Let it be recorded that when history beckoned, we did what was right for the memory of the millions who suffered the indignity of slavery.” His statement reflects both the historical significance of the resolution and the beginning of a more difficult conversation about what comes next. One of the areas where this conversation is unfolding is the question of African complicity in the slave trade. While this question carries some intuitive appeal, because African participation appears to complicate the assigning of responsibility to external actors alone, its weaknesses become evident when closely interrogated and contextualised.

The resolution in legal and moral context The UN resolution stressed the trafficking and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity “by reason of the definitive break in world history, scale, duration, systemic nature, brutality and enduring consequences that continue to structure the lives of all people through racialised regimes of labour, property and capital”. This language is a considered legal designation grounded in fundamental principles of international law. Ghana’s foreign minister, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, pointed to the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which classifies enslavement as a crime against humanity, and argued that addressing it is a responsibility owed to the global community, not just one between individual states.

This framing shifts the conversation from sentiment to obligation. The UN resolution urges member states to engage in dialogue on reparations, including formal apologies, the return of stolen artefacts, financial compensation and guarantees of non-repetition. While the General Assembly’s resolutions are non-binding, they carry persuasive weight and reflect prevailing international consensus.

In the context of justice for mass atrocities, such moments of recognition often come before binding legal actions, as seen in earlier global responses to apartheid, the recognition of genocide as a crime against humanity, and the eventual establishment of the International Criminal Court. African “complicity”? Almost immediately after the vote, critics in Ghana and beyond argued that Africans, having participated in the slave trade, cannot frame it as the gravest crime against humanity and seek reparations without first confronting their own complicity.

Indeed, some kingdoms and merchants on the African continent participated in the capture and sale of people to European traders and profited from the process. Yet assigning equal moral culpability to African intermediaries and European states is a grave misrepresentation. The UN resolution neither denies African involvement in slavery nor rests on claims of moral innocence.

Rather, it asks us to recognise the transatlantic slave trade as a historically specific system of organised, racialised and global violence. Responsibility in this regard requires three important considerations. The first is scale and structure.

Pre-colonial African societies practised forms of slavery that, while morally indefensible by contemporary standards, differed fundamentally in character from the transatlantic system. Enslaved persons in many African societies retained certain rights, could earn freedom, and were not subjected to the hereditary, racialised, biological theory of permanent subhuman status that defined chattel slavery in the Americas. The transatlantic system did not merely export enslaved bodies: it exported and industrialised a racist ideology that reclassified an entire continent of people as private property.

The second is power asymmetry. European demand for enslaved labour was insatiable and was backed by military, commercial and naval dominance that profoundly shaped the conditions under which African actors operated. For more than 400 years, millions of people were stolen from Africa, put in shackles and shipped to the Americas.

The African states and merchants who supplied captives to European traders were responding to — and were often destabilised by — a demand they did not create and a system they did not design, finance or ultimately control. To treat these actors as equivalent is to overlook the asymmetries that made the system possible in the first place. Additionally, as the