David Cameron may not be aware that the first campaigners for slavery reparations were the enslaved. But he will be very aware of the rewards extracted from the brutal trade.
“We know that, of the £20m paid in cash by the British state as compensation to 46,000 British enslavers after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, £4,000 - worth over £3m today - was paid to the prime minister’s relatives.”
That fact does not appear to trouble him unduly as he visits Jamaica, with Downing Street declaring that he does not believe either reparations or apologies for slavery to be necessary or appropriate. He will hope to continue his trade mission without reference to a shameful history. That should not be allowed to happen.
As he addresses the Jamaican parliament on Wednesday Cameron may reflect that there have been varied responses from those who made fortunes from the transatlantic trade in Africans. In 1795, David Barclay, from Essex, who had come into possession of Unity Valley Pen, a plantation on the north coast of Jamaica – in exchange for a debt – freed all the enslaved Africans he owned. Barclay, a Quaker, decided that keeping people in slavery was incompatible with Christianity. While two of the freed slaves stayed in Jamaica, 28 were sent to the US, because planters on surrounding properties objected to having a potentially subversive group of freed people living close to enslaved people.
The 28 were sent to John Ashley, Barclay’s agent in Philadelphia, who in turn delivered them to the care of the Pennsylvania Society for the Improvement of the Condition of Free Blacks. Reports in 1796 indicated they were comfortably settled. Those who could not support themselves were supported from public funds as well as by funds given to the Abolition Society by David Barclay through his agent. Keith Stokes, the great-great-great-grandson of one of the exiled Jamaicans – Robert “October” Barclay – talks fondly about how his ancestors were able to build lives in the US.
Barclay, in his way, had accepted some responsibility. The same cannot be said for Cameron, his ancestors and other recipients of compensation. They used the money to build the British economy – now the fifth largest – while the Caribbean economy declined.
Sir Ellis Clarke, who represented Trinidad on a UN committee on colonialism, set out the case for reparations to former colonies in 1964. “An administering power,” he argued, “is not entitled to extract for centuries all that can be got out of a colony and, when that has been done, to relieve itself of its obligations by the conferment of a formal but meaningless – meaningless because it cannot possibly be supported – political independence. Justice requires that reparation be made to the country that has suffered the ravages of colonialism before that country is expected to face up to the problems and difficulties that will inevitably beset it upon independence.”
Two years ago, the 15 member states of Caricom (Caribbean Community Secretariat) agreed to set up national committees to establish the moral, ethical and legal case for the payment of reparation by European colonisers for native genocide, the trafficking in Africans and a racialised system of chattel enslavement. To date, 12 committees have been formed. Last March, a 10-point plan calling for apology, debt cancellation and technology transfer was unanimously agreed.
It cannot be said the claims are outlandish. The programme of the UN’s decade for people of African descent calls for states that have “not yet expressed remorse or presented apologies” for slavery, colonialism and genocide to do so. It also suggests they should find some way to contribute to the restoration of the dignity of victims, and calls for “effective measures to halt and reverse the lasting consequences of those practices, bearing in mind their moral obligations”.
In March 2007, making that case in parliament, the MP Diane Abbott reminded her colleagues that 15 Lord Mayors of London, 25 sheriffs and 38 aldermen were shareholders in the Royal African Company of slave traders.
It is estimated that in 1776 40 members of the British parliament were making their money from investments in the Caribbean. The Anglican bishops of London were also major enslavers in Barbados. Some of them agonised over their involvement in slavery, and the practice of branding the chests of the enslaved on their estates with SPG (Society for the Propagation of the Gospel). But they did not end that involvement.
One archbishop, while lamenting the situation that made more importations necessary, stated that “we must take things as they are at present”.
That was not a moral position then, and it certainly isn’t now.
We believe that the descendants of the 46,000 slave owners who received compensation – including the prime minister – should refuse to take things as they are at present. There is a moral obligation on them to remember, and to act.