My ancestors profited from slavery. Here’s how I am starting to atone for that

‘Guyana, once one of the richest of the British sugar colonies, is now among the poorest countries in the northern hemisphere.’ Coffee plantation in British Guiana in the early 1800s. Photograph: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy

How many people in Britain today have benefited from industrialised slavery in the Caribbean? A vast and many-stranded enterprise, it was responsible for 11% of British GDP at its height in 1800. Wealth and privilege seeps down the generations, and British slavery ended only 185 years ago: there must be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Britons whose lives are touched by the money it generated.

“You aren’t responsible for what your ancestors did. You are responsible for what you do,” says the writer on culture and racism Emma Dabiri. I examined my ancestors’ involvement in a book published two years ago. Now I, and others with similar histories, have decided we should go further.