UNESCO Director-General makes the voice of Ghanaian student heard on reparatory justice

By: Jonathan Bill Doe, a student of Heritage Studies and Technoscience Studies, Brandenburg University of Technology

On his recent working visit to Germany in June 2026, the Director-General of UNESCO, Professor Khaled El-Enany Ezz had an interaction with a group of students from the World Heritage Studies programme of Brandenburg University of Technology. I was part of the student group that asked the Director-General questions on the UN “Declaration of the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and Racialized Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime against Humanity”. I believe the questions to be the zeitgeist question of the hour, of this generation and on behalf of my ancestors and descendants, and on behalf of my country, Ghana, which led the resolution at the UN. Especially so when UNESCO has Africa and gender equality as global strategic goals. The question, the mode of answering the question, the answers, the risk in raising the question and the one-dimensional political economic imagination of some Africans are what I would like to discuss briefly.

Though I had thought about the questions, the introductory speech of the Director-General laid out Africa and gender equality as global strategic goals of UNESCO. Obviously, those goals were formulated before the UN resolution on the enslavement of Africans, and in the wake of the resolution, those goals would have been reviewed, I thought. Such a thought gave me the opening to ask the question. The question was: UNESCO has produced the UNESCO General History of Africa, and UNESCO also has established enslaved routes memorials. In light of the UN resolution that declared the enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity, how would the resolution affect research and education? What are the state parties thinking about the resolution?

In his response, the Director-General said he was going to answer part of the question and give another part of the question to the German Ambassador to UNESCO, Ms Kerstin Pürschel, who also joined the interaction, to answer.  After the Ambassador answered, the Director-General was going to ask me a question. I was not expecting this mode, splitting the answers and the opportunity to be asked a question. The challenge of answering a question put me in two minds, to listen carefully and at the same time anticipate what the question was going to be.  Upon reflection, the mode of answering comes across as a mode that suggests the voices of all should be heard on the question. The other reflection was that the position of the Director-General is primarily a diplomatic position with the ultimate aim of bringing about peace through the means of culture, heritage, both natural and cultural heritages, both tangible and intangible. He could not be seen to be championing one side over the other. Especially when he had to travel to sixty-six countries to campaign to be voted for as the Director-General. But as many heritage professionals know, culture is also conflict, heritage is also conflict. This is what makes the mode of answering the question ingenious to me. At the very least, it is not a mode that endorses what President John Mahama called “erasure and the normalisation of erasure” of African enslavement history in Europe and the USA. A mode that underscores the sacred rule of democracy, to let the voice of the people be heard. But, after the voice of the people has been heard, what next? I return to this question in the conclusion.

In answering the question I posed to him, Prof. El-Nany Ezz said the UNESCO General History of Africa is voluminous. He is now trying to reduce it to smaller volumes that people can easily read. This answer was in line with three views he had expressed in his opening speech. The first is his view on Artificial Intelligence (AI). The Director-General deems AI to be a tool to make culture available to the people. The second was the fact that the term culture was missing in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The UN had to adopt another means in 2024 to make culture central to the SDGs. The third is a crisp statement that “culture is a human right”. Again, in response to the question, he acknowledged the UNESCO memorial for enslaved people, not only Africans in Africa but also the Africans in the Caribbean and the USA. He elaborated on the role of UNESCO, which, among other things, involves documenting and educating in both cultural and scientific spaces. The German Ambassador to UNESCO said that most of the issues the resolution talks about are things UNESCO is already doing.

At the end of the two answers, I felt my question was only partially answered, or my question was not clear enough. The most important part of the UN resolution, as far as my understanding goes, is the language that enslavement of Africans is the gravest crime against humanity. This language introduces a normative scale of weighing atrocity against over 12 million enslaved Africans and their descendants for over 500 years, the reason EU countries, including Germany, abstained from voting. What then is the place of such a normative scale in research and education? Here lies the tacit risk of asking the question and using the language with which the state party disagrees, and a Director-General who must not be perceived as siding with one state party over the other. But the UN resolution was won by the overwhelming majority of countries that accept the language. 123 countries voted in favour, 3 countries voted against, and 52 countries abstained. The minority who voted against or abstained with similar reasons about the language, among others, were the United States of America, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal. Ironically, these were the biggest enslavers of Africans. On account of democracy, the minority would have to give up and accept the majority viewpoint. But there is also minority rights; in this context, the minority are countries with economic power over the majority of the countries, a direct competition between moral power and economic power. Countries that themselves enslaved Africans and, after the abolition of African enslavement, deliberately or otherwise created economic conditions that make African countries unliveable for some, survivable for others, contented for some others, but fully liveable for the African elite – the European collaborators in Africa. All these demographics have embodied abilities or disabilities which go unnoticed and to which the language of the resolution seeks to bring attention. Those to whom Africa is unliveable find legal and illegal means to cross the Sahara Desert to go and find means of sustenance in Europe and the USA. When these Africans end up in Europe and the USA, they are branded, and they fall into the silent traps of casualisation of labour. The majority of them are never fully employed with health insurance and retirement benefits. They have to hide, constantly living with the guilt of illegal immigration. At the same time, they have to clean the factory floors to survive, and yet, they have to remit part of what they earn to support families back home in Africa. This is the condition Hannah Arendt calls homelessness. Even those who stay behind also fall into the casualisation of labour. How enslavement hides, under so called business innovation models that are celebrated as cutting costs and maximising profit, is complex and difficult to link to enslavement. But this is where the Director-General’s question to me is intriguing.

