 

Looking Forward: Accountability and Justice

The world's power dynamics are not fixed. As geopolitical influence shifts, the question becomes: will future generations — including those from Africa and formerly colonised regions — have the power to demand not just acknowledgment but genuine reparations and structural rebalancing?

The Transatlantic slave trade was not an unfortunate chapter of the past. It was systematic, institutionalised violence that produced the inequalities defining our present developed and underdeveloped or developing world. Ghana's resolution is a necessary step toward ensuring that this atrocity is neither forgotten nor repeated.