The sight of shackled, half-dressed men and women and their haunting wails that echoed through Ghana's Christiansborg Castle moved some descendants of enslaved Africans to tears on Friday, during what the West African country says is the first Juneteenth commemoration held outside the United States.
The performance reenacting slaves being prepared for final shipping from Ghana across the Atlantic Ocean, was the culmination of a three-day conference Ghana hosted to map out next steps after a landmark UN resolution declared the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity.
"To see babies and little children (being held by shackled mothers), it was too real for me," said Gaynel Diana Curry, who is from the Bahamas and chairs of the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent.
"And to hear the cries and the hollows from the dungeons, it really hit," said Curry, who had visited the castle before.
"That people actually went through this, and that man can be so unkind to man," she said after reaching for a packet of tissues from her black handbag.
Standing next to her, another woman, who said she was from England, sobbed, flooding her eyes with tears.
Verene Shepherd, a Jamaican academic and professor of social history, said that while the performance might have looked like entertainment for some, "to those of us who are descendants, this is our pain on display".
Reparatory justice
The conference in Ghana sought concrete measures including reparatory justice after the UN's resolution.
"What we're saying in the reparations movement is that it wasn't okay to do this to people, to human beings, whether black, white, or whatever," said Shepherd.
For Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who has visited the castle before, "nothing prepared" her for the performance. It was the "bold reality of oppression".
With dozens of forts and castles, Ghana has the highest density of trading forts that were used for shipping off slaves from Africa.
June 19 is a US federal holiday known as "Juneteenth", which commemorates the end of slavery.
Ghana President John Mahama said the Juneteenth commemoration in Accra celebrated the slave descendants in the United States "for their resilience, for their survival, for their strength".
‘Restoring dignity’
The conference Ghana hosted came up with a 10-page document with "far reaching" decisions, according to Ghana foreign minister Sam Okudzeto Ablakwa.
"We will retain reparatory justice in our lifetime," he said.
The document listed among other decisions a call "for the mobilisation of adequate and sustainable financial and technical resources, including through international cooperation and innovative financing approaches to support reparations efforts and initiatives".
Julius Garvey, son of Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey, said "reparation is more than compensation, it's about restoring dignity".
"Today is a continuation of the work that my father started."
The Dutch government presented at the conference a catalogue of 2,000 artefacts it plans to return to Ghana.
