Ghanaian lawyer and activist Oliver Barker-Vormawor has written an open letter to investigative journalist Manasseh Azure Awuni, defending the moral and legal foundations of reparatory justice against arguments rooted in African complicity in the transatlantic slave trade.
The letter comes days after the United Nations General Assembly adopted a landmark resolution, championed by President John Dramani Mahama, formally declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity and calling for reparations. Awuni subsequently argued in a widely shared social media post that African states should also bear financial responsibility, given the documented role of African rulers and merchants who captured and sold enslaved people to European traders along the coast.
Barker-Vormawor does not contest the historical record. He acknowledges that African intermediaries participated in the trade but insists there is a fundamental difference between participation and origination. He argues that the legal and commercial architecture of the slave trade, including the Code Noir, British and American Slave Codes, and the asientos, was designed, enforced, and sustained by European powers, not African rulers.
“Honest history should enlarge the scope of accountability, not be weaponised to shrink it,” he wrote, in what amounts to the sharpest line in the letter.
To illustrate his argument, Barker-Vormawor draws a parallel with Holocaust history, pointing to the case of Jewish police units who were implicated in enforcing Nazi-era rules within ghettos. That historical fact, he notes, has never been used to diminish Jewish moral claims for reparations from Germany, and he questions why the same analytical standard is not applied to Africa.
His central concern is about how the complicity argument functions in contemporary political discourse. He contends that invoking African participation almost always surfaces in debates as a tool to redirect moral responsibility away from the European states and institutions that extracted generational wealth from enslaved labour, rather than to pursue a more complete accounting of historical guilt.
The letter adds an intellectual dimension to a debate that intensified this week following Ghana’s successful push at the United Nations, where the reparations resolution drew opposition from the United States and the European Union but secured backing from the African Union, the Caribbean Community, and over 120 other member states.
