Repairing the legacy of slavery: what are campaigners calling for?

The debate in much of the British media over reparations has focused almost entirely on cash payments: how much Britain might owe for its role in transatlantic enslavement, who should pay and whether people today should be held responsible for the actions of those who came before them. But some campaigners warn that this narrow focus overlooks the broader goals of the reparations movement. Eleanor Shearer, a senior research fellow at Common Wealth, said: “I think we’re missing the root of the word itself, which is repair. It’s about this idea that something has been broken, continues to be broken and we need to work together to fix and to heal. “And that’s why I think that the narrow focus on money is unhelpful. If you listen to community activists here in the UK, in the Caribbean, what people are asking for is so much more expansive than that.” Others have emphasised the distinction between reparatory justice and development assistance. Ralph Gonsalves, a former prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines and a senior figure in the reparatory justice movement Repair Campaign, said: “We have to understand the specificities of reparatory justice as distinct from general sustainable development goals. They’re shaping the discussion only within the frame of sustainable development goals.” The problem, he suggested, was that this framing allowed the UK to take a discretionary approach, in contrast to the obligation of a reparatory framework. But most campaigners agree that there is no version of reparations which amounts to a simple cash transfer. Here are three ways that this broader version of reparatory justice could work in practice. Building climate resilience The most prominent framework for reparation is the Caribbean Community (Caricom) 10-point reparations plan, which sets out demands ranging from healthcare and education to economic development. Caricom’s revised manifesto explicitly links climate justice to the legacy of colonialism, arguing that plantation economies and centuries of extraction have left the region particularly vulnerable. “There’s a framework around reparations that is interpreted as punitive. So ‘Let’s go and punish you for the things you did’,” Marvin Rees, the former mayor of Bristol, said. “But actually, there’s another way of looking at the whole question of saying sorry and receiving forgiveness … It’s a process that restores relationships that leaves all parties stronger.” He believes reparations could therefore take the form of enabling the delivery of “top-class, net zero, climate-resilient infrastructure”, including roads and housing. Rees argued that there is also a migration dimension. He said leaders including Jamaica’s prime minister, Andrew Holness, and the mayor of Freetown in Sierra Leone, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, have spoken to him about the loss of skilled workers from their countries. “If we help countries deliver the infrastructure – good homes, energy systems, resilient flood defence, cooling in the summer – people won’t leave,” he said. “It offers an opportunity to blend the conversation on reparatory justice into the other global priorities that we have helped to shape on climate development, and a management of a just system to manage the movement of people.” A public inquiry For campaigners in Britain, one longstanding demand is for a national commission to investigate the country’s involvement in slavery and colonialism, examine their present-day consequences and then recommend measures to address them. Esther Stanford-Xosei, a longstanding reparations campaigner and legal scholar, said: “I’m advocating for a commission of inquiry because I feel that there’s too much of a jump to solutions without us even having the national dialogue. And that includes not just those of us who are calling for reparations and our allies who support the call; it also includes the right of the British public, the wider public, to understand what the issues are.” Shearer, who also supports a truth-telling process, pointed to how little is taught about transatlantic slavery and the British empire in schools. “This is particularly important for communities here in the UK because of the complete lack of any forum to talk about what the empire really did to them, to their ancestors, what it’s still doing to their communities and what repair would look like in those communities,” she said. Return of cultural artefacts Caricom has called for the return of objects held in European collections to allow Caribbean communities to engage with histories and knowledge that have often been inaccessible to them. Its manifesto proposes cultural exchanges, support for artists and scholars and programmes reconnecting descendants of enslaved Africans with their ancestral communities. Stanford-Xosei has also called for the opening of colonial archives held by the royal family and other British institutions. “We don’t have access to the records … So, even to find out our own history, we’re denied proper access to that. And we don’t get the truth,” she said. For Shearer, repair also means reclaiming the stories told about slavery and emancipation in arts and culture. “It’s important to kind of be proud of that heritage as well,” she said, pointing to examples of resistance such as the Haitian Revolution. “Communities being able to take more ownership over their history, their stories and shape public understandings and the collective consciousness of those histories, I think that’s the role for the arts.”