Photo: The cover of 'Britain’s Slavery Debt: Reparations Now!' by Michael Banner.
Britain’s Slavery Debt: Reparations Now!
By Michael Banner
A few years ago, a relative of mine was contacted by a man with whom he shared his surname. ‘We’re not related,’ the visitor explained, ‘but my ancestors worked on your ancestors’ plantations in Jamaica.’ The Caribbean visitor was a historian, and when I was a child in the 1960s it seemed that the only people in England who understood the transatlantic slave trade were historians.
That changed with the publication of Alex Haley’s novel Roots in 1976. Many people read this phenomenal best-seller, or watched the TV series, so everybody learned how so many Africans had endured the notorious Middle Passage and become the ancestors of African Americans.
Here, the celebrated ethicist Michael Banner laments how the ‘Brits-as-freers-of-the-slaves’ narrative dominated the 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire. Since then, and since the murder of George Floyd and the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue, Britons have had to face up to the fact that we were among the worst offenders against the freedom of Africans. Nor did we abolish slavery itself in 1807 – only the trade that brought abducted Africans to ‘our’ islands in the Caribbean.
Banner re-tells the story in a useful short history, explaining how, even after the enslaved people of the Caribbean were freed, they still had to endure generations of servitude, racism and neglect, leading at times to grinding poverty, as part of the very empire that was supposed to have enfranchised them. Meanwhile the vast sum of twenty million pounds had been allocated to compensate the slave-owners for their loss.
As well as casting shade on Britain’s history, Banner has something to say about the Windrush generation. Yes, those immigrants contributed immeasurably to the economy and culture of Britain, but many felt obliged to emigrate because of the hopeless conditions at home – conditions we had done little to ameliorate.
Readers may be tempted to say, ‘Reparations? That will never happen. It’s all ancient history!’ Familiar with this response, the author counters it with the observation that at times during the eighteenth century the idea of abolition itself must have looked like a pipe-dream.
In fact, a large slice of the book is taken up with Banner’s unassailable responses to objections to the idea of reparations. Among these is the notion that such compensation will be humiliating to modern Caribbeans, since it will force them to accept their difference and victimhood. Caricom, a pan-Caribbean organisation, disagrees.
Banner also addresses the idea that nobody thought slavery was wrong back in the eighteenth century, in part by citing Quaker opposition. He also tackles the ‘Viking’ argument: should their descendants pay reparations to the British, whose ancestors they enslaved? But unlike my relative, modern-day Scandinavians are not still benefiting from the wealth generated by those enslaved Angles.
