Follow Us on Google
By Faheem Lawal
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has said Africans and people of African descent must never forget the slave trade, adding that forgiveness should follow only if those responsible show remorse, as speakers at the Creative Africa Nexus Weekend (CANEX WKND) 2026 in Lagos pressed the case for reparations.
Obasanjo spoke at a session titled “A Conversation Inspired by Lest We Forget”, held at Live Theatre 1, alongside the former Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, Dr Ralph Gonsalves, and Professor Paulette Angela Ramsay of Jamaica.
The session was inspired by the book Lest We Forget: Slavery, Slave Trade, Colonization, Emancipation and Reparation, which Ramsay said grew out of Obasanjo’s call for an insider’s account by African and diaspora scholars, politicians and policymakers.
Obasanjo compared the slave trade to the Holocaust. He said that if the world forgot, nobody would insist the Holocaust had happened, adding that millions of Africans had also died in the slave trade.
“As a Christian, we will forgive if they show remorse, those who committed this sin, this atrocity, but we must never forget,” he said.
He said global Africans, including those in the Caribbean, the Americas and the Pacific, should remember that they were one people who had been divided by greed and must unite in their own interest for their own prosperity.
Other News
Gonsalves said the United Nations General Assembly, on 25 March 2026, acknowledged the transatlantic slave trade and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans as the greatest crime against humanity.
He said reparations were about repairing the present-day legacies of underdevelopment, harm and pain. He said the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) had a 10-point plan for reparatory justice, starting with a full formal apology and ending with debt relief and financial compensation. The plan also covers health, education, housing, poverty, technology, memorials and the return of stolen artefacts.
According to him, the British government has said it will consider some matters but does not call them reparations. He said many of them were already covered by the Sustainable Development Goals, which he said were distinct from reparations because reparations required a special, multi-generational approach.
Ramsay said reparations should not be reduced to money. She said they must include an apology, restitution, the return of artefacts held in museums abroad and an end to the ongoing exploitation of Africa’s resources, such as minerals used in making semiconductors.
She said Ghana presented a resolution on the matter at the United Nations on 25 March this year, and that reparations concerned all global Africans, not only the Caribbean. She called on governments to protect Africans’ intellectual and creative production through legal frameworks and to put African history in school curricula.
She said African people’s story was one of survival, and that the past should be remembered “without bitterness”.
