The President, John Dramani Mahama, has urged Africans on the continent and in the diaspora to reclaim suppressed histories of slavery and colonialism and use them as a rallying point for unity and self-determination.
He made the call on Friday, December 19, 2025, when he addressed the Diaspora Summit 2025 at the Accra International Conference Centre (AICC).
He reminded participants that Ghana’s coastline, dotted with dozens of slave forts and castles, became a major exit point for millions of enslaved Africans, turning the Gulf of Guinea and the wider Atlantic into “a graveyard of our ancestors.” Many captives from across West Africa were marched for days to these dungeons before being shipped out as human cargo.
President Mahama traced part of this history to the Volta River estuary, explaining how Portuguese sailors used the “volta do mar” navigation technique to turn their ships and ride Atlantic winds and currents more quickly toward the Americas, with enslaved Africans packed below deck. What happened to those who were taken away, he stressed, is as much a part of Ghana’s story as the experiences of those who remained under colonial rule at home.
Challenging the way this past has been recorded, he said power has long determined whose version of events is preserved. He urged Africans and their descendants to ask whose voices were silenced so that others could be heard, and to deliberately seek out and reclaim those missing stories.
By owning the full truth of their past, he argued, Africans gain the power to write themselves “truthfully and respectfully” into the future of humanity.
He also condemned the divisions created by colonial borders that split ethnic homelands and by racist ideologies that cast some African groups as inferior. These legacies, he said, live on through stereotyping, a “war of images” that portrays Africans as primitive.
