I am glad that the Barbados government quickly reconsidered the original plan to purchase part of Drax Hall (for £3 million) after a tremendous public outcry against the original plan. It would have been a gross contradiction of our international stance on reparations.
Instead, further pressure, perhaps utilising the weight of the entire Commonwealth, CARICOM community and even the UN, should be brought to bear on the current owners to donate the property to the people of Barbados. Perhaps the British government or royal family can donate the purchase price to Barbados, formerly known as ‘Little England’. What a gift to the Republic — though they might not wish to set the precedent!
It is unconscionable that the current owner of Drax Hall, the wealthiest of the current English MPs, could say (without noting the profound irony) that he is not responsible for the atrocities committed by his ancestors. He isn’t, but he and his issue certainly have benefited from the intergenerational wealth built on the backs of my enslaved ancestors. They were already given the equivalent of possible millions in today’s currency for the loss of their ‘property’, my ancestors, as part of the Emancipation process. To expect us, the descendants of those who endured that Holocaust, to pay that same family – again – of all plantation owners, is too painful a concept to pursue.
The Barbadian post-emancipation plantation society made it almost impossible for the vast majority of my forefathers to build intergenerational wealth via the purchase of their own homes until relatively recently in the post-independence era, largely thanks to free education. I was shocked to read decades ago in Sir Hilary Beckles’s book that the Barbadian Parliament enacted legislation specifically prohibiting ‘Panama money’ from being used for land acquisition.
Systemic, intergenerational racism and colourism are real and pervasive, and embedded mentally. It could be argued that a form of de facto enslavement was perpetrated well into the 20th century. Former enslaved people in Barbados had few options after Emancipation, as virtually all of the land was owned by the plantation owners and merchant class, unlike other British colonies. Most descendants of enslaved people in Barbados were therefore forced to live – or exist – on and work for the same plantations whose owners ensured that the economic status quo was maintained.
It has been said that Drax Hall Plantation was a centuries-long crime scene. (It could also be argued that all of Barbados was too, for the great majority.) Drax Hall is unique, not just in Barbados, but perhaps in all of the British Caribbean to have remained in the continuous, 400-year-long ownership of the descendants of one of the first colonists. I really don’t know how the Drax family can sleep at night, directly maintaining that ownership and the ‘strange fruit’ memory and legacy that is embedded within it.
The righteous demand for slavery reparations will continue. I hope that sometime soon the current owners of Drax Hall will grow a conscience and do the right thing.
Some continue to minimise the atrocity of our history, and in this discussion have even offered that the original Indo-Caribbean people endured harsh conditions, yet their descendants are not asking for reparations.
Food security is national security. Low-income housing is vitally important, but it shouldn’t come at the sacrifice of rich arable land such as that of Drax Hall and Newton Plantation. We have lost far too much arable land already (says a resident of rab land of the former sugar cane fields of Mount Wilton Plantation, which also has a tragic past, including the murder of the plantation owner by a few of the enslaved people or their descendants).
Surely the government owns other land that is suitable for housing without that permanent arable loss. We also need to reconsider the density of the type of housing we are building in our very limited land space.
