Reparations for slavery: realistic or pie in the sky?

I turned to page 12 of the Daily Express of Monday, October 14, 2024, and there was a picture of Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley. The caption under the photo read ‘Demanding Payment: Barbados PM Mia Mottley is pushing for reparations’.  I have hitherto been reluctant to comment on the reparations issue for two reasons. Firstly, one is reluctant to be seen as being on the wrong side of history and secondly, I did not feel myself fully apprised of the precise nature of the call for reparations. So much in the debate seems to be calculated at the level of the understandably emotive rhetoric of historical injustice.

The British Daily Express is a conservative publication and Leo McKinstry is arguably one of its more right-wing columnists. Not surprisingly, his piece was entitled, Big surrender over slavery would be moral cowardice, and he adds that it would constitute “a retreat in the face of cripplingly expensive demands for redress from the woke brigade for our nation’s involvement with the Atlantic slave trade”. The case for reparations has slowly but surely gathered pace over the past decade and some persons of outstanding intellect and reputation have rallied to the cause.

One of the outstanding questions in the debate surrounds who should pay, to whom and how much. One overarching question is whether the crimes of history (and history is replete with crimes of varying sorts) should be paid for by persons living today. The other query is whether money can ever be a recompense for damage done over such a long period of time.

A clearly radical Black female activist visiting Barbados was asked how long reparations would have to be paid for. She replied that as long as there were Black, poor people in the diaspora, the white world would have to continue paying. Say what? So much of the reparations talk is pitched at the level of unreality, vain re-imaginings or at worst a colossal shake-down.

One of the thorny issues in the reparations debate concerns the question of recompense. Exactly how much is owed, by whom and payable to who? McKinstry states that Ms Mottley claims that Britain’s debt to her tiny island is £ 3.7 million, a figure he claims is “not distinguished by actuarial accuracy”. He concludes that it was “plucked out of the air and hurled with guilt-tripping venom at Western leaders”.  The Daily Express correspondent suggests that at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Summit in Samoa, Britain would be asked to fork out at least £200 billion in reparations for the slave trade. This, he contends, would be more than Britain’s National Health Service’s annual expenditure.

In 2023, a report for the United Nations contended that Britain owes 14 countries a mind-blowing £9 trillion, which the report itself considered “an underestimation”. I do not think that Britain or any of the other European powers involved in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade is likely to make the kind of reparatory payments being asked of them. One cannot see any British government, Labour or Conservative, asking present-day taxpayers to shell out the kinds of monetary recompense being demanded. Besides, one would question the ability to pay in the current circumstances. The British economy has struggled since the global financial crisis of 2008. Poverty among the British working class is rampant, with increasing demand for food banks and other forms of charity. Blackpool in Lancashire is considered the poorest town in Britain and the home to many homeless teenagers, a substantial number of whom are Black. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves has just imposed several taxes on share and asset holders, contending that before coming to power, the Labour Party was not aware of the dire state of Britain’s finances. Prime Minister Starmer himself stated, “We discovered a £250 billion black hole when we came to power.”

Apart from Britain’s capacity or incapacity to pay, there is the question of who exactly should be paid and in what form. The Rastafarian brethren in Jamaica have long claimed that the compensation paid to the planters after 1834 should have gone to the ex-slaves. The Abolition Act passed on August 28, 1833, made provision for the payment of £20 million for the planters in the Cape, Mauritius and the West Indies. The West Indian planters secured four-fifths of that amount. In 1848, the French government paid Martinique, Guadeloupe, Cayenne and Réunion 126 million francs or a little over £5 million for freeing their 25 800 slaves.

In the British Caribbean, the compensation was in fact an inducement, a bribe if you wish, to get the recalcitrant planter assemblies in the region to endorse the Abolition Act of 1833. It was also compensation for the planters’ loss of property and labour. In 1834, no one was thinking of paying the emancipated peoples reparatory monies.

Fast forward to the present claims. One ‘historian’ stated that if one had two manifestly Black grandparents, one might be entitled to a reparatory payment. This led a caller to Down to Brass Tacks – presumably one with two observably Black grandparents – to state that he wished they would hurry up with the reparation as he “could do with the money right now”. Clearly, the European states would not entertain giving monies to individual persons, whatever colour they might be. Persons in the region should disabuse themselves of the notion that they can hold out their hands for a money payment from already hard-pressed British taxpayers.

Then there is the question of whether the European powers alone can be held responsible for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. It is a historical fact that Africans were themselves complicit in the inhumane trafficking of slaves. One is not sure how this factors into the reparations debate, but it is a fact that some African states became deeply dependent on the selling of human beings. The African kingdom of Dahomey earned considerable revenue from the sale of Blacks captured in inter-tribal wars. Express columnist McKinstry notes that in the early 19th century, while some European powers were seeking to abolish the slave trade and slavery, the King of Dahomey protested that the trade “has been the ruling principle of my people. It is their source of glory and wealth.”

Long after the last European country had abolished the trade, some African states were calling for its continuance, so economically dependent had they become on it. It could be argued that while the trade enriched Europe, it had an adverse effect on Africa in terms of the depopulation of certain regions, particularly in West Africa. That demographic decline was also due to the influx of European diseases such as syphilis, smallpox, tuberculosis and typhus.

Two other questions remain to be answered. If the reparations money was paid – be it £200 billion or £3.7 trillion –, on what would it be expended in such a way that it might truly redress the conditions of life of Black diasporic peoples? Two conditions immediately come to mind. One is education and the other is health. One proponent of reparations would seem to want a major input into university schooling. The real need in the Caribbean is to strengthen pre-primary, primary and technical/ vocational education to benefit those traditionally shortchanged by colonial times schooling.

The second question is: Can any amount of money ever overcome what is seen by the advocates of reparations as the psycho-social damages wrought by plantation slavery and colonialism? McKinstry raises two alarms. One is that the payout could exacerbate a dependency culture within the recipient nations. The other is – and this is a real fear – it might give more scope to corrupting the political elite and others who would seek to boost their particularist dominance.