Ghana on Thursday kicked off a landmark global conference aimed at turning growing political support for slavery reparations into practical commitments — and the timing couldn't be more deliberate.
The three-day event in Accra comes just three months after the United Nations adopted a resolution recognising the transatlantic slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity.” That resolution, pushed by Ghanaian President John Mahama, is non-binding. But it asks nations that benefited from the slave trade to engage in restorative justice. 123 UN member states backed it.
“We won the battle against slavery, we won the battle against colonialism, we won the battle against apartheid, and we're confident that we shall win the battle against reparatory injustice,” Ghana's Foreign Minister Samuel Ablakwa told the opening session.
The conference lineup includes the leaders of Barbados, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Namibia and Liberia, plus Nigerian Nobel laureate and activist Wole Soyinka.
Since the UN vote, the campaign has gained steam in unexpected places. French President Emmanuel Macron endorsed the symbolic repeal of royal decrees that governed slavery in French colonies. France was the third-largest slave trader in Europe, after Britain and Portugal.
Pope Leo XIV last month issued an apology for the Catholic Church's centuries-long delay in condemning slavery, calling it “a wound in Christian memory.”
“The growing international support for these conversations demonstrates that reparatory justice is no longer a peripheral issue,” Ablakwa said.
Ghana itself is leaning hard into its role as a hub for diaspora connection. The country has granted citizenship to more than 1,000 people from the diaspora in recent years. Ablakwa described the nation as “transitioning from being a crime scene to a sanctuary for healing and reparative justice.”
Once a central point in the transatlantic slave trade, Ghana now hosts the “Year of Return” and “Beyond the Return” campaigns that have drawn thousands of African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans to visit and settle.
What comes next is less clear. The conference is expected to produce a roadmap for how countries can move from apology to action — whether through financial reparations, debt cancellation, educational programmes, or institutional reforms. No specific dollar figures have been floated yet.
The push for reparations has been a long-standing demand from Caribbean and African nations, but the UN resolution and this week's conference mark the strongest international endorsement yet. Whether it leads to real money or remains symbolic will depend on what happens after the speeches end.