President Mahama rejects claims African involvement diminishes slavery’s crime or reparations case

President John Mahama has rejected arguments that the involvement of some Africans in the transatlantic slave trade diminishes the scale of the atrocities committed or weakens calls for reparatory justice, insisting that such participation does not erase the fact that slavery was a systematic crime against humanity.

Using the Holocaust as a comparison, he said the involvement of some Jews in acts linked to Nazi persecution does not invalidate the historical reality or severity of the genocide.

“Some of the most brutal prison guards were Jews. Some of those who went into the communities and showed where Jews were hiding and delivered them to the Nazis to be exterminated, were Jews, but it doesn’t mean the Holocaust didn’t happen and that the Holocaust wasn’t a crime against humanity.”

Speaking at a high-level dialogue on reparations at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, he said the same principle applies to discussions about African involvement in the slave trade, arguing that the participation of some Africans cannot be used to deny the wider system of exploitation and suffering.

“And so even the argument that Africans were involved in enslaving Africans does not stop it from being the gravest crime against humanity.”

President Mahama said the history of the transatlantic slave trade must be examined in its entirety, including the systems and structures that sustained it for centuries.

“And the point is, you must look at all the legal underpinnings. You must look at everything that was established to support the slave trade, in terms of the insurance of the cargo and all that kind of thing, the auctions and all that, it was a very systematic trade.”

He argued that the existence of African intermediaries cannot be used to dismiss the realities of a global system that treated human beings as commodities.

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