The UN General Assembly will vote Wednesday on a resolution designating the transatlantic African slave trade as "the gravest crime against humanity," in a move advocates say is a step towards healing and justice.
Ghana's President John Mahama, one of the African Union's most vocal supporters of slavery reparations, visited the United Nations headquarters to promote the "historic" gesture.
The resolution, he told the UN on Tuesday, "allows us as a global community to collectively bear witness to the plight of more than 12.5 million men, women and children, whose homes, communities, names, families, hopes, dreams, futures and lives were stolen from them over the course of 400 years."
Calling it "a safeguard against forgetting," Mahama took aim at recent political moves in the United States to ban books on the subject in order to "stop teaching students about the truth of...slavery, segregation and racism."
The draft resolution "declares the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity."
The text also highlights the legacy of slavery via "the persistence of racial discrimination and neo-colonialism" in today's society.
'Not ranking suffering'
Amma Adomaa Twum-Amoah, the African Union's Commissioner for Health, Humanitarian Affairs and Development, said that "to name these atrocities clearly is to remove the last veils of ambiguity from the historical record."
"It is to say that what was done to Africans was not a tragic accident of history, but the result of deliberate policies whose legacies structure today's inequalities," she continued. "Justice begins with calling things by their proper names."
But the resolution goes beyond simple acknowledgement, asking nations involved in the slave trade to engage in the process of restorative justice.
"The perpetrators of the transatlantic slave trade are known, the Europeans, the United States of America," Ghanaian Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa told AFP.
"We expect all of them to formally apologize to Africa and to all people of African descent."
One pathway toward restorative justice, he said, is that "all the looted artifacts are returned to the motherland."
He also suggested that institutions continue to address structural racism and that "compensation" could be offered to those affected.
Okudzeto Ablakwa also acknowledged criticism of the resolution brought by some General Assembly members that the language of it could create a "hierarchy" of suffering.
"We are not ranking suffering when we say that the transatlantic slave trade represents a 'gravest crime against humanity,' it is not to introduce a hierarchy," he said.
"What we are saying is that if you look at all of the atrocities that have happened in the history of humanity, none have been this systemic, this prolonged, over 300 years, and the lingering consequences of that," he said.
"We are not ranking pain. We are not saying that our pain should be valued more than your pain."