The caribbean people have a legitimate claim for slavery reparations
1. The Caribbean people have a legitimate claim for slavery reparations
Cecily Jones The Guardian Newspaper March 16, 2014
The economic and social poverty of parts of the region are a lasting legacy of slave trading
Caribbean heads of government gathered in St Vincent last week to discuss reparations from
Europe for the enduring legacy of slavery. Professor Hilary Beckles, a Barbadian historian who
chairs a reparations taskforce for these governments, wants to open talks with former slave-trading
nations including the UK, France, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands.
Campaigners point to the continuing socio-economic problems that have their roots in the
colonial era. They argue that the present-day underdevelopment of the Caribbean is a direct and
lasting legacy of the slavery trade, and descendants of enslaved Africans should be
compensated for present-day injustices, rather than historical suffering. That the legal case will
be difficult to establish is in no doubt; the moral case, however, is less easy to dismiss –
especially when the nations of the former colonizers owe their present prosperity to, and are still
benefiting from wealth accumulated from the slave trade and slavery. Though whites in the
Caribbean represent a minority, they own most of the wealth.
Most of the largest businesses are owned by families who amassed huge fortunes from
plantation slavery and, when slavery was abolished, from the compensation paid to them by the
British government for the loss of their human property. By contrast, not a single enslaved
man, woman or child received even a penny for the backbreaking toil they endured almost
every day of their lives, or for the loss of mothers and fathers, children, brothers and sisters
caused by the callous separation of families. There was no compensation for the pernicious
brutality exacted against them, or for the violent sexual assaults on enslaved women.
Even today, international trade agreements lock the region into disadvantageous western-imposed
tariffs that stifle economic growth. Yet many people across the region harbor
ambivalence and antipathy to the idea of reparations. Doing my own mini-research, I am struck
by how many reject reparations through what I interpret as a deep sense of shame. It seems
people are still coming to terms with a history of enslavement, and many would rather the topic
wasn't discussed.
I am reminded of this whenever I visit any of the great houses that are dotted around Barbados.
Their foundations were literally built on slavery. Tour guides will talk about the gracious
lifestyles led by the planter families who lived in them. But there is rarely any mention of the
armies of enslaved peoples whose forced labor made such living possible, and who are all too
often erased from these histories. It is as if islanders attach greater shame to being the
descendants of enslaved peoples than the owners of these houses attach to having been the
holders of human property.
For me, as a descendant of African forebears stolen from their homelands and forcibly
transported to Barbados, the issue of reparations is deeply personal. I am semi-resigned to the
fact I will probably never know the African family names of my fore-parents. The family names
2. I carry (Forde on my father's side and Griffiths on my mother's) derive not from any African
ancestors, but were almost certainly imposed by a now-anonymous slaveholder.
Last week, I met a white American tourist. She revealed that she was descended from a
prominent 17th-century Barbadian planter, though she knew very little of him beyond his name
and the parish in which he had owned hundreds of acres and enslaved peoples. We shared an
ironic laugh afterwards that I could lay out for her, her own genealogy stretching back to the
17th century, yet knowledge of my own family tree begins and ends in the post-slavery era of
the 1930s.
I will probably never know with certainty where in Africa my ancestors came from. But I am
not ready to resign myself to accepting the continuing effects of the European genocide against
the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, or of the humans forced to work and die on the
plantations of the Americas, and the colonization and exploitation of the natural resources of the
African and Caribbean societies. The effects are deep and enduring, and can be felt at every
level of every former colony and throughout the rest of the world.
My parents, like thousands of their generation, journeyed from the Caribbean to England. They
arrived in the era of estate agent signs that said, "No blacks, no Irish, no dogs". The collective
humiliation suffered by people who left behind children and communities to come to work in
conditions that many British people found unacceptable and demeaning is, in itself, deserving
of compensation.
And as I have wandered around Barbados over the last months, thinking about the connections
between the lives of my parents, blighted by prejudice, and the persistent economic, social and
cultural poverty that still bedevils Barbados, I believe more and more in the legitimacy of
reparations claims.
Professor Beckles, principal of the University of the West Indies, has set out a 10-point
framework on which the case should rest. The first of these is a formal apology from all the
nations who participated and gained from the trade in human beings. For me, an apology is a
start. Not the end.
Read the article by Cecily Jones
On a separate paper:
Write a persuasive letter to the leaders of the European Union supporting or disagreeing with:
“Wealthy European countries that benefited from slavery should pay poor people in countries
like Barbados”
Use textual evidence to support your claim