Keypoints:
- Mahama reframes Ghana’s history to fully include the African diaspora
- Ghana to push UN motion recognising slavery as a crime against humanity
- President links culture, memory and reparative justice
PRESIDENT John Mahama opened the Ghana Diaspora Summit in Accra with a question that cut through ceremony and protocol: why does Ghana’s story so often end at the shoreline?
Speaking on December 19 at the Accra International Conference Centre, Mahama delivered an emotionally charged keynote that sought to reunite history, identity and destiny, arguing that Ghana’s national narrative remains incomplete without the millions of Africans who were violently uprooted and scattered across the Atlantic.
Addressing the gathering ‘not as president, but as a student of history’, Mahama said centuries of slavery and colonialism had engineered a false separation between Africans on the continent and those in the diaspora — a division that continues to deny both their wholeness.
‘When you study history,’ he said, ‘you must ask yourself whose story is missing.’
Rewriting where Ghana’s story begins
Mahama challenged the conventional framing of Ghana’s history as beginning with British colonial rule in 1821, calling it an inaccurate and limiting account. Ghana’s peoples and civilisations, he argued, long predated colonial boundaries — and so too did their connections beyond the continent.
Between the 16th and 19th centuries, nearly 13 million African men, women and children were captured and forced onto slave ships, with more than 2 million dying during the Middle Passage. Ghana’s coastline became a central artery of that crime, hosting more than 70 slave forts and castles — more than any other African country.
‘What followed for those who passed through here,’ Mahama said, ‘is as much Ghana’s story as what followed for those who remained.’
He drew a stark contrast between the ‘Door of No Return’ and the Portuguese navigational concept of Volta do Mar, which allowed European traders to guarantee their own safe return home. The irony, he noted, lay in how power ensured survival and memory for one side, while denying both to the other.
Power, memory and reclamation
Quoting Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Mahama reminded delegates that ‘the one who has power is the one who gets to write the story’. For generations, Africa did not hold that power.
The consequences, he said, remain visible in racial stereotypes, colourism and language itself — systems that taught Africans and people of African descent to see themselves through the eyes of their oppressors.
‘Anything stripped of its power no longer works,’ Mahama said, urging Africans to reclaim suppressed histories not as nostalgia, but as a path to self-knowledge and dignity.
Music, language and memory that refused to die
Mahama reminded the audience that Africa did not vanish in the Americas. It survived — stubbornly and creatively — in rhythm, language and ritual.
In the United States, he noted, the Gullah Geechee people still count using Akan words rather than numerals. Yoruba continues to be spoken across Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Trinidad and Tobago. In Jamaica and Suriname, Maroon communities preserve creole languages born of African tongues and resistance.
Africa also endured in sound, Mahama said — in the cadence of speech, the call-and-response patterns that became gospel, jazz, reggae and samba. Even food carried memory across oceans: okra travelled from West Africa into gumbo and feijoada, mirroring Ghanaian okro stew, while cowpeas crossed the Atlantic into dishes that still echo home.
These, he argued, were acts of remembrance — proof that enslavement failed to erase Africa from its children.
Reparations and a shared future
Mahama confirmed that Ghana will move a motion at the United Nations General Assembly to recognise the transatlantic slave trade as the greatest crime against humanity. Recognition, he said, must be followed by action: debt cancellation, monetary compensation, the return of stolen artefacts, institutional reform and transformative economic redress.
Citing Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley’s warning about a ‘conspiracy of silence’, Mahama said Africa no longer has the luxury of forgetting.
Invoking Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, he reaffirmed pan-African unity as both moral obligation and political necessity.
‘The future is African,’ Mahama declared. ‘And with a united Africa and diaspora, there is nothing we cannot achieve.’
