Editorial | Reparations talk centuries-old

It will take consistent and committed work for the regional reparations campaign to achieve success. For the idea of repairing the inhumanity of slavery by compensating enslaved people dates back many centuries. And it is still a controversial, often emotional topic, much like abolition was. As we now know, the road to abolition began in the 1780s and only ended in the 1830s.

Historical accounts trace one of the earliest cases of reparations in the United States to 1783, when the state of Massachusetts ordered that a former slave, Belinda Royall, be paid a pension from the proceeds of her enslaver’s estate in acknowledgement of her unpaid labour.

It was not called ‘reparations’ then, but the idea that people like Belinda Royall who were dragged from their homes, mostly in Africa, and taken across the Atlantic to give forced labour, while being subjected to colonial violence, is similarly being argued today.

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And even though the global powers who were enriched on the bruised backs of these Africans and their descendants are refusing to engage in a meaningful reparations debate, they have already showed their hands by paying compensation to the owners of enslaved people. Britain, for example, paid 40 per cent of its total annual budget to the owners of enslaved people, who lost their ‘properties’ due to abolition. This debt was only extinguished in 2015.

In spite of this reluctance on the part of most Europeans governments to apologise for these criminal acts and compensate the descendants of former enslaved people, the reparations momentum is growing. Voices from CARICOM’s Reparations Commission, the UWI Centre for Reparations Research, various academics, researchers, legal luminaries, political leaders, institutions and grass-roots representatives have gained deep resonance in all parts of the world.

Institutions, such as banks, insurance companies, renowned universities, and aristocratic families have begun to examine their links with slavery. The region has already seen a first step in reparatory justice taken by a British family who publicly apologised to the people of Grenada for their part in slavery. The family of BBC correspondent Laura Trevelyan, who donated £100,000 to The University of the West Indies, owned six plantations on which 1,000 slaves worked and they were given £27,000 compensation in 1835.

It may be of significance that a group of Jamaicans who are members of the Church Reparation Action Forum (CRAF) are now in the United Kingdom to press for restitution from church denominations which were involved in the trade in Africans.

The Trevelyans might have opened the door, just a wee crack for groups like CRAF. Feelings run very high in former British colonies when it is understood that the so-called ‘mother country’ got involved with the trade in Africans in 1663 with Royal approval, as it was felt that the trade was a legal means of advancing the economic and marine interests of the Empire.

Ahead of their mission, the five-member CRAF group declared that it is now time for businesses and church denominations that benefited from the trade in Africans to make reparations to their descendants.

CRAF, formed in 2019, is hoping that by their visit they will move the case for reparations forward. They plan to meet with representatives of the Quakers, Churches Together in England, the Evangelical Alliance, the Church of England, the New Testament Church of God and the National Church Leaders’ Forum.

What form reparations ought to take is still being hotly debated, but the proposals range from financial restitution to renewed educational programmes and skills training, to debt forgiveness and other valuable suggestions.

Abolition was a long, hazardous road, but it was one of the most successful reform accomplishments of the 18th and 19th centuries; and there were many champions among the religious leadership of Britain who led the fight for abolition.

Given the long history of reparation demands and the controversies surrounding the idea, will CRAF be able to prevail in what amounts to its moral mission?