Call for reparations spreading like wildfire
Published:Saturday | December 17, 2022 | 1:11 AM
THE EDITOR, Madam:
Reparation advocates will continue to keep the pressure on the conscience of the world for repairing the wrongs of the past.
Week after week, former slave-owning countries are responding to the call for admission, apology, and commitment to fixing the dehumanisation of generations of enslaved people. The Caribbean, led by Barbados, is now looking at prominent rich English families to pay reparations for their slave-owning past. British Member of Parliament Richard Drax, whose family owned Drax Hall Estate in St Ann, is now being called on by Barbados to pay.
We should join them and add to the list former Prime Minister David Cameron, who came here in 2015 and insulted us by saying we should “move on” and not peer into the past and ask that he accounts for his family’s wealth gained here. A few years ago, the cause was mocked as the pipe dream of radicals. Today, following the June 2020 casting of a noose around the bronze statue of Edward Colston – a 17th-century slave trader in Bristol – has made good the words of Martin Luther King Jr that “right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant”.
The latest country to join the tide of admission and apology for slavery is the Netherlands, which intends to issue a formal apology on December 19 to our brothers and sisters in Suriname, and its other territories in the Caribbean. In California, the Gavin Newsome reparations committee will recommend handing out $223,200 per person to all descendants of the enslaved for “housing discrimination”, and the march for reparatory justice moves on and on.
Several universities are now under pressure from their student populations to return stolen artefacts, and are being called upon to fund the education of the descendants of African enslaved people. The British have been asked by our minister of culture to return pre-colonial indigenous sculptures being housed at the British Museum. These include the Taino wooden sculptures – ‘Boinayel’ (Rain Giver) and ‘Birdman’. We call upon King Charles III to immediately order the return of these artefacts stolen from a cave in Carpenters Mountain in the parish of Vere, now known as Manchester, during the 18th century.
The call for reparations is alive and is here to stay, because it is wisely said that our freedom is whole and cannot be allowed by degrees.
BERT SAMUELS
Attorney-at-Law