An early childhood spent in a chattel house in Barbados followed by the shock of racism in the UK imbued Rosemarie Mallett with a sense of historical injustice and disadvantage that has shaped her life’s work.
Now in her mid-60s and bishop of Croydon, her life experiences are the backdrop to a determined push to get the Church of England to help repair the harm caused by the slave trade from which it benefited financially.
Mallett led a group set up by the church to advise on a £100m fund it proposed to invest in communities damaged by the legacy of slavery. The group’s conclusion was blunt: it is nowhere near enough.
Instead, the Church Commissioners, the body that looks after the C of E’s financial assets, should use the £100m to build a fund 10 times the size at £1bn, the group recommended.
“£100m is a heck of a lot of money, but we also recognise that it is not a lot when you consider the harm done. How do you put a price on that?,” said Mallett.
She wants to see other UK institutions and organisations that benefited financially from African chattel enslavement in the 18th and 19th centuries to partner with the C of E.
She added: “Some are hiding under their petticoats, not doing what they should do, too scared to step forward into difficult conversations around the word reparations. It’s not very hard to scratch the surface of this country’s institutions and organisations and know which were involved in African chattel enslavement. Some of these haven’t put money on the table.”
Some had already “surreptitiously” approached the church after “listening in to the debate” about the legacy of enslavement. But there would be no public calling out of those who had not made a move, she said.
The C of E had been courageous in “recognising the horrors of the past” and being willing to try to build a better future, said Mallett. But not everyone has seen it that way: the day after the report was published, MailOnline ran the story on its front page under the headline “Vicars in uproar over church’s £1bn slavery reparations”.
It was “anti-Christian” and motivated by a “death wish for the C of E”, said one of those quoted. Others said the fund would divert money from parishes – a fallacy, said Mallett.
“We knew we’d get brickbats, we knew some people think £100m is too much. But social justice is at the heart of our faith. We have to accept that some people disagree, and we have to be brave, open and transparent,” she said.
Some of the criticism focused on the report’s call for the C of E to apologise for “seeking to destroy diverse African traditional belief systems”. Mallett said: “What we’re talking about is the way in which a western Christian understanding of faith was imposed on African people, and it was a Christianity that othered them and delineated them as subhuman. The understanding of western Christianity was that anything African was uncivilised, unacceptable and needed to be basically decimated, destroyed.”
She added: “As the colonial project moved itself forward, it walked with the church.”
Mallett’s personal history has inevitably shaped her views. She was born into a poor but devout Anglican family in Barbados. When she was two, her mother left to live and work in the UK – part of the Windrush generation, responding to the call to build a new Britain.
For the next five years, she was cared for by relatives until one day she was put on a plane with a label saying “unaccompanied minor” around her neck. She travelled to Coventry to join her mother, stepfather and older brothers. “I remember seeing all the houses joined up, and feeling it was dull, dark, grim and smelly compared with the fresh air and sea back home. It was a culture shock.”
At school, Mallett was called racist names that she had never heard before. “You had to re-evaluate who you were.” But she excelled academically, and “lived in the local library”, devouring books that gave her insights into injustice and taught her about the civil rights movement in the US. “I remember reading Martin Luther King at the age of about 12 or 13, and a breaking open of knowledge about inequity and the need for civil rights.”
At Sussex University, “all church-going stopped and activism started”. She hadn’t lost her faith, but had lost respect for a church in which people of colour were not represented as leaders and which had not faced up to its involvement in transatlantic chattel slavery. “The church wasn’t an entity that I wanted to participate in.”
In her mid-30s, she decided to rejoin the C of E “determined to find a way to change it from within”. Ten years later, she was ordained as a priest, and in 2022 she was appointed bishop of Croydon.
The C of E has “gotten so much better” at reflecting the diversity of the UK population in its ranks, she said. “When I was ordained, I was one of the very, very few [black women clergy]. Now there are more and more.” To get this far has been “a job”, she said. “But at this moment, we are seeing some of the fruits.”
