Dear Editor,
Today, March 25, European nations refused to declare slavery a crime against humanity. This was not a failure of procedure; it was a failure of conscience.
On the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Ghana put forward a proposal to finally acknowledge, in the language of international law, what centuries of history have already proven: slavery was the GRAVEST CRIME against humanity. The United States, Israel, and Argentina voted no. But the most telling response came from Europe: abstention en masse. The inventors, perpetrators and primary beneficiaries of this heinous crime chose silence.
This vote is both deeply troubling and profoundly revealing.
When apartheid fell in South Africa, Black South Africans did not seek revenge. They chose forgiveness and reconciliation. Nelson Mandela called for a rainbow nation. In Kenya and Zimbabwe, despite the brutality of white settler rule: the land theft, the humiliation, the violence, the same pattern held. The colonized extended grace to the colonizer.
If you visit Elmina Castle in Ghana, Gorée Island in Senegal, or Kunta Kinteh Island in the Gambia, you will walk through the ‘Door of No Return.’ You will see the dungeons, the chains, and the punishment yards. These are not symbols. Rather, they are evidence of centuries of rape, castration, sterilization, overwork, and murder. During the Middle Passage, millions perished in transit. Those who survived were subjected to chattel slavery: treated as property, denied humanity, and exploited across generations.
And from this brutality, the Industrial Revolution was built. The palaces of Europe, its churches, its universities, its banks, and its industries, all rose on the backs of enslaved Africans. Europe’s immense prosperity, power, and wealth were not achieved in isolation. No! They were forged in the fire of exploitation of Black People.
Yet today, European nations, who imagined, invented, and perfected this system, claim it does not meet the threshold of a crime against humanity.
Ask most Africans today whether to forgive Europe, and the answer will be YES! That generosity is evident in everyday life: in the smiles, the hospitality, the openness with which Africans receive Europeans. There are no mobs hunting down Europeans for the sins of their ancestors. No political movement in Africa is built on vengeance for slavery or colonialism. Across the continent, Africans have moved on, not because the crimes were minor, but because forgiveness is embedded in their culture.
So why do European nations refuse to accept what history, morality, and logic demand? Why do they reject a designation they would instantly apply to any other crime of this magnitude? Is it fear of reparations? If so, what does that fear reveal? That they know justice is owed, but they are unwilling to pay it.
Is Europe declaring to the world that it is incapable of accepting accountability? That it will take responsibility for crimes against its own people, but not against Black people? We hear you!
After World War II, the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention of 1948. That law was built on the recognition of the Holocaust as a crime of genocide, and rightly so. Six million European Jews were killed in a state-sponsored campaign of persecution and extermination.
Now compare: the Transatlantic Slave Trade was also state-sponsored. It involved the systematic removal, exploitation, and dehumanization of millions of African people. The UN estimates that over 15 million Africans were forcibly transported. Other scholars argue that the continent lost more than 100 million people when accounting for those killed in raids, wars, and the Middle Passage. This depopulation did not just cause suffering, it truncated Africa’s socioeconomic and political evolution for generations.
Let there be no confusion: slavery was genocide in essence. If Africa’s population had been smaller, if it had been a single, concentrated community rather than a vast continent, the machinery of the slave trade would have wiped it out entirely. The acts inflicted upon enslaved Africans were not merely exploitative; they were conditions designed for extermination.
Mass death in the Middle Passage, calculated neglect, reproductive sabotage through sterilization and castration, the destruction of family structures, the deliberate obliteration of culture, language, and identity, these were not incidental consequences. They were the mechanisms that ensured populations would not endure.
The Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The slave trade met that definition for centuries, systematically applying every listed act: killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to bring about the group’s destruction, and imposing measures to prevent births. That it did not succeed in extinguishing African peoples does not negate the intent or the attempt. It succeeded only because Africa’s human reservoir was vast enough and resilient to survive what was meant to be annihilation.
Since 1948, European nations have provided reparations to Israel: financial assistance, military aid, diplomatic support. In 1952, West Germany signed the Luxembourg Agreement, paying over $700 million (at the time) to Israel as compensation for Nazi-era crimes.
No such reckoning has been extended to Africa. Instead, Europe continues to extract billions of euros from the continent through unfair and illicit trade, perpetuating the economic violence that began with slavery.
Europe’s refusal to acknowledge slavery as a crime against humanity is not an oversight, rather it is a position. It says that Europe will honor its moral debts when they are owed to white populations but evade them when owed to Black ones.
Therefore, for the African government, this vote is a diplomatic signal that accountability must be pursued collectively, through the African Union, through international courts, and through sustained political pressure. Ghana has set the stage and all African governments with the AU and its regional blocs must hold the fort. Justice must be delivered.
For the African intellectual, it is a reminder that the work of decolonizing knowledge and international law is far from complete.
For the African journalist and activist, it is confirmation that silence is complicity. The facts are clear; the argument is sound. The task now is to force the conversation Europe is trying to avoid.
For the ordinary African person, this vote is an insult to their ancestors, and a challenge to demand justice, not in place of forgiveness, but as its prerequisite. Because forgiveness without accountability is not reconciliation. It is amnesia. And Europe is counting on us to forget.
No recognition, no justice! Africa will not be erased.
Madi Jobarteh
Kembujeh
