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 ۲۰۱۵, British Prime Minister David Cameron rejected calls for slavery reparations. Instead, he announced a ۲۵-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.
In his book Labour in the West Indies: The Birth of a Workers’ Movement, published in ۱۹۳۹, Lewis insisted: “It is the British who by their action in past centuries are responsible for the presence in these islands of the majority of their inhabitants, whose ancestors as enslaved persons contributed millions to the wealth of Great Britain.” He further referenced the over ۲۰۰ years of unpaid labour Britain extracted from millions of enslaved people in the Caribbean as “a debt that must be repaid – and which the British have yet to repay”.
The British have not yet acknowledged or attempted to repay their “black debt”. Indeed, they have denied responsibility for reparations, even in the face of quantitative and qualitative evidence of how they benefitted from chattel slavery.
Lewis’s economic development theories were grounded in the belief that the ۲۰th-century economic transformation of the British colonies could not be realised without the coloniser acknowledging and honouring its “black debt”.
Statements in the Ten Point Plan, Ghana’s March ۲۰۲۶ United Nations Resolution and the UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination’s General Recommendation No ۴۰ all express, in varying ways, that the transatlantic trafficking in enslaved Africans and chattel enslavement really broke the world.
Together they created an unprecedented racialised regime of violence and governance that reduced Africans and their descendants to permanent, nonhuman property, barred them from civic life, and laid the blueprint for modern global power, economics, and enduring hierarchies of race and gender.
What we, the descendants now living with the legacies of chattel enslavement and colonial terror, want is a conversation on actual reparations: debt cancellation rooted in the reality of the lingering legacies of colonialism.
Confronting that “complicated history” of which the British prime minister speaks includes paying for the wrongs of chattel slavery. In fact, it is not complicated at all.
That conversation should also be about setting the record straight about abolition: enslaved people like Chief Takyi in Jamaica and the Black revolutionaries in Ayiti and elsewhere, not Britain, led the fight for abolition.
Former colonisers do not seem to agree that African jurisprudence always saw the trafficking and chattel enslavement as wrongful acts. But as far as former colonies and Africans are concerned, a crime does not rot; it is carried forward until justice is achieved.
The UK prime minister may intend to launch a new “drive on debt” for poor countries that would allow them to pay back under better conditions. But we reject the notion that a nation that profited from chattel slavery should not now be held responsible for its actions. We demand debt cancellation and monetary compensation. It is time for Britain to apologise and pay its debt.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
