Slavery, the UK and reparations: ‘Black lives matter’

OBV supports the reparations movement in the Caribbean and beyond. Over the weeks and months ahead we’ll be talking to those at the heart of this debate. Today Michael McEachrane from Sweden, a driving member of two pan European movements for racial and reparatory justice, ENPAD and ERC, writes exclusively for OBV on the issue.
 

Today British Prime Minister David Cameron will speak before the Jamaican Parliament. It’s a historical event. In 2013 the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) decided to pursue reparatory justice for the effects of native genocide, the transatlantic traffick in African enslaved persons, and a racialized system of chattel enslavement.

The Chair of CARICOM’s Reparations Commission, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, has issued an open letter to the Prime Minister. The legacies of enslavement, he writes, “continue to derail, undermine and haunt our best efforts at sustainable economic development and the psychological and cultural rehabilitation of our people from the crimes against humanity committed by your British State.”

CARICOM is calling for a reparatory justice programme for the Caribbean. Including, a full formal apology to the victims of enslavement and their descendants, a development plan for indigenous peoples, addressing chronic health diseases such as hypertension, illiteracy eradication and debt cancellation.

“We ask not for handouts or any such acts of indecent submission”, writes Sir Beckles in the open letter, but “a joint programme of rehabilitation and renewal.” You owe us a “commitment to reparatory justice” to clean “up this monumental mess of Empire.”

This is a call that Prime Minister Cameron no longer can ignore in good faith. The question is will Cameron offer an apology or as Tony Blair before him did just say that he is sorry for what has transpired? Will he merely mention the ravishes of Empire in the region without any comment of regret or perhaps even ignore the matter altogether?

As the Head of the British State and thereby representing a respect for human dignity, justice and democracy, the sheer force of history beckons. British colonialism in the Caribbean was essentially a genocide of native people and enslaved Africans. For every African that left the coast of West Africa a conservative estimate of at least two people died underway from their communities to the coast. Many didn’t survive the Middle Passage. And to Jamaica alone, during a two hundred year period some three million Africans were imported, which became a population of three hundred thousand African descendants.

This system of genocide for profit helped fuel the British economy. As the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Dr Eric Williams, argued in his now classic book, Capitalism and Slavery (1944), the profits of chattel enslavement in the Caribbean and the transatlantic slave trade significantly helped fuel the English economy from the 17th Century and culminating with the Industrial Revolution. Although historians for long resisted this thesis, in recent years economic historians such as Joseph Inikori, Catherine Hall and Nick Draper have given it overwhelming evidential support.

Also on the individual level the British system of chattel enslavement created a significant amount of wealth. For example, as Dr Draper of the University of London put it to me in an email exchange, “In total one in six of the richest individuals in England during the first quarter of the 19th Century, in a period which saw the end of the British slave system, derived their wealth from chattel enslavement.”

Add to this that whereas the enslaved never were compensated for their enslavement and former British colonies never have been compensated for the “monumental mess of Empire”, with the abolition of slavery the former enslavers were generously compensated by the British state for their loss of property. As the recent BBC documentary which aired in July, Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners: Profit and Loss, showed the British State paid out about £ 20 million in compensation to former enslavers. And among them, members of Cameron’s own family.

Under British rule, Jamaica used to be England’s largest and richest slave colony in the region. Today it’s the poorest Caribbean commonwealth member. This poverty stands against the background of the wealth the system of enslavement generated.

So on which side of history will Cameron place himself? If he stands before the Jamaican Parliament, respects its democratic decision to support reparations and declare “let there be justice where justice is due”, he may very well become a Mandela or Gorbachev of his time.

In any case, CARICOM’s step toward reparatory justice is a significant step toward greater global justice. What we today think of as globalization is deeply shaped by hundreds of years of European colonialism and its adverse effects are many and far-reaching. This is true of aspects of today’s relationship between the so called developed and underdeveloped world or the continued racial and social stratification we find throughout the Americas.

Caribbean states are the first states in the world to demand reparatory justice for the adverse effects of European colonialism and enslavement. This fact is not lost on CARICOM. As professor Sir Hilary Beckles predicted in an address he gave in the British House of Commons in July last year, “this 21st Century will be the century of global reparatory justice.”

Michael McEachrane