The question was, many people talk about reparatory justice. What does that mean to me? I was honestly not expecting the question. Especially the question that puts myself at the centre of the assessment. I am also aware of the debates around Afropolitanism as to which African do Europeans take to be representative of Africans – the Africans living in Europe or the Africans living in Africa?  But I know that I embody the injustices of my ancestors. That is, I have survival-ability and unlive-ability, adopting and frustrating me at the same time. As a tour guide in Ghana, I have also led African Americans who broke down in tears at the slave castles after going through the slave dungeons. Two of such slave forts were built by Brandenburg-Prussian slave merchants. The slave merchants from where the Brandenburg University of Technology is located and Berlin, the venue where Africa was partitioned and the venue of our meeting with the Director-General of UNESCO. The five hundred years of trauma are still tears on the faces of many Africans. But the gaps in knowledge, and so-called business innovation models de-link African contemporary unlive-ability, survival-ability, contented-ability, and collaboration-ability from the conditions set in motion during periods of enslavement and colonisation. It is a problem of education, one of the tasks of UNESCO. It is also the question of how UNESCO education has prepared me to draw the linkages and answer the question honestly. I also could not afford to waste the time of colleagues who also wanted to ask questions. In haste, my answer was an aphoristic one at best. My answer was “It is a new way of seeing the structure of the world…I know the first thing that comes to people’s minds is money. But if the structure of the world remains the same and money is given, the money will get out of your hands”. The Director-General responded, ‘I hope the state parties understand you.’ In this piece, and after some thoughts, I would like to add a little more to the answers.

When I look back at the answer, two pictures unfold in my mind. The first is the impression I got from reading W.E.B Du Bois’ book, The Souls of Black Folks; the second was how the enslavement of Africans and African colonialism had been framed as the Triangular Trade up to the year 2000s, but now the framing has been removed to avoid treating the deep historical injustice as mere trade. The impression I got from reading The Souls of Black Folks was that, upon the abolition of the slave trade in the USA, the freed enslaved Africans did not have lands to farm, did not have capital, and had to go back to their slave masters to work for survival. Former slave masters and freed slaves had to enter into a sharecropping economic model. That kind of economic arrangement, I believe, is what structured the economic life of most African Americans in the USA to date. In Africa, the triangular trade involved the enslavement of Africans, being ferried across the Atlantic to produce sugar cane, tobacco and cotton in the Americas. The raw products were ferried to Europe. After the abolition of the enslavement of Africans, the raw materials of Africans – gold, diamonds, oil, bauxite, rare-earth minerals, and lithium are extracted cheaply, ferried across the Atlantic to generate wealth in Europe and the USA. That also includes the cocoa and coffee. The USA and European wealth comes back to Africa in the form of loans. Countries like Ghana have borrowed to unsustainable levels, and have to pay interest on those loans. The money to service the loans comes from selling raw gold, crude oil and cocoa beans – and so the vicious cycle continues. This is the vicious cycle structure of the world that has to change to give meaning to reparatory justice. The question then is why Africans should have the collaboration-ability for such a vicious cycle. There is not enough space to answer the question now; suffice it to say, the political-economic imagination of African governments follows the former slave master and sharecropping model. This is where UNESCO education and research, in light of the UN resolution, have to be situated to give a different response-ability to African governments, not the usual collaboration-ability skills they have accumulated through IMF and World Bank economic education.

To conclude, the mode of answering the question also made room for my voice on the matter to be heard, for which I am grateful, however imperfect it was. But what comes next? There is a growing frustration about the practice of democracy without anything substantial to point to. Many people express their voice in a democracy, but such does not amount to any material change.  There is also a silent “erasure and normalisation of erasure”. Yet, will the state parties allow my voice to change the structure of the world? Or would African elite and governments do away with their collaboration-ability which maintains the former slave master and freed slaves’ economic structure in place? Or would companies stop casualisation of labour in the name of job outsourcing? There is a risk in raising these questions, just as there is a risk in being a moral witness among contending parties. There is a risk of raising such uncomfortable questions. The one raising such questions puts himself in the politics of job distribution. Who gets accepted and for what job? The jobs that the state parties that voted against the UN resolution control. This is the weight of asking such questions. This is also why the debate around Afropolitanism, who is accepted to speak on behalf of Africans, is crucial. So that no one raises the questions from a position of what they stand to gain. For they are moral questions. They will not die. Even if the one asking them dies. For UNESCO to bring a permanent peace to the people, the UN resolution on the enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity must mean something to research and education about the former slave master and freed slaves sharecropping economic model.