Editorial | Time for reparations

The Gleaner welcomes the British government’s apparent new willingness to consider reparations for that country’s role in chattel slavery.

We, however, hope that Keir Starmer’s movement is not merely a ploy to buy time in wearying discussion, rather than a serious commitment to something for which Britain has a legal and moral obligation.

Well, to be fully accurate, it was not the UK government that specially declared its readiness to place reparations on its agenda. Instead, it was Commonwealth leaders, including Mr Starmer who, at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Samoa last week, agreed it was an issue whose “time has come” for serious study and consideration.

Given that decision-making by the Commonwealth is primarily by consensus, it means that Britain agreed, or acquiesced, to the declaration.

Moreover, although the United Kingdom was not mentioned by name, Britain is the only Commonwealth member, as an enslaved people-owning colonial power, that carries a clear obligation to pay reparations – a responsibility from which it has attempted to sidestep, with suggestions that its former colonies should put slavery behind them and concentrate on the future.

Indeed, only days before the Samoa meeting, Mr Starmer insisted that reparations was not on the summit’s agenda, and warned his colleagues against becoming bogged down in the past with “very, very long, endless discussions about reparations”.

UNFORTUNATE CHARACTERISATION

That, for this newspaper, was an unfortunate characterisation of the slavery perpetrated in the Caribbean for more than 300 years, and in which Britain was a dominant player. Indeed, during the period of the Atlantic trade in Africans and slavery, up to 12.8 million Africans were trafficked by Europeans to other regions. Perhaps a fifth of those human beings died before reaching their intended destination.

Between the 1640s, when the Atlantic trade in Africans began in earnest, and its formal end in 1807, Britain moved an estimated 3.1 million people to its colonies in the Americas. More than 10 per cent of them did not survive the journey.

Jamaica, as Britain’s prime sugar colony in the New World, and therefore a prized economic entity, received the bulk of the trafficked Africans: more than one million during the period of the Atlantic trade in Africans.

But should there be any doubt about the harshness and human cost of slavery in these colonies, statistics provided by the Jamaican sociologist and Harvard University professor, Orlando Patterson, are telling.

At the end of slavery in the British colonies in 1834, there were fewer than 400,000 black people in Jamaica, from the more than one million Africans brought to the island between 1650 and 1834.

By contrast, an estimated 388,000 enslaved Africans went to North America, mostly to the US south. By 1830, there were over two million enslaved Africans in the US. In other words, the enslaved/black population of Jamaica (whose sugar plantation owners were substantially richer than their mostly cotton-producing counterparts in the southern US) was only about 20 per cent that of the United States.

Professor Patterson’s analysis is that all things being equal, Jamaica’s black population at slavery’s end should have been 5.7 million.

He explained the difference by how enslaved people were treated in Jamaica. It was considered more economic to import new Africans, rather than incurring the costs to ensure the survival of those in the island.

OWNERS OF ENSLAVED PEOPLE COMPENSATED

Yet, at the abolition of slavery, the British government compensated the owners of enslaved Africans for the loss of their property, while the formerly enslaved people were left with nothing.

Indeed, the £20 million paid to the holders of enslaved people helped to finance a second British Industrial Revolution and added to the wealth of families who had already profited from sugar plantations in the colonies, whose continued underdevelopment is part of the legacy of slavery.

Against this backdrop, this newspaper believes that a discussion of reparatory justice is a conversation, as uncomfortable as it will be for some, that must be engaged.

Happily, one European country, Holland, which is not a member of the Commonwealth, began that conversation under its former premier, Mark Rutte. In the UK, several institutions and families who benefited from slavery have made efforts at reparations.

Until now, the British government, while accepting the pain and ills of slavery, has attempted to lodge it in the past.

We therefore endorse the Commonwealth’s collective declaration “that the time has come for a meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation towards forging a common future based on equity”.

“Heads further agreed to continue playing an active role in bringing about such inclusive conversations addressing these harms, paying special attention to women and girls, who suffered disproportionately from these appalling tragedies in the history of humanity,” the summit communiqué added.

Those conversations must lead to a clear resolution.