by DC Campbell
The world is watching to see if King Charles III uses his upcoming coronation to apologise for the leading role the British monarchy played in the horrendous crime of African slavery.
Such an unequivocal and historic proclamation by the new king will demonstrate that current British humanity holds such past barbarism in irrevocable contempt. An official apology will promote racial healing and lay the foundation for constructive reconciliation with the former slave colonies in the Caribbean.
The active participation of the Royal Family in slavery is well documented. When King Charles II officially approved the Transatlantic Slave Trade 360 years ago, he granted the monopoly to the Company of Royal Adventurers, the slave-trading company led by his brother, James. Then titled Duke of York, James had his captured Africans branded DY for the initials of his title. He went on to become King James II in 1685. He would not be the last of the Royal Family to profit from slavery.
King Charles III has it in his hands to usher in a new age when shallow platitudes no longer shield the painful legacy of a brutal practice. An official apology will be a monumental step, also called for by 15 Caribbean countries, which enriched Britain at a devastating and continuing cost to them.
Over the years, various British officials have presented statements of “regret” and “sorrow” for slavery. These are not apologies. No one, now or in the past, could have regretted slavery with more sorrow than the victims and their descendants.
The king’s royal ancestors have placed him in an unenviable dilemma today, but the good news is that the timing is right, and others have already paved the path for him.
The Netherlands, the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England, and the Bank of England have officially apologised for their roles in slavery. Family descendants of enslavers are also stepping forward. Such is the case with Laura Trevelyan and her family, descendants of Sir John Trevelyan, 4th Baronet, who owned as many as 10 plantations in my Caribbean homeland of Grenada.
When Laura, a BBC correspondent at the time, asked me a year ago to accompany her to Grenada to trace her ancestors’ role in slavery, I could not have predicted the historic events that unfolded since. In the following months, more than 100 members of her family signed a letter of apology for the crimes against humanity committed by their 18th Century ancestors.
This past February, she and 7 family members braved uncertain winds and returned to a public event in Grenada, where they presented the letter to the Prime Minister and the people of Grenada in a remarkable atmosphere of frankness, reconciliation, and tears. There, children of enslavers met with children of enslaved under the same roof to acknowledge the crime, the grief, and the human destruction left behind by slavery.
As a working mother, Laura also dedicated an advance on her pension towards an education fund on the island. Other family members have also started individual donations to local causes. Laura has since left the BBC to dedicate her life to Caribbean reparatory justice. She puts it succinctly: “I am confronting the past to help understand and repair the present.”
This is but one courageous and promising step by one woman and one family out of thousands whose ancestors participated in slavery. It is just the beginning, but the Trevelyan example should encourage others, and maybe it has already. King Charles III is testing the waters that other British monarchs before him avoided. “This is an issue that His Majesty takes profoundly seriously,” Buckingham Palace said in a recent press release.
If King Charles III apologises for British slavery and acknowledges the legacy of that brutal past, he will indeed convey to the world that he takes it profoundly seriously.
On a recent LBC radio interview with Labour Party MP David Lammy, he asked me, “What do you say to people who say it’s time to move on from the past?”
Good question. Why not move on from the painful memories 200 years after Britain ended the brutality and injustice of slavery? After all, those directly responsible for this horrific institution of forced labour have long since moved on. And so have their victims. But have the consequences of slavery also moved on?
To fully answer Mr Lammy’s question, I reflected on my own experience growing up in Grenada in the 1960s. By then, Britain had controlled Grenada for 200 years, following a century of French rule. I lived a few of my formative years in a proud countryside town called Gouyave, just north of Beausejour Estate, one of the slave plantations that Sir John Trevelyan owned and which I wrote about in my latest historical novel.
