Ghana Conference Demands Reparations for Gender-Based Violence in Transatlantic Slave Trade

Sarah, Betty, Doll, Nan – just a few of the names commonly given to enslaved African women during the transatlantic slave trade.

We know that they would have suffered unspeakable sexual violence. But now that history is being given greater prominence.

Last month, Ghana hosted an “historic” reparations conference, where the Caribbean Community (Caricom) presented its updated 10-point plan for reparative justice. Billed as Next Steps, the event was the first major gathering since the landmark UN resolution in March to declare the transatlantic slave trade as the gravest crime against humanity. It concluded with the adoption of a global framework for reparatory justice, including a call for formal apologies, fair compensation and debt relief.

What was particularly striking was the specific demand for compensation for gender-based violence, placing the issue front and centre in the global campaign for repair and redress. Speaking at the conference, Ghana’s president, John Mahama, said “the historical experiences of women and girls cannot remain footnotes in the global narrative”.

I spoke with Prof Olivette Otele, a historian, about why the move to address what the feminist activist and writer Stella Dadzie has described as the “historical amnesia” about the horrors experienced by enslaved women has been a long time coming.

Resurrecting history

“As somebody who has been working on this history for several decades, I am very happy,” says Otele, a distinguished research professor of the legacies and memory of slavery at Soas University of London who serves on the Guardian’s Legacies of Enslavement advisory panel. “There was a lot of consultation about this. This is something that was missing. We can finally share that history, but also the role that women played and the extreme violence they experienced.”

Of the 20 million Africans forcefully transported across the Atlantic, about 30% were women, and 1.2 million experienced sexual violence, according to data in the Caricom plan. A 2023 report by Brattle on reparations for transatlantic chattel slavery said it was “reasonable to assume that 100% of enslaved women over the age of 10 were subjected to sexual abuse by enslavers”.

During the transatlantic slave trade, a child took the legal status of the mother through partus sequitur ventrem (“that which is born follows the womb”), which was codified in 1662 in Virginia, then a British colony. “From that moment it meant that, as an enslaved woman, you were the property of the owner,” Otele says. “Women were currency, they could be bought, exchanged. They were a reproductive tool being impregnated to extract more enslaved people, more labour, more profit.”

The legacies of that history continue today, Otele says, in misogynoir (the term coined by the Black feminist Moya Bailey to refer to a form of prejudice and sexism directed at Black women) and the adultification of young Black girls through to the trope of the angry Black woman.

“I think this will open the debate on gender-based violence,” she says, adding that, just as it is right that the grooming of white working-class girls is finally being discussed, the experiences of Black girls should also be acknowledged. We talk about the grooming of white working-class girls, but “we never talk about the grooming of young Black girls”, she says. “They are at the bottom of the social ladder like young white girls, yet their stories are ignored.”

Resistance fighters

But it is also important to remember the role of Black women in resistance – freedom fighters such as Queen Nzinga of Ndongo (now Angola), or Solitude, a dual-heritage woman from Guadeloupe who fought French colonial troops sent by Napoleon to reinstate enslavement while pregnant (she was executed the day after she gave birth), Nanny of the Maroons in Jamaica, Nanny Grigg in Barbados.

“Women were always at the forefront of resistance and Black liberation,” Otele says. “They were working in the houses so would have information about what was happening in the master’s house.”

What next?

Historians including Hilary Beckles, Barbara Bush, Verene Shepherd and Stella Dadzie have shed light on this forgotten history, but there is more to be done, Otele says.

“For those who have looked at this history I applaud them, but very few Black women have been able to do so,” she says. “For a long time it’s been said they would be too partial.

“But there are a handful of Black women coming up who are working on this history who are now mid-career. I hope this will open the door.”