African and Caribbean nations gathered in Ghana this week to endorse a comprehensive reparations plan, demanding formal apologies, debt cancellation, and financial compensation from countries that benefited from the transatlantic slave trade.
The 19-point plan was adopted at the close of a three-day conference and represents a joint effort by the African Union and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Commission on Reparatory Justice. The document does not specify which individual countries should issue apologies.
Among its key provisions, the plan calls for the creation of a Global Reparations Fund, broad debt relief and cancellation for affected nations, and reforms to international financial institutions aimed at giving countries in the Global South a greater voice. It also demands the return of looted cultural artifacts and ancestral remains, climate justice funding, and targeted measures to address the specific suffering endured by African women and girls during slavery.
Additionally, the plan urges African nations to offer diaspora Africans pathways to citizenship and the right of return, while committing to preserving historic coastal forts and castles as memorials to the slave trade.
The conference builds on momentum from a United Nations resolution passed in March, which recognized transatlantic slavery as the “gravest crime against humanity.” That resolution passed with 123 votes in favor, though the United States, Israel, and 52 other nations — including European Union members and Britain — either voted against it or abstained. Both the EU and the U.S. expressed concern that the resolution could create a ranking system among crimes against humanity.
Historians estimate that at least 12.5 million Africans were kidnapped and forcibly transported aboard European ships between the 15th and 19th centuries. Advocates argue that the lasting effects of that era — including systemic racism and economic inequality — demand a formal, coordinated response.
Previously, CARICOM and the African Union had each been developing their own separate reparations frameworks. The Ghana conference allowed both organizations to combine their work into a single unified document, which will now be presented at the next U.N. General Assembly.
Several heads of state addressed the conference, many striking a tone that distinguished between personal guilt and collective responsibility. Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama told delegates: “None of us gathered in this hall today can be held personally responsible for the atrocities of the transatlantic slave trade. History does not ask us to inherit guilt, but it asks us to inherit responsibility.”
Leaders from Namibia, Liberia, Senegal, Barbados, and Sao Tome and Principe attended in person, along with the vice president of Equatorial Guinea.
French President Emmanuel Macron participated virtually from the Elysee Palace, saying that enslaved people “were torn from their homelands, deported, dehumanised, and treated as goods.” He cautioned that reparations should not be viewed “as an end point, or a cheque written to bring the story to a close.”
Last month, French lawmakers voted to formally repeal slavery-era laws that had classified enslaved people as “movable property” and permitted abuse and corporal punishment — though the legislation stopped short of including any reparations demands.
