I read with interest the recent news that United Kingdom Prime Minister Andy Burnham is now open to calls for a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic trafficking in enslaved Africans and chattel enslavement. On the face of it, this is some good news. Only a full and formal apology can allow for the healing of wounds and the destruction of cultures caused by colonialism, chattel enslavement and other forms of oppression of peoples to begin.
The Reparations Commission of the Caribbean Community (CRC of CARICOM) has been requesting a dialogue on apology and reparations for some time without success. Indeed, previous such demands have been met with expressions of deep sorrow and regret, but never an apology or even a promise of one. As a reminder, in 2015, British Prime Minister David Cameron rejected calls for slavery reparations.
Instead, he announced a 25-million-pound UK-funded project to help construct a new prison in Jamaica, aiming to facilitate the deportation of Jamaican nationals serving long sentences in British prisons. The proposal caused much controversy. I suspect that, now that King Charles III will address the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Antigua on Tuesday amid civil society protests and calls for an apology and reparations, this promise has been squeezed out of the British prime minister before the event.
I have often been asked why a formal apology for the transatlantic trafficking in enslaved Africans and chattel slavery in the Caribbean is so important to the reparations process, and what difference an apology can make in terms of acknowledgement, accountability, healing and repair. As CARICOM’s Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice emphasises, an apology is a formal gesture of goodwill and will foster better relations between the states of Europe and the Caribbean. It would acknowledge a shared history and interconnectedness to be mobilised towards justice and mutual respect.
It would accept responsibility for these crimes, commit to non-repetition and pledge to repair the harms caused to the victims and their descendants. It would represent an ethical and legal acknowledgement of how present-day inequalities and racial injustices are rooted in the history of such criminal conduct; acts such as complicity in native genocide, the introduction and perpetuation of chattel slavery and violent oppressive colonisation. An apology would then have to be followed by meaningful reparations actions.
Those actions, however, cannot be reduced to what Burnham proposes: improved debt repayment conditions. Here, it is important to remind ourselves of the debt Britain and other nations involved in enslavement have to repay. Sir Arthur Lewis, considered the father of the modern Caribbean reparations movement, conceptualised the call for reparations within the framework of social and economic development.
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