Africa seeks action plan on slavery reparations at Ghana conference
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00:00 A conference calling for an action plan on slavery reparation is currently underway in Accra.
00:06 From the 15th to the 19th century, at least 12.5 million Africans were kidnapped and forcibly transported by European ships and merchants and sold into slavery.
00:18 Ghana's President Nana Akufa-Adu has been a vocal advocate for reparatory justice over the damage done by the slave trade.
00:26 Our Justice Baidu brings us more from the Ghanaian capital.
00:30 It is day two of what would be a four-day conference that is being attended by not less than five African heads of state, including the chair of the African Union, Azali Asumani.
00:44 Speaker after speaker at this conference have been justifying why the continent deserves these reparations.
00:53 The President of Ghana, Nana Akufa-Adu, who made a very bold statement at the last UN General Assembly in September, repeated it today,
01:03 saying that the West had built its wealth and superpower on the back of the exploitation that it had caused on the continent and its people.
01:12 And the West, the continent, deserved these reparations to have a closure to the issue of the slave trade.
01:20 Predictably, the question of reparations becomes a debate only when it comes to Africa and Africans.
01:29 When the British ended slavery, all the owners of enslaved Africans received reparations to the tune of some 20 million pounds sterling,
01:41 the equivalent today of some 20 billion pounds sterling.
01:45 But enslaved Africans themselves did not receive a penny.
01:50 Likewise, in the United States of America, owners of slaves received $300 for every slave they owed.
01:59 The slaves themselves received nothing.
02:03 This meeting is expected to produce an action plan to ensure the achievement of these, the payment of these reparations.
02:11 It is also expected to put together an African-led committee that will push for this to happen.
02:17 The third thing that this meeting is expected to do is also to connect the people that are attending this meeting
02:22 and the broader people on the continent to the diaspora to help sustain this advocacy.