Task force plans campaign to pressure plantation owner

Barbados is set to escalate its campaign for reparations against Richard Drax, the British Conservative MP and owner of Drax Hall plantation, as negotiations remain stalled over the St George estate where African ancestors suffered centuries of brutal enslavement.

The National Task Force on Reparations (NTFR) also plans to launch a public education initiative about the plantation’s history of slavery, aiming to pressure Drax into acknowledging his family’s role in the slave trade and negotiating compensation.

Early last year, Prime Minister Mia Mottley backed away from the government’s planned compulsory acquisition at Drax Hall for housing, paving the way for a negotiated payout of reparations by Drax for the purchase of 53 acres of the plantation which he owns. Drax was initially set to receive some $7.5 million from the land sale.

Critics of the acquisition suggested the government should confiscate the property as reparations rather than enriching the pockets of Drax, a descendant of Colonel Henry Drax who introduced sugar cultivation to Barbados within a decade of settlement.

On Wednesday, the deputy chairman of the NTFR, Ambassador David Comissiong, lamented that Drax has so far been unwilling to negotiate a settlement.

“The government is pursuing a reparations claim against Mr Drax. To my knowledge, no consideration is being given to purchasing that plantation, period. Suffice to say that Mr Drax has been intransigent. Mr Drax, so far, has rebuffed all efforts to approach him about discussing a reparations settlement. That is where the matter is right now,” Ambassador Comissiong told Barbados TODAY.

“I am hoping that in this new year, this is a matter that the National Task Force on Reparations will take up in a very serious manner. So, I will in fact be going to propose to the Task Force on Reparations, that we as an institution take control of this matter and take it forward from there.”

The deputy chair disclosed that the NTFR has sought to engage the plantation owner through several contacts in the United Kingdom, but he has refused to budge.

“Through some contacts in the UK, we have made some overtures to Mr Drax; but as I said, he has remained intransigent. So, we have to go back to the drawing board in terms of how do we pursue a campaign to bring Mr Drax to the negotiating table in a spirit of moral conscience and adhering to the tenets of legality as they relate to reparations,” he said.

“We are not suggesting that we can pursue a legal claim against Mr Drax as an individual. We are not suggesting that. But there is a legal logic to reparations, to acknowledging where a crime has been committed and following legal precepts in calculating what kind of compensation should be paid.”

Comissiong, Barbados’ ambassador to the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), suggested that Drax take a leaf out of the books of aristocratic families such as the Trevelyans who travelled to Grenada and publicly apologised for their ownership of more than 1 000 enslaved Africans; and the Gladstones, who owned enslaved Africans in the British West Indies, and in 2023, apologised for their role in the slave trade.

“We are asking Mr Drax to have that same moral conscience and behave in a similar manner,” he said.

Comissiong revealed that part of the campaign of the reparations task force this year will be to educate Barbadians about Drax Hall’s role in slavery in Barbados.

He said: “I have already secured the rights for a very good publication about the history of Drax Hall and the Drax family. I will be proposing this to the task force, that we engage ourselves in a serious campaign of educating the Barbadian people about the plantation, [and] about the role the family played in the history of enslavement in Barbados.

“But the whole purpose and intention is to bring Mr Drax to the negotiating table…to bring Mr Drax to acknowledge what is pellucidly clear — that, one, his family was involved in the crime of enslavement, and two, his family benefited financially from that crime of enslavement, and that a significant portion of the current wealth of the family, and of Mr Drax himself, was generated by that criminal process of the enslavement of the ancestors of the Barbadian people.”

Comissiong stressed that a way must be found to get Drax to admit these facts and, thereafter, be able to sit down and negotiate some form of compensation.

Prime Minister Mottley is adamant that while Barbados will aggressively pursue reparations through advocacy, it has no intention of breaching the Constitution by taking up anyone’s land without paying them.

She said that having already met with Drax, and although not happy with the pace at which talks have been progressing, she believed the focus should be on pushing for a reasonable settlement for reparations.

emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb