African news. Ghana’s president Nana Akufo-Addo urged European nations pay repatriations to Africans for damage wrought by the historic slave trade.
The president said that the effects of the slave trade have been devastating to the African continent and to the African diaspora, with the entire period of slavery stifling Africa’s economic, cultural and psychological progress.
He urged that he was now time to revive and intensify the discussion about reparations for Africa among calls for reparations for damage wrought by the slave trade have been growing in recent years.
The idea was spurred on by the onslaught of the global Black Lives Matter movement for racial justice. Many argue that slavery brought on great devastating economic legacy that stunted the development of former slave colonies and the countries to which slaves were forcibly removed.
Modern-day Ghana was a major exit point for millions of slaves forced to endure the brutal Middle Passage to the United States, West Indies and South America wrote Africa business.
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Nana Akufo-Addo also shed light on the lack of reparations paid to Africa compared to the large amount of compensation paid to Britain, French and American slaveholders when the trade was finally outlawed in those countries.
The president argued that Africans should be compensated in a similar way to the victims of other historic atrocities.
“Native Americans have received and continue to receive reparations; Japanese-American families, who were incarcerated in internment camps in America during World War II, received reparations. Jewish people, six million of whom perished in the concentration camps of Hitlerite Germany, received reparations, including homeland grants and support.”
Addo also said that European nations must formally apologise for the trauma of slavery.