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King Charles said it was “time” to acknowledge the lasting impact of slavery, comments welcomed by the UK prime minister. Barbados She spoke in London about the need for reparations.
Mia Mottley said on Wednesday evening that slavery countries owed Barbados $4.9 trillion (£3.9 trillion), noting that conversations about how to repay that debt “will be difficult and will take time”.
“We don’t expect compensation to be paid in one, two or five years because wealth has been taken and lost for centuries. But we ask that we be seen and heard,” she said.
Mottley met David Cameron on Tuesday but did not reveal the foreign secretary’s views on Britain’s slavery-related debt.
She said: “I will not go into the details of our conversation, but I can say that I thought the foreign secretary would defer to his majesty the king.”
Speaking at the London School of Economics’ International Inequality Institute, she repeatedly praised King Charles for appearing willing to confront slavery. She believes the king’s willingness to discuss stems from his speech at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Rwanda in June 2022.
The king said he was “deeply saddened by the suffering of so many” and said he would continue to “deepen our understanding of the enduring impact of slavery.” He added: “To build a shared future that benefits all of our citizens, we must also find new ways to acknowledge our past … The time for this conversation has come.” There was no mention of financial reparations in the speech.
Since becoming prime minister in 2018, Mottley has become a powerful voice on the legacy of colonialism around the world and has helped turn calls for reparations into a mainstream political issue.
Quoting calculations from a Brattle Group report that takes into account The wealth and GDP accumulated by countries that enslaved African peopleShe noted that Britain owes $24 trillion in reparations to 14 countries affected by the transatlantic slave trade, Spain owes $17.1 trillion, France owes $9.2 trillion, and the Netherlands owes $4.86 trillion.
“These numbers may seem shocking if you take them out of context. But compared to the total wealth that has accumulated over time, these numbers are actually tiny,” Motley said.
She said addressing the legacy of slavery would allow the global community to “move forward stronger rather than languish in the shadow of a shameful history”.
Motley said calls for reparations have taken on greater urgency in 2020 following the Black Lives Matter movement and the killing of George Floyd.
She added: “For the first time, the world has realised that we can no longer ignore the trauma of four centuries of slavery and barbarity and dehumanisation. I salute the king for having the courage to recognise that now is the time for dialogue.”
She expressed reservations about recent reparations commitments made by some British institutions, pointing out that these institutions sometimes “ignore the autonomy of black people and the reparations commitments are not made after dialogue and negotiation.”
She questioned The Church of England announced earlier this year the creation of a £100 million fund Reparations to address historical links to the slave trade are more than adequate. “I want to thank the Church of England for agreeing to pay £100 million. The only difficulty is that there has been no dialogue between the two sides, and the difficulty is that this may not in any way bridge the gap,” she said.
Rishi Sunak rejected suggestions that the UK should pay reparations for its role in slavery, saying “trying to unravel our history is not the right way forward and it’s not something we are focused on”. Cameron acknowledged during a visit to Jamaica in 2015 that slavery was “abhorrent in any form” but expressed hope that “we can move on from this painful legacy”.
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