The UN’s Historically Selective Denunciation of Human Bondage

The transatlantic slave trade was a monstrous crime against humanity. Yet it represented just one example of an ancient evil that spanned many civilisations.

United Nations photo of the UN General Assembly Hall, following the vote on Resolution A/80/L.48, Agenda Item 119, declaring the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and the Racialised Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime Against Humanity. The resolution passed with 123 in favor, 3 against, and 52 abstentions.

From my press-gallery vantage point on 25 March, the United Nations General Assembly didn’t seem like a body wrestling with history so much as one re-enacting it. Delegates rose in turn to condemn the trans-Atlantic slave trade in solemn tones, much as generations of abolitionists had done two centuries ago in the parliaments of Europe. None but a small handful grappled with the larger sweep of history in which this depravity unfolded. And serious analysis of modern calls to compensate the victims’ ancestors was absent altogether.

The occasion was a resolution sponsored by Ghana that proclaims the transatlantic slave trade to be “the gravest crime against humanity.” It passed by a lopsided margin of 123 votes in favour versus three against (the United States, Israel, and Argentina). The 52 abstentions included the UK and the members of the European Union.

No reasonable person would contest the claim that the transatlantic slave trade was a grave historical crime. During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, more than twelve million Africans were shipped to the Americas as cargo. Those who survived the journey were typically worked to death in plantations, or assigned to other menial and dangerous tasks, sometimes chained or yoked together like livestock. In the United States, the bondage of black men, women, and children didn’t end until 1865.

Marché aux Nègres, a painting depicting a nineteenth-century slave market in Brazil, by German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–58).

Yet the identity of the resolution’s main sponsor points to moral complications in the historical narrative. At the height of the slave trade, the country we now call Ghana was ruled by the Asante Empire—an expansionist military power that fought, conquered, and, yes, enslaved its west African neighbours. The abundant supply of captives in the area is one reason why the Europeans used Ghana’s coastal ports as depots for western-bound slaves.