Vincentian Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves has told Britain’s Observer newspaper he instructed law firm Leigh Day to bring a case against the UK, France and the Netherlands for reparations for slavery. With the backing of the 15 Caricom heads of state, Gonsalves believes the case could be heard in the international court of justice at the Hague.
Historian Prof Bridget Brereton told the T&T Guardian there is a “very compelling moral and legal case for Britain and other countries to pay reparations for slavery and the slave trade,” but noted: “The difficulty will be conceptualising how reparations should be made.” In St Vincent, the reparations committee is seeking the establishment of a development fund as opposed to payments paid to the individual descendents of victims.
“As far as I understand, no one is calling for a single transfer of money,” said Brereton, “they firstly want Britain to make a full apology for the crimes and then a fund for education.”
Asked how T&T’s experience of slavery compared to the rest of the Caribbean, Brereton said T&T should be considered separately. Whereas Trinidad had a relatively short experience of plantation slavery—50 years, from 1780 to 1830—Tobago’s was considerably longer, as the island was first established as a Dutch slave colony in the 1600s and recolonised in 1763 by the British.
Whereas the last census in Trinidad showed 38 per cent of the population self-identifying as Afro-Trinidadian, Tobago’s African ancestry is closer to 100 per cent.
Brereton put the case for reparations in human terms as well as fiscal. “In addition to bringing people to the Caribbean against their will, they were enslaved as lifelong slaves and hereditary slaves—the children of an enslaved mother inherited her condition, and of course there were no wages,” she said.
Speaking about the lasting effect, she referred to the “huge legacy of damaging race myths and stereotypes, ideas about colour, shade and blackness that continue to this day. Massive social disadvantages that descendants of slave had to face in the 19th and 20th century.” On the economies of the Caribbean she said: “Slavery promoted skewed economic development. The focus on the export of plantation crops created an imbalanced economy.”
Khafra Kambon of the Emancipation Support Committee told the T&T Guardian the process of setting up a reparations committee in T&T had begun but was not finished. Since the meeting of Caricom heads of state in June, at which it was agreed that all 15 countries would appoint their own reparation committees, there have been two stakeholder meetings involving preliminary discussions, attended by representatives from academic institutions and the government.
Asked what form reparations should come in, Kambon said that was a matter for further down the line. Right now, he says, the “critical thing is that people accept reparations in principle and that we get our society to understand why it is necessary.” Kambon supports the Caricom agreement and, in anticipation of a long court case, he said extensive research was being carried out in all 15 member states into the specific impacts of slavery in each country.
“A lot of people don’t have a proper idea of the loss brought about by slavery,” he said, “not just the the cruelty but the impact on society and human beings. That period reshaped the world in terms of economic power, psychology and in human and material terms. A tremendous amount of research has to be done to make a case. Each country has to research its own experience.”
Asked about the likelihood of securing victory in such a complex historical matter, Kambon pointed to reparations to the Jews of Europe after the Holocaust as a precedent. The creation of the state of Israel was part of the compensation to Jewish Holocaust survivors and victims. Similar states in West Africa, established as homelands for emancipated slaves—Liberia and Sierra Leone—do not, however, receive the funding and global economic partnerships that Israel does.
Asked why Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac had refused to apologise for Britain and France’s roles in the slave trade, Kambon said: “An apology is an admission of guilt which opens the door for payments, so instead they say they deeply regret their state’s involvement but justify it by saying slavery was legal at the time.” He pointed to the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams’s support for reparations, saying: “People have a sense of justice.”
Asked whether the case might damage the relationship between T&T and the UK and Europe, he said: “There is something very wrong in a relationship where someone who has done wrong doesn’t want to correct that wrong. It exposes a flaw in the relationship.
“By international law, as long as the effects of the wrong—a crime against humanity—remain, and those who benefited in the past continue to benefit, then there is a legal case.”
T&T stakeholders
The stakeholders who attended the preliminary discussions before the establishment of T&T’s reparation committee are:
• Jennifer Marchand—director of Caricom and Caribbean Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
• Heather Cateau—senior lecturer and deputy dean, UWI
• Avril Belfon—archivist at the National Archives
• Deon Isaac—deputy presiding officer, THA
• Aiyegoro Ome—president, NJAC
• Lucia Phillip—executive director, Nalis
• Khafra Kambon—Emancipation Support Committee
• Tiffany Bethel—Office of the Prime Minister.