President John Dramani Mahama has stated that no amount of rationalisation can justify the horrific transatlantic slave trade visited on the black race, stressing that it was designed to deny African people their humanity.

President Mahama made the remarks at a high-level event on reparatory justice at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, USA, yesterday.

He said that, the arguments the social norms of today could not be used to judge the actions of the past were flawed.

“People sometimes try to put a disclaimer on slavery by insisting that you cannot use the social norms of today to judge the actions and events that took place in the past.

“Well, such people are loud and wrong. Just because everybody is doing something does not make it right. Slavery is wrong now, and it was wrong then,” President Mahama stated.

According to him, as far back as 1619, when the first slave ship landed in the United States of America, there were recorded instances of opposition to chattel slavery.

President Mahama delivering his address at the United Nations high-level event

He added that in 1688, the Germantown Friends, a group of Quakers, issued a formal written protest against slavery.

He said these and other examples made such disclaimers untenable.

President Mahama noted that the approximately 15 million enslaved Africans contributed significantly to the development of Europe, a contribution that had never been fully recognised.

“We paved roads through mountains, laid railroad tracks, constructed buildings brick by brick, cut sugarcane, picked cocoa and cotton, and descended into mines to unearth precious metals and stones,” he recounted.

Citing further examples, he noted that there had been attempts to erase the horrors inflicted on enslaved Africans through the use of misleading narratives, including the removal of Black history courses from school curricula.

President Mahama mentioned that his call for a United Nations declaration was aimed at preventing such historical amnesia.

“This is the type of forgetting that I was referring to,” he said.

He stressed that discussions on slavery and its enduring legacy must begin with reclaiming racial equality, restoring the dignity of Africans, and recognising the humanity of both past and present generations.

Moreover, referencing the accounts of Guyanese historian, Walter Rodney, and Portuguese sailor, Vicente Pegado, the latter in 1531, President Mahama said:

“The greatness within us will always outweigh the injustices that have been visited upon us. Our survival is a testament to that fact.”

He called on member States to speak truth to power and support his motion, backed by the African Union and CARICOM, to have the transatlantic slave trade declared the gravest crime against humanity.