Slavery and Reparations

After graduating from university in the early 1980s, I decided to discover my Caribbean roots and apply for a job as a teacher in Jamaica. My school was nestled in the heart of rural Jamaica, and my students were fantastic.

I arrived during an interesting transition. Jamaican children up until that time had exclusively followed the British curriculum. The region had rightly decided to develop a syllabus that better reflected its own history, culture and local context.

But even after that, it was an education system that was firmly rooted in a British tradition, and Shakespeare was compulsory.

Caribbean countries will teach children to be activists so they can claim reparations from Britain for generations.

Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, has hosted a conference over the past week to discuss strategies for obtaining compensation for slavery.

Government-backed experts have devised an “action plan”, which includes training children to continue the dispute with former colonial powers for decades to come.

Boston officials have canceled a reparations report, which was already three years behind schedule, as the lead researcher looking into the role the city played in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Kerri K. Greenidge, a former Tufts University professor, has been accused of making false statements in her celebrated book about slavery.

Caribbean nations will try to force slavery reparations onto the agenda of the forthcoming Commonwealth summit attended by the King.

Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, is hosting a meeting of policy-makers and campaigners this week to discuss plans to secure compensation for the slave trade.

Delegates at the conference confirmed on Thursday evening that Caribbean leaders would push reparations onto the agenda at the Commonwealth heads of government meeting next month.

The pressure on British taxpayers to start coughing up money to fund reparations for the historic enslavement of Africans by some of their ancestors is mounting. In February, the African Union adopted a resolution proposed by its champion for reparations and Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, which identifies slavery as a crime against humanity. In March, the UN General Assembly passed Ghana’s resolution describing transatlantic chattel slavery as ‘the gravest crime against humanity’ and calling for reparations as ‘a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs’. While 123 states supported it, only three (Argentina, Israel and the US) opposed it, and 52 (including the UK) abstained.

Since I’m a cheerful unbeliever, like most people in Britain now, there’s no reason why I should be more than marginally interested in the C of E’s expensive guilt-trip for its historic links to the slave trade. Except that I have a fondness for ancient architecture and language that, as with Richard Dawkins, includes old churches, old liturgies and the music that goes with them. I contributed to the renovation of the bells of the fine Norman church in my village because I like the sound they make. Like the liturgy, it’s an important facet of British history and the church’s bells are actually much more prominent in village life than its church services. For several years, they have only happened when a peripatetic vicar can include us in his rounds every few weeks. As to the slavery issue, the villagers, who only enter the church in large numbers for services at Christmas, Easter and harvest-time, seem to feel much less guilty than the new Archbishop of Canterbury. I agree with them for a reason that hasn’t been mentioned in the recent beating of ecclesiastical breasts or even in newspapers and journals that are unhappy with the idea of compensating the descendants of slaves and the governments of the present-day countries where the slaves were captured.

UN experts have told Britain to build statues of African people to atone for the slave trade.

It is one of a series of measures proposed by lawyers, who have written a report for the organisation setting out what former slave-trading nations should do. The advice follows a vote in March, in which UN member states voted to demand reparations.

The legal experts said the UK should create public monuments that “honour the contributions of people of African descent”.

Start with the African slavers and then do the Muslim slavers.

A UN committee has said countries are legally obliged to consider reparations for the transatlantic slave trade and take other ⁠measures to address the enduring ⁠legacy of racial ​discrimination.

Guidance published on Monday by the committee on the elimination of racial discrimination (CERD) said the obligations arose from ⁠a legally binding 1965 convention on racial discrimination, not from the legal standards that existed when the slave trade took place.

The committee described the approach as a “paradigm ⁠shift” away from debates over historical responsibility that have often been used by governments to resist reparations ​claims.

OK African Slave Traders first.

This year has seen a dramatic change in tone in the global conversation about the transatlantic slave trade.

The demand for formal apologies, debt relief and financial compensation from nations and institutions that benefited from slavery has become increasingly forceful.

In March, a resolution was passed at the United Nations recognising slavery as “the greatest crime against humanity” – though the United States voted against the resolution and every European nation abstained from the vote.

Hmmm …

In short, Ghana’s territory was both a primary origin point for captives and a critical coastal hub where African suppliers and European traders interacted to sustain a large share of the Atlantic trade for over two centuries.

You can see why the Church of England thought ‘Project Spire’ would be a good name for its multi-million-pound ‘reparations’ scheme. Yet if Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally or her predecessor Justin Welby had read William Golding’s The Spire, this might have given them reason to reconsider.

At a former British castle where thousands of enslaved Africans were held before being shipped across the Atlantic, the archbishop of Canterbury expressed “lament” for the Church of England’s involvement in transatlantic chattel slavery and reaffirmed her commitment to a controversial £100m fund for affected communities.

Dame Sarah Mullally made the comments on Thursday during a visit to the Cape Coast castle, a 17th-century fortress that was built by Swedish traders, but occupied by the Danish and the Dutch, before the British seized it in 1664.

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Civil rights groups in New York have released a report demanding reparations for black residents, arguing that decades of deliberate racial inequality must be amended.

The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) released a report last week titled, The Other New York: The Legacy of Slavery and the Case for Reparations Now.

‘This report lays out a clear and undeniable truth: racial inequality in New York is not accidental,’ the introduction states.

Caribbean nations have called on Britain to give up its overseas territories as part of slavery reparations.

A delegation representing 15 Caribbean countries has been sent to London to advocate an expanded set of proposals to address the effects of “extractive colonialism”.

The detailed manifesto from the Caribbean Community (Caricom), which is being put to MPs, says that former colonial powers should not only offer financial compensation but also give up their territories in the region.