President John Dramani Mahama has described the transatlantic slave trade as a deliberate system designed to strip African people of their humanity, calling for global recognition of its crimes and the restoration of dignity to millions of victims.

Speaking at a high-level event on reparatory justice at the UN Headquarters in New York, he said the slave trade was built on a false racial hierarchy that unjustly placed superiority on whiteness and inferiority on blackness.

He stressed that the widespread atrocities of the era were rooted in the treatment of Africans as property rather than human beings, leading to generations of injustice that continue to shape modern societies.

President Mahama recounted the harsh realities of enslavement, where captured Africans were stripped, chained, and transported under brutal conditions across the Atlantic, with many dying during the Middle Passage. Survivors, he noted, were often stripped of their identities, renamed, and in some cases branded.

Highlighting the scale of the trade, he pointed out that millions of Africans were trafficked across the Americas, emphasising that these figures represent real lives, families, and futures that were destroyed.

He also warned against the growing risk of historical erasure, citing efforts to downplay or remove the teaching of slavery and racial injustice in some educational systems.

President Mahama called for collective global action to reclaim racial equality, restore dignity, and honour the humanity of those who suffered, urging continued commitment to truth, accountability, and reparatory justice.