Gouyave had no electricity when I lived there. To light the narrow streets at night, the elderly Mr Ferguson lit gas lamps and roped them up traditional lamp posts, the way it was done during slavery. Few homes had indoor plumbing. Women still washed clothes in rivers and spread them out to dry on sun-bleached boulders. Many people carried river water for home use in buckets balanced on their heads. Most still cooked their meals outdoors, over smoky coal pots, a West African method handed down from the rugged days of slavery.
It seemed very little had changed since the abolition of slavery, except for the absence of shackles and whips.
Education, long denied to the enslaved, also suffered under British colonialism. When my primary school became uninhabitable from leaky roofs and rotting floors, they squeezed us into a fish market. Most of my classmates attended school barefoot and in clean but tattered uniforms. Fainting at school from poor nutrition was a regular occurrence.
Such human neglect was common in all the British colonies. On the eve of Jamaica’s independence in 1962, after 300 years of British domination, more than 80% of the population was functionally illiterate, compared to only 1.5% in the UK.
A common sight I saw as a young boy in Gouyave was people limping around on wooden prosthetic legs. Some were veterans of WWI and WWII, with injuries sustained in loyal service to the British monarchy. Wartime service among the descendants of slaves was not unusual in the Caribbean. My own uncle survived a German torpedo attack that sank his ship in the Mediterranean. More recently, Sergeant Major Johnson Beharry, also from Grenada, was awarded the Victoria Cross by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005 for saving dozens of his fellow British soldiers in Iraq.
But most amputees I saw in Grenada had not lost legs from war but from diabetes. In my immediate family, I had 4 amputees and one blind relative, all with diabetes. It is a subject that deeply concerns Sir Hilary Beckles, the Barbados-born and UK-educated Vice-Chancellor of The University of the West Indies.
“Jamaica and Barbados are now competing for the title Amputation Capital of the World,” Sir Hilary said. He argues that it is a generational legacy of slavery, the impact of a high-salt, high-sugar plantation diet, combined with constant overwork, intense terror, stress, and pain. Sixty percent of the descendants of slaves over the age of 60 in the Caribbean today suffer from hypertension, diabetes or both. A crucial point he makes is that the rate of these life-threatening ailments and their resistance to modern medicines are not seen among their cousins in West Africa. For example, the diabetes rate in Barbados is quadruple that of Nigeria. “Something happened here,” Sir Hilary said.
Yes, what happened here in the Caribbean was slavery. And the results are still here.
When UK Prime Minister David Cameron said in 2015 that it was “time to move on from this painful legacy and continue to build for the future,” he was wrong. The past is still here. Until we recognise that, the future will always evade us. While slavery is in the past, its destructive legacy on health, education, and economic development is crushingly alive and well today.
This is the fate of descendant children of enslaved Africans, 8 generations after their foreparents created investment streams that ignited the Industrial Revolution and British prosperity. So valuable were enslaved bodies, that in return for freeing them in 1834, the UK Government compensated British enslavers with 40% of the annual national budget, the equivalent of billions of dollars in today’s money.
The enslaved received nothing.
Former British colonies in the Caribbean are sentenced to chronic poverty, substandard educational infrastructure, crippling health, and massive unsustainable debt. When they became independent from Britain, they accumulated enormous financial burdens to tackle those daunting challenges that the British left behind.
Jamaica, described in the 18th century as a “constant mine, whence Britain draws prodigious riches,” is now $14 Billion in debt. Barbados, once the “brightest jewel in England’s crown,” is $7.5 Billion in debt. Grenada, where hundreds of British soldiers died defending the sugar-rich island against the French, is $1 Billion in debt, with more than 70% of the budget going to infrastructure, health, and education. So heavy the debt burden, the capital city, St George’s, is without a public library years after it was damaged in a hurricane.
This legacy of slavery is repeated across the Caribbean. It is, therefore, no surprise how many of these former British colonies are drifting into the expanding Chinese orbit, sowing the seeds of troubling geopolitical realignments.
The wall of silence and neglect around slavery must come down. Only then will the past begin to heal and trust be established to build the future.
