Rabiu Alhassan

We missed out on the top prize. But still excited about the journey so far. We placed second in the DW start-up contest at the Global Media Forum out of close to 100 applicants from 39 countries. Congrats to the team. From Germany with ❤️

Letter to my dear Bongo Brother! 1. This letter is addressed to my brother Manasseh Azure Awuni (@Manasseh_Azure). But in truth it is intended to be read by all interested in the conversations evoked by his recent writings. 2. Precisely because of that wider target audience, I apologize in advance. For my writing will be a little dense and perhaps too academic for how I usually write on social media. 3. For all who follow me; you know that I try to separate my academic work from how I engage here because I want to carry along the most amount of people when I write. Many say they appreciate how I make law accessible. 4. But issues at hand beget their own manner of responding. The issues are at once academic and dense, so forgive. 5. Manasseh is correct. Correct in that African merchant involvement as middlemen in this barbaric enterprise must be catalogued and be part of the broader reparations conversation. 6. Now in having that conversation we must do so to educate and enlighten so we can better acknowledge how we too repair. YES ! WE TOO MUST REPAIR! 7. My worry however, is that we must be careful that we do not tether too closely to the ever regressive argument which holds that the participation of African merchants and polities in the transatlantic slave trade somehow negates or dilutes the moral and legal case for holistic repair. 8. Still, this line of reasoning which many find in your writing, deserves serious engagement, because it touches on genuine historical complexity. Yet, I find that it ultimately rests on a conflation of complicity with causation; or worse, it conflates moral imperfection with an imposed forfeiture of justice. 8. Now, let us be precise about what the historical record shows. Yes, African rulers, merchants, and intermediaries participated in the capture and sale of enslaved persons. 9. This is neither new scholarship nor a suppressed truth. It has been extensively documented by historians from Walter Rodney to Toyin Falola. The question is not whether this happened. The question here is what follows from it, legally and morally. 10. This is what I feel you address inelegantly, if at all! 11. Consider an instructive parallel. During the Holocaust, some Jews run the Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst, Jewish police units in the ghettos tasked with maintaining order and, in some cases, facilitating deportations to extermination camps. 12. The moral anguish of that role has been the subject of profound reflection, from Hannah Arendt’s controversial treatment of the Judenräte to more recent and more sympathetic scholarship recognising the impossible conditions under which these individuals operated. And yet no serious person has ever suggested that the existence of the Ordnungsdienst undermines the case for Holocaust reparations, restitution, or even the basic moral claim that what was done to the Jewish people constituted an unparalleled crime. 13. The reason is straightforward: the system was not designed, or imposed, by its victims, even where some among the victimised were drawn into its machinery as key players. 14. The same structural logic applies to the transatlantic trade. The system of racialised chattel slavery that defined the Atlantic world from the sixteenth century onward was conceived, financed, legislated, and enforced by European powers and their colonial successors. 15. The legal architecture of the Code Noir, the Slave Codes of the British Caribbean and the American South, the asientos, the joint-stock companies chartered by European crowns: none of this originated in Africa. African participation occurred within a system whose terms, prices, destinations, and ultimate purposes were determined by external demand. 16. To put it bluntly, treating the middleman as the architect is to confuse a distorted market response with the market’s creation.

Ghana won!

Sorry to hear. The good news is that there are proven methods for screening for trustworthiness and other psychological traits while hiring. By the time you finish reading this, you will know a little more about integrity testing and industrial psychology, so you can hire more young Ghanaians (or young people in developing countries in general). However, this is not employment advice. A thread on integrity testing.

Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, investing, coding and AI.

For the culture 😍

Muslims worldwide often face institutional discrimination, socio-economic exclusion, biased immigration policies & unwarranted surveillance & profiling. This International Day to Combat Islamophobia, let’s re-commit to the equality, human rights & dignity of every person, no matter their faith.

UK Police have a device that can download any data they want, from your phone, without a password

This is a tremendous read. thenation.com/article/world/…

Once you start reading Kafka, Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emil Cioran, and Hermann Hesse, there is no going back.

We're so screwed as a society.

Stanford Law Review Online is seeking short essays for a special collection on Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Civil Rights. Submissions open April 3-May 1, 2026. Scholars, practitioners, industry experts, and policymakers welcome! review.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/upl…

Ghana to introduce new gold royalty regime on Tuesday despite opposition, regulator says reuters.com/world/africa/g…

Breaking News: New video adds to evidence that a U.S. missile likely hit an Iranian school where 175 people, many of them children, were reportedly killed. nyti.ms/4ls4WMr

🔴 BREAKING: Bangladesh announced all universities will be closed as part of emergency measures to conserve fuel amid a worsening energy crisis linked to the US-Israeli war on Iran.

BREAKING: Missiles have struck the Ghanaian headquarters of its United Nations peacekeeping battalion in southern Lebanon, critically wounding two soldiers, Ghana's armed forces say. 🔴 LIVE updates: aje.news/c86shj?update=…

GHANA BATTALION POSITION IN SOUTHERN LEBANON COMES UNDER MISSILE ATTACK

China, US pressure Ghana to halt gold royalty hike, document, sources say reuters.com/world/africa/c…

🚨 BREAKING: Apple has just published a paper with a devastating title: *The Illusion of Thinking*. And it's not a metaphor. What it demonstrates is that the AI models we use every day - yes, ones like ChatGPT - don't think. Not one bit. They just imitate doing so. Let me explain: 🧵👇

Middle East conflict: Burkina Faso has not deployed an infantry unit to Iran, nor has it closed the US Embassy in Ouagadougou. This fact-check exposes a deepfake video that mimicked the public broadcaster, RTB. ghanafact.com/false-burkina-…

Running a newsroom in sub-Saharan Africa has stretched me in ways I never anticipated. Grants disappear without warning. Local advertising or subscription is an extreme sport. Real philanthropy for journalism is almost absent, and when funding appears, it is crowded, competitive, and tilted toward safer, less disruptive themes. You push for accountability, and governments bristle. Corporations shut their doors. Your reporters navigate legal threats, online harassment, and real physical danger. The public value of this work is obvious. The market value is not. Profit has never been the reason to wake up and do this again each morning. What keeps me here is impact. The farmer who got his land back after we exposed the grab. The detainee who walked free because we would not drop the story. The quiet policy reversals that happened because the facts refused to disappear. Somehow, @HumAngle_ has survived six years. That survival is not just ours. It belongs to the communities that trusted us with their pain and who endured the crossfire of violent conflicts across Africa. Today, we mark another year. We are still here.