On March 25, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly made history. In a vote of 123 nations in favour, with only three against, the United States, Israel, and Argentina, and 52 abstentions, including the United Kingdom and all 27 European Union member states, the world body formally declared the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity. The resolution, spearheaded by Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama, calls for reparatory justice, formal apologies, restitution, compensation, and the return of cultural artefacts looted during the colonial era. It was adopted on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, a date that marks the passage of Britain’s Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807.
Many Africans will celebrate this moment, and rightly so. It carries deep emotional and symbolic weight. For some, it is a geopolitical score. For others, it is long-overdue moral validation. But for those of us who love Africa and are invested in her future, the more important question is not what the world now says about our past, but what we ourselves will do with our present and our future.
The transatlantic slave trade was a horror beyond words. For over 400 years, an estimated 12.5 to 13 million African men, women, and children were seized from their homes, packed into ships, and transported across the Atlantic Ocean to work on plantations in brutal conditions. Millions died before they even reached shore. The trade hollowed out entire generations and robbed Africa of the human capital she needed to grow and prosper.
But let us be honest with ourselves: the transatlantic slave trade, as terrible as it was, was not the only great crime committed against African people.
Long before the first European ship anchored on African soil, another slave trade was already operating. This is the Arab slave trade, also called the Trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trade. Beginning in the 7th century, this trade spanned more than 1,300 years, making it the longest slave trade in recorded history. Between 10 and 18 million Africans were trafficked across the Sahara Desert and the Indian Ocean to Arab markets in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Persia, and the broader Middle East. The conditions were unspeakable. It is estimated that up to 50 per cent of enslaved people died during the trans-Saharan crossings. Zanzibar, on the east coast of what is today Tanzania, became one of the most notorious hubs of this trade, with enslaved people shipped from as far as Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and the Great Lakes region of East Africa. The Arab slave trade was finally abolished in Mauritania which is the last country to do so in 1981.
The Arab conquest and expansion into North Africa from the 7th century also brought enormous disruption to the continent. Indigenous peoples were displaced from their ancestral lands, their religions were changed by force or by the threat of heavy taxation for those who refused to convert. Those who resisted sparked centuries of wars and conflicts across the continent, as African kingdoms and warriors rose up to defend their people and their way of life. The suffering was immense and the effects were lasting.
And then came European colonialism, a system that carved up the African continent at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, distributed her peoples like property, and extracted her resources for foreign enrichment. The atrocities carried out under colonial rule in places like the Congo Free State under King Leopold II of Belgium, where millions of Congolese were mutilated, enslaved, and killed, stand among the worst crimes in human history. The destabilisation of governments, the sponsoring of armed groups, and the manipulation of African politics by outside powers did not end with formal independence. They have continued in different forms up to this day, from regime changes to the fuelling of insurgencies that have cost countless African lives in countries like Burkina Faso, Nigeria, South Africa and beyond.
Every one of these crimes deserves to be named, remembered, and never forgotten. History must record them all. But here lies the difficult question that every African must ask: how many acknowledgements do we need, and from how many perpetrators, before we decide to rise?
If the transatlantic slave trade requires a UN resolution, what about the Arab slave trade? What about the Congo? What about colonialism itself? What about the extraction that continues today through corrupt deals, debt traps, and the looting of natural resources by both foreign companies and our own leaders? There is a very real danger that Africa becomes a continent defined entirely by what was done to her, always looking to others for recognition, apology, or compensation, while her people remain poor and her potential remains locked.
That is not a future worth fighting for.
There is a truth we rarely say loudly enough: Africa’s suffering was not caused only by outsiders. Some of our own people opened the gates. African chiefs and kings participated in the transatlantic slave trade by selling their own people to European merchants. Internal divisions, ethnic rivalries, and the hunger for short-term power made the continent vulnerable to exploitation from outside.
Today, the same pattern repeats. Too many of Africa’s leaders continue to sell their people, not in chains, but through corrupt contracts, stolen resources, foreign bank accounts filled with public money, and the acceptance of foreign aid in exchange for political compliance. While African nations remain poor and underdeveloped, the wealth extracted from African soil and labour continues to enrich others. The problem is not only historical. It is happening now.
This must change.
Africa is not a poor continent. She is a rich continent with poor leadership. Africa holds approximately 30 per cent of the world’s mineral resources. She has the youngest and fastest-growing population on earth. She has fertile land, abundant water in many regions, and an extraordinary diversity of cultures, languages, and knowledge. The African Continental Free Trade Area, if fully implemented, could create one of the largest single markets in the world.
What Africa needs is not more apologies from distant capitals. What Africa needs is honest, courageous leadership that serves its people. She needs open borders between African nations, so that African traders, workers, and entrepreneurs can move freely and build wealth together. She needs investment in railways, roads, and infrastructure that connect African cities to each other, not just to foreign ports. She needs to refine and process her own raw materials rather than exporting them cheaply and buying them back as finished products at a premium. She needs to eject terrorist organisations and puppet governments that keep her people in fear and poverty. And she needs citizens who hold their leaders accountable, who vote with wisdom, speak with courage, and refuse to be silenced.
The memory of slavery, colonialism, and every atrocity committed on African soil must be kept alive as education, so that we understand how we arrived here, and so that we never allow it to happen again. But memory must not become a prison. The past must be a teacher, not a permanent identity.
Africa has produced great civilisations. The ancient kingdoms of Egypt, Mali, Songhai, Benin, Great Zimbabwe, and Kush built cities, universities, trade routes, and systems of governance that the world still studies today. That greatness was not destroyed forever. It was interrupted. And what was interrupted can be resumed.
The resolution adopted at the United Nations on March 25, 2026 may be a moment of recognition. But recognition from others means very little if we do not recognise ourselves, our strength, our worth, our capacity. Africa must stop looking defeated. Africa must stop performing grief for a global audience. Africa must stand upright, look forward, and build.
The greatest reparation Africa can give herself is not a cheque from a foreign government. It is the decision, made by Africans, for Africans to rise.
