Three years ago, I wrote a Facebook post about our failure to mark the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition. We passed it without ceremony, without reflection, without so much as a school assembly. Yesterday, I found myself writing again, this time about something else that the public debate in Ghana was failing to notice. That Ghana had tabled a resolution before the United Nations calling for the Declaration of the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and Racialised Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime Against Humanity, which is up for vote in the General Assembly. I bemoaned the fact that our domestic media has barely registered it.
Two different moments. The same silence. A usual but deeply disturbing continuity.
But I want to go deeper than media coverage in this piece. Because the problem is not really about column inches or airtime. It is about something more fundamental that has happened to our society, and perhaps many post-colonial societies. Which is that we have not built the intellectual and cultural infrastructure to hold this history. And so, every time the conversation surfaces, we are starting from zero.
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I challenge you. Watch what happens whenever slavery and reparations come up in our public discourse, even among educated Ghanaians, even among people who should know better.
Within minutes, someone will say: “But Africans sold Africans.”
It lands like a checkmate, and the conversation collapses into a binary: either you acknowledge African complicity and therefore the whole reparations argument falls apart, or you are seen as naive, romantic, an apologist for victimhood politics. There is no third space. No sophistication. No ability to hold two truths at the same time. But if the historians can, then the legal scholars must. And surely our society must be taught to. Any serious student of this period can tell you that African complicity in the slave trade is real, documented, and must be reckoned with honestly.
And that none of it neutralises the case for reparations, because the reparations argument rests on the scale, the industrial character, the racialised permanence, and the multigenerational economic architecture of transatlantic slavery, not on a simple moral ledger that none of it neutralises the case for reparations, because the reparations argument rests on the scale, the industrial character, the racialised permanence, and the multigenerational economic architecture of transatlantic slavery, not on a simple moral ledger of who did what to whom. These are not competing facts. They live in the same sentence.
The reason we cannot hold that complexity is that we were never given the tools to do so. Our educational system did not teach us to. It still does not.
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We speak endlessly about decolonising education. It has become a fashionable phrase. But one test of whether you have actually done it is this: can your citizens walk you through the intellectual and moral weight of the transatlantic slave trade without reducing it to a talking point?
We cannot. And that is not an accident of neglect. It is, in part, the residue of an educational inheritance that was designed, from the beginning, to make us strangers to this history. Our post-colonial educational system has not been neutral on these questions. It was structured to produce a certain kind of amnesia, a certain comfortable distance from the very events that shapes the world our children are navigating.
We have not seriously dismantled that structure. We have sometimes renamed things. We have updated some syllabi. But all point to reinforcing the African inferiority complex. And the deep work of building a cultural and civic relationship with our history, one that goes beyond a school module or a heritage tourism campaign, has not been done.
So we have generations of Ghanaians, including highly credentialled ones, who understand very little and speak very loudly.
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And then there is the trust problem.
When reparations come up at the level of heads of state, our citizens do not hear a moral argument. They hear the setup for a transaction. They have watched enough cycles of grandstanding and elite capture to have learned, reasonably, that every big idea announced from a podium eventually finds its way into someone’s pocket.
That scepticism is not irrational. Even as it is undermining what should be a global good. A proud African moment.
But here is what that earned scepticism costs us: it means that the moment a legitimate historical and legal conversation begins, it is immediately contaminated by our reasonable suspicion of the people leading it. I have myself been guilty of this same thing. The result is that the argument does not get evaluated on its merits. It gets evaluated on the credibility of its messenger. And our messengers have spent decades burning that credibility down.
The tragedy is that both things can be true simultaneously. Our elites can be corrupt. And the reparations argument can be serious, grounded, consequential, and deserving of our full engagement. These are not mutually exclusive propositions. But we have not built a citizenry that is equipped to separate them.
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I want to be clear about something that often gets muddled in these conversations.
Insisting that we build a serious, sustained cultural relationship with the history of the slave trade is not a claim to perpetual victimhood. It is the opposite.
Every society that has successfully processed a grave historical wound, whether through truth commissions, memorialisation, curriculum reform, public art, legal reckoning, or civic ritual, has done so because it understood that the point is not to wallow. The point is to build ownership. To construct an authoritative account of what happened, why it matters, and how it connects to the present. To give your people the conceptual vocabulary to engage the world from a position of informed conviction rather than vague grievance or shallow pride.
The African-American intellectual tradition has done this work. Imperfection, incompleteness, but seriously. Caribbean thinkers have done it. There is a rich, rigorous, global body of scholarship on slavery, its afterlives, its economic consequences, its psychological residue, and its legal dimensions. We largely do not teach it. We largely do not read it. We certainly do not institutionalise it.
And so we show up to global conversations about reparations as a country that markets itself as the homeland of the diaspora, that has real legal and moral standing in this debate, that has produced people who have sat in international working groups on these very questions, but whose broader society cannot sustain a serious conversation about the subject for more than five minutes before it either dissolves into cliché or gets hijacked by distrust.
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Ghana has tabled a resolution at the United Nations. The world has noticed. Our own people, by and large, have not, and that is not a failure of media alone. It is a failure of the long, unglamorous work of civic and cultural education that we never did.
The knowledge divide is not just an educational failure. It is a civic one. It means that the citizens who could hold their leaders accountable on these questions, who could insist on substance over spectacle, who could distinguish a genuine moral argument from a money grab, are simply not equipped to do so.
A resolution before the General Assembly is a historical moment. Whether we are present for it, intellectually and culturally, is a different question entirely. That is the silence I am mourning. The depth beneath it.
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[1] Oliver Barker-Vormawor is a constitutional and international lawyer and Senior Partner at Merton & Everett LLP, Accra. He has worked as Law Clerk to the Vice President of the International Court of Justice, Legal Advisor at the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs and has been involved in international legal working groups on reparations for the transatlantic slave trade.
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