Britain should pay reparations
THE EDITOR, Madam:
THE NOTORIOUS fact that Britain shamefully paid enslaving planters for the loss of forced labour continues to haunt the descendants of those who were treated like discarded plantation animals.
Slavery was based on racism practised at its worst. It was chattel enslavement, launched on African people and unmatched by any other form of slavery known to man. The Magna Carta, Britain’s bill of rights – its human rights charter – was implemented in June 1215. This was some four centuries before we were criminally extracted from our homeland and trafficked across the Atlantic.The British, who engaged in this massive human trafficking, were at one and the same time protecting their citizens with their centuries-old bill of rights.
Its citizens were protected from the arbitrary powers of the king for centuries, because the Magna Carta enacted into law that the king and his government were not above the law, and were prohibited from oppressing or enslaving its people. After being restrained by law, the said king of England, James II, in 1685 spearheaded the birth of a shipping line called the Royal Shipping Company. This company, owned by the predecessors of ‘our’current King Charles II, shipped more enslaved Africans to the Americas than any other single institution. When will Charles own up to this mass atrocity his bloodline inflicted on us?
The £20 million paid for by the British state by law – The Slave Compensation Act of 1837 – to their plantation owners, and nothing paid to us, is clear evidence that the ending of slavery was not based on the love for us, nor any empathy for our suffering. Trinidadian scholar Eric Williams debunked that lie when his study showed that it was all about the money.
Now that we have driven home, in the last five years, that black lives matter, we must now make our call for the payment by the same British government, at today’s value, of the equivalent of the £20 million they paid from their Treasury to their planter friends in 1834.
We cannot continue to say “God save the King” in Jamaican courts while his lineage keeps the profits made from our blood with impunity. We demand that £20 million equivalent (worth £1 billion today) as a deposit.
BERT SAMUELS Deputy Chair, National Council on Reparations bert.samuels@gmail.com