Barbados in reparations tiff with British again

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In the quasi inter-government set up in the 15-nation Caribbean Community, Barbados is responsible for leading the regional effort to make former European slave trading nations pay reparations to the Caribbean for the centuries of the transatlantic slave trade.

Barbadian prime minister Mia Mottley is the lead head of government on the reparations issue, maintaining links with the umbrella Reparations Commission (CRC) and other relevant bodies and involved personnel.

Earlier this year, Mottley and her cabinet were just about to tie up a deal with the descendants of a former British slave owning family — which amazingly still owns property and plantations in Barbados — when many in the nation of close to 300,000 forced her to abandon the idea to pay the Drax family 3 million in British Sterling for 53 acres of a plantation that the family still owns today. Mottley took to the national airwaves to tell the populace and the Draxes that she had heard the cry of descendants whose ancestors had worked sugar and other plantations for free and so was abandoning the planned purchase of the land. Not much has been heard of the issue since, but judging from remarks from one of her top advisors, the cabinet is about to have another reparations tiff with the Church of England’s United Society Partners in Gospel (USPG).

Apparently the USPG wants to partner with the Barbados-based Codrington Trust to improve living standards of tenants occupying estates linked to the church. The idea of the USPG is to invest $9 million in a joint venture project that will research the history of slavery in Barbados and improve living conditions of people who live on church land and housing. It is unclear what exactly is being hatched to improve these living conditions.

To avoid any misapprehensions or misinterpretations that the $9 million project is part of a reparations arrangement with authorities, the local reparations commission made it clear at the weekend that this is a social rather than reparations project that must be treated in this manner and in no other regard, said Ambassador David Comissiong, deputy head of the commission.

“The USPG is the successor body to the 18th and 19th century Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) – the Church of England entity that owned and operated the Codrington slave plantation in Barbados for some 126 years – and is therefore duty bound to engage in a reparations discourse and eventual settlement with the government and people of Barbados. And the entity with which that discourse is to be appropriately conducted is the Barbados National Task Force on Reparations,” the body stated. “The task force would like to put on record its admiration of the Christian spirit of justice that has been evinced by both the USPG and the church commissioners – the two entities of the Church of England that have thus far publicly acknowledged their implication in the crime of African enslavement and their determination to make some form of recompense,” it noted as it urged the church not to even think the current project is linked to the current regional governmental effort to pay European nations pay for slavery.

The latest slavery/reparations issues between Barbados and the British are certain to keep the issue in the limelight even as Keith Rowley, prime minister of neighboring Trinidad, vowed just last month that governments will “speak forcefully” to Britain when commonwealth leaders meet in Samoa next month.

“We here gathered are on that arc; we genuinely believe that it will bend to a point in a day when justice would be recognized by all and it will be handed to those who deserve it. When we meet in Samoa, the Caribbean leaders took a decision this week to very forcefully speak to the commonwealth as one voice. There is one particular country with a new King (the UK’s King Charles) and a Labor government with an outstanding mandate, and we look forward to the reaction in October,” PM Rowley said, speaking at a recent emancipation forum in Trinidad.

As he engaged the Church, Ambassador Comissiong noted that “we believe that the words and actions of these two Anglican religious bodies have the potential to help generate significant breakthroughs in Caricom’s reparations claims against both the Church of England and the national government of the UK and to help usher in a new era of reparatory justice, reconciliation and brotherhood. We now look forward to the USPG deepening and fortifying that potential by publicly undertaking to complement its Codrington College social justice project by commencing an appropriate reparations discussion with the Barbados National Task Force on Reparations,” the ambassador stated.

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