Repairing the wrong is not a call for aid or handouts. It is reparatory justice.
King Charles III can begin his own honourable legacy of healing and repair with an official apology. It is the right thing to do, so we can begin to move on from the past.
Let’s start with African countries who started slavery, ask for apology and reparations from there, whilst we are at it, perhaps Uganda can apologise to the Indians they got rid of in living memory of 1970’s!!!
His mother did not even touch on this topic so I think it is a bit unfair to ask the son to look at things his great grandparents was involved in.
The monarchy is a very structured establishment and they will make sure such topics are dealt with or sweep under the carpet.
I have seen an apology once when an American travelled to Africa in search of their historical roots. A leader of a local tribe actually apologised for their ANCESTORS capturing the American’s African ANCESTORS taking them to be sold as slaves.
Laura Trevelyan is a publicity hound and good at it after her many years at the BBC. Restitution doesn’t need publicity if it is genuine.
Stop harping on the Riyal Family as if they alone are responsible for Slavery or the only country that took part. Each island in the Caribbean has colonial connections to different Slave trading countries.
Why don’t you OPEN YOUR EYES to the FINANCIAL COLONIALIZATION being perpetrated all over thecworld by CHINA??? They may not be transporting people as Slaves but they are achieving a financial Slavery of small island nations who will NEVER be able to get rid of them and regain their autonomy. Look to this situation in the present. Also this stupid SELLING of PASSPORTS which promotes abuse and corruption of the islands. Caribbean islands and cultures are disappearing under the yoke of these situations.
Should there be reparations. Perhaps this will be achieved but look to ALL participants. How about the Slave owners of the American Colonies. King Charles coronation is not the place or time for this subject. Let him be crowned first.
You all think dumping the Royalty is a great idea. They and England’s history continue to generate millions of dollars in revenue through Tourism. You ever think that thus might be the very mechanism that could finance reparations?
Give King Charles a minute to breathe. Stop villifying him and the Royal Family for history they didn’t personally create. You might be surprised at the result.
“Among the most absurd apologies have been apologies for slavery by politicians. For one thing, slavery is not something you can apologize for, any more than you can apologize for murder.
If someone says to you that he murdered someone near and dear to you, what are you supposed to say? “No problem, we all make mistakes”? Not bloody likely!
Slavery is too serious for an apology and somebody else being a slave owner is not something for you to apologize for. When somebody who has never owned a slave apologizes for slavery to somebody who has never been a slave, then what began as mushy thinking has degenerated into theatrical absurdity – or, worse yet, politics.
Slavery has existed all over the planet for thousands of years, with black, white, yellow and other races being both slaves and enslavers. Does that mean that everybody ought to apologize to everybody else for what their ancestors did? Or are the only people who are supposed to feel guilty the ones who have money that others want to talk them out of?”
– Thomas Sowell
As I stated above, and as called for by the CARICOM Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice, an official apology is just the beginning. British slavery and colonialisation have left huge economic, educational, and health burdens on former colonies, while Britain prospered at their expense. An apology can lay the foundation for honest and constructive movement towards reparing the cost of slavery that Caribbean colonies still carry. True, it’s impractical to account for the injustices of 1,000 years ago. But Caribbean slavery is more recent and measureable. It was not until 2015 that Britain made its final bond payment that compensated plantation owners to the tune of 40% of the UK budget in 1834. The enslaved received nothing.
King Charles III can begin his own honourable legacy of healing and repair with an official apology. It is the right thing to do, so we can begin to move on from the past.
Really? Folks must remember that slavery began in Africa. African men hunted down their own fellow men and captured them and sold them. England and Spain did not ask nor told the Africans to do so for them. King Charles may apologize ( I wish he does not) to appease this writer and others like him but that will never be enough.
So maybe y’all should move on or go to Africa and ask the leaders to apologize. None of y’all are doing that. Why?