Downing Street has said reparations for the British enslavement of black people in the Caribbean are not on the agenda at the Commonwealth heads of government meeting this week in the South Pacific. And Keir Starmer’s Labour government has asserted that it will not – now or ever – participate in the payment of any form of reparation.
On the first matter, nothing could be further from the truth. Reparations are in the mouths and on the minds of all participants, and the formal agenda does not determine the real agenda. It is just a conciliatory framework for the moment, and does not reflect what in fact is a supportive movement.
On the second, the Labour party’s participation is significant. In 2006, Tony Blair’s government laid down the party line of hostility to any apology for the crime of chattel enslavement, with the insistence that enslavement by Britain was legal because it said so. The Conservative government under David Cameron agreed, and told black folks to get over it in an address to the Jamaican parliament in 2015.
Global opinion, however, has rallied around the idea – rooted in international law and bolstered by the best ethical and moral thinking – that there is a case to answer and that negotiations should be inevitable. In 1939, Arthur Lewis, a Nobel laureate in economics, set it out clearly. Britain, he said, had 200 years of free labour from an estimated 20 million black men, women and children. This was Britain’s black debt, which must be acknowledged and repaired.
While imperial Britain soared to sustainable economic development and global military superpower status, the enslaved and their descendants were left to this day with enduring pain, persistent poverty and systemic suffering. There is still British colonisation in the Caribbean, a daily reminder of the white racial supremacist culture that ruled the region for centuries. But the call for reparatory justice began with the enslaved themselves.
The so-called Slavery Abolition Act, the most racist legislation ever passed in the British parliament, defined some 700,000 enslaved black people as “property”, rather than humans, and was the precondition for the compensation of £20m in cash paid as reparations to the enslavers. The enslaved were valued at £47m, and the remaining amount was paid off with labour in kind for four extra years of enslavement after they were freed. They received no compensation for the theft of their labour or the denial of their human identity.
The issue of Britain’s black debt has generated several accounting and actuarial studies. Many methodologies have been used to quantify the debt, resulting in figures that include the pain and suffering of dehumanisation, torture, terror and genocidal management practices.
The British imported some 3 million Africans into the Caribbean and upon emancipation in 1833, only about 700,000 had survived. Barbados, where it all began as an economic explosion, received 600,000 people from British ships over 200 years; only 83,000 survived.
Since the 19th century, Caribbean communities have been calling for reparatory justice as part of their social and economic emancipation. There is nothing new or sudden about it. Until recently they were mostly colonies and could not bring a claim against the “imperial nation”.
In the 1960s, when nationhood broke on to the development agenda, the first generation of political leaders, led by Eric Williams of Trinidad and Tobago and Alexander Bustamante of Jamaica, tried to open a dialogue about reparations to promote economic transformation. They were humiliated, rejected and told that by claiming national independence they were on their own, and that Britain owed them nothing. However, the legitimacy and loudness of their claim for development support has grown over time.
The Caricom Reparations Commission has proposed a 10-point plan to frame the dialogue. It is rooted in the call for a conversation about economic development and social justice. It imagines a summit in which governments can engage around the need for economic modernisation in the Caribbean.
The region has consistently been rejected in calls for a development partnership that recognises reparations. At the moment, “aid” is offered as an alternative to development investment, but this has never been accepted in the region. What has been consistently called for is an investment initiative designed to assist cleaning up the colonial mess left behind in the Caribbean.
Investments are required to facilitate competitiveness in leading economic sectors such as tourism and financial services; in education and health to uproot illiteracy and support research to tackle the chronic disease pandemic. There is a need for partnerships in digital transformation and technological transfer. Finally, there is a call for debt cancellation, given that these young nations received no investment support at independence and were forced to finance their nation-building with debt.
Once again Caribbean governments and civil society are calling on the British government and national institutions such as the Bank of England and the Church of England – as well as the high street banks and insurance companies that generated and distributed wealth from slavery – to engage in a compassionate, intergenerational strategy to support postcolonial reconstruction. Britain received the Marshall plan after the second world war, but refuses to engage with the Caribbean after the slavery holocaust.
Many British families whose wealth is derived from slavery have already come forward to discuss the reparations project and have been well received. The search for a win-win solution remains the dominant approach. The concepts of reconciliation and racial healing inform the initiative proposed by the Caricom commission.
“Correcting the world” for the 21st century is indeed the imperative, and stands in contrast to those who seek to promote fear-mongering and persistent racist attitudes. The British government has yet another opportunity to do the right thing by its citizens and the Caribbean world. There are no enemies within the reparations enterprise, just partners in search of mutual development and justice for all.
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Hilary Beckles is chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission
