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An Early childhood Barbados The subsequent impact of racism in Britain made Rosemary Mallet feel the injustice and adverse effects of history, which influenced her lifelong creation.
Now in her 60s, she is the Bishop of Croydon and uses her own life experience as a backdrop to push firmly for the Church of England to help repair the damage done by the slave trade, from which it benefited greatly.
Mallett led a panel set up by the church to advise on a proposed £100m fund designed to invest in communities devastated by the earthquake. The legacy of slavery. The group’s conclusion is stark: it’s not enough.
Instead, the Church Council, the body responsible for managing the Church of England’s financial assets, should use the £100m to set up a fund of 10 times that amount, or £1bn. Group Recommendation.
“£100m is a lot of money but we also realise it’s not a lot given the damage done. How can you put a value on it?” Mallett said.
She would like to see other British institutions and organizations that benefited financially from the African slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries work with the Church of England.
She added: “Some people are hiding under their skirts and not doing what they should be doing, too scared to step up and engage in the difficult conversations about reparations. It’s not hard to look at the institutions and organizations in this country and see which ones were involved in African slavery. Some of them haven’t come up with the money yet.”
Some people have contacted the church “secretly” after “hearing debates about the legacy of slavery.” But she said the church would not publicly call out those who did not take action.
Mallett said the Church of England had been brave enough to “recognise the horrors of the past” and to work towards a better future. But not everyone saw it that way: the day after the report was published, the Daily Mail ran a front-page story with the headline “Priests furious over church’s £1bn debt” Slave reparations”.
One of the respondents said the fund was “anti-Christian” and motivated by a “desire for the Church of England to perish.” Others said the fund would divert funds from dioceses — a fallacy, Mallett said.
“We know we will be criticised, we know some people think £100m is too much. But social justice is at the heart of what we believe in. We have to accept that some people disagree and we have to be brave, open and transparent,” she said.
Some criticism has focused on the report’s call for the Church of England to apologise for “trying to destroy traditional African belief systems”. Mallett said: “We are talking about the way in which a Western understanding of Christian faith is being imposed on African people, which is a Christianity “They viewed Africans as alien and subhuman. Western Christianity believed that anything African was uncivilized, unacceptable and needed to be completely eradicated.”
She added: “As the colonial project progressed, it went along with the church.”
Mallett’s perspective is inevitably informed by her personal experiences. Born in Barbados into a poor but devout Anglican family, when she was two, her mother left home to live and work in England – part of the “Windrush Generation” that responded to the call to build a new Britain.
She spent the next five years in the care of relatives until one day she was put on a plane with a tag around her neck that read “unaccompanied minor”. She travelled to Coventry to join her mother, stepfather and brothers. “I remember seeing all the houses linked together and feeling it was dreary, dark, gloomy and smelly compared to the fresh air and sea back home. It was a culture shock.”
At school, Mallette was called racist names she had never heard before. “You have to rethink yourself.” But she excelled in her studies and “lived at the local library,” devouring books that taught her about injustice and exposed her to the civil rights movement in the United States. “I remember reading Martin Luther King around 12 or 13 years old, and that opened up my awareness of inequality and the need for civil rights.”
At Sussex, “all church activities stopped and events started”. She has not lost her faith, but has lost respect for a church that does not have people of colour represented as leaders and does not take its involvement seriously. Transatlantic slave trade. “The church was not an entity I wanted to be a part of.”
In her 30s she decided to rejoin the Church of England, “determined to find a way to change it from within”. A decade later she was ordained a priest and in 2022 was appointed Bishop of Croydon.
She said the Church of England was “getting better” at reflecting the diversity of the UK population. “When I was ordained I was one of very few black women clergy. Now there are more and more black women clergy.” She said it had “taken a lot of hard work” to get to where we are today. “But we are seeing some results now.”
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