Commonwealth chief candidates all back slavery reparations

The fraught debate about reparations for slavery and colonialism is likely to dominate the King’s first meeting with Commonwealth leaders since he ascended the throne.

The organisation, which has 56 members, has long resisted tackling the legacy of slavery in a public forum but a reckoning with its roots in the British Empire seems unavoidable next month with the election of a new secretary-general.

All three candidates running to succeed Baroness Scotland of Asthal have backed the idea of making amends for slavery and colonialism.

“I stand for reparations,” Shirley Botchwey, the Ghanaian foreign affairs minister, told a debate at Chatham House in London this week between the all-African shortlist of candidates.

Joshua Setipa, a former trade and industry minister in Lesotho, said that if elected he would not wait for member states to ask the Commonwealth to act.

Mamadou Tangara, a Gambian diplomat and politician, said he “fully” supported reparations and would want the Commonwealth to facilitate member state-led conversations.

The King is the ceremonial head of the Commonwealth, whose members include west African and Caribbean countries affected by the slave trade. About ten million people were enslaved by Britain and European nations between the 15th and 19th centuries and sent to work on plantations across the Atlantic in the Caribbean and the Americas.

Calls for reparations to address historical wrongs across what Queen Elizabeth called the “family of nations” have gained momentum, with several institutions and some countries acknowledging their past. With the exception of four recent admissions, all of the Commonwealth members are former British colonies.

Botchwey has previously said Africa should use declarations and admissions of guilt as a “compelling reason and a foundation for a demand for reparations”.

The Caribbean community has a ten-point reparation plan that, among other demands, calls for debt cancellation. Ghana is leading efforts by the African Union to develop a common position on the issue. This year António Guterres, the United Nations chief, called for reparations to “help overcome generations of exclusion and discrimination”.

During their time as active members of the royal family, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex used their roles as president and vice-president of the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust, a charity that supports young entrepreneurs, to call for the umbrella organisation to confront its dark past. “When you look across the Commonwealth, there is no way we can move forward unless we acknowledge the past … and trying to right those wrongs,” they said in July 2020.

Charles and the Queen will join the Commonwealth heads of government gathering in Samoa next month after visiting Australia, their first trip to a Commonwealth country since the coronation.

All three candidates for the top job in the Commonwealth rejected the idea that the organisation was an irrelevant and expensive relic. Critics of the group have argued that it serves little purpose to the 2.7 billion predominantly young citizens of its member states, while providing cover of legitimacy to many of its mostly old leaders, who are brazenly flouting the Commonwealth’s principles on democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

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