So, is the Commonwealth conference in Samoa going to be dominated by the possibility that Britain will be asked to pay billions of pounds in reparations for the evils of the slave trade? It does rather look like it.
According to the BBC, the current text of the draft summit communique goes: “Heads [of government], noting calls for discussions on reparatory justice with regard to the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and chattel enslavement… agreed that the time has come for a meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation towards forging a common future based on equity.”
To which the obvious question is, how much?
Naturally the Caribbean countries – as represented by Caricom, a body that represents 15 of them – are not doing anything so vulgar as to present a bill for the sufferings of the ancestors of many of their present population. The foreign minister of the Bahamas, Frederick Mitchell, has refused to put a figure on what reparations might be worth, saying that discussions of this kind prevent the conversation from starting. He says he wants “simply to call for this discussion to take place on reparatory justice”.
This sounds dandy; who is against talking about these things? Trouble is, the outcome of a discussion of this kind is not very much in doubt. The PM could not say otherwise than that the slave trade in which Britain was very much implicated was barbarous and wrong and then the obvious next step is to put a price on contrition. And that would mean that the present population of the UK would be liable for the cost of the sufferings of people long dead at the hands of slave traders and plantation owners long dead. As for the institutions that profited to any extent from the trade – and that covers an awful lot of bodies whose history goes back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – many have been engaged in protracted soul-searching about this for many years, with renewed emphasis on the issue since the BLM protests.
Sir Keir is right that we should focus on the challenges of our time rather than the easy business of passing judgment on the past
The Prime Minister has been surprisingly robust about the matter, saying that he doesn’t want the summit to be dominated by “endless discussions about reparations on the past” given that Commonwealth countries are “facing real challenges on things like climate in the here and now”. His host, the Samoan government, may feel strongly about this, given that it, like other Pacific nations, has a practical interest in rising sea levels as a result of warming global temperatures. Climate change for Samoa is very much to the point.
The PM is right to kick this matter firmly into that useful vegetation, the long grass. Quite apart from the question of whether we are liable for the sins of our fathers there is the palpable injustice of focusing exclusively on the trade in slaves on the Atlantic passage. There was a huge traffic in African slaves in East Africa, focused on Zanzibar, which continued long after abolition of the trade by Britain, except that instead of West Indian plantation owners benefiting, it was slave owners in Arab countries and the Ottoman Empire, where there has been no soul searching on the subject whatever, let alone discussion of reparations. That trade was in great part brought to an end by the remarkable Scotsman, Sir John Kirk. The East African trade has gone largely unremarked by the reparations industry – and in the case of Caribbean states, that’s fair enough. And then there is the question of the slave traders in both east and west African slaves, many of whom were Muslim Arabs. What reparation, what repentance there?
Does it even need saying, as Sir Keir has already done, that a traffic in human beings is abhorrent, and that no one can contemplate the trade to the Caribbean without moral revulsion? But in our present situation, Sir Keir is right that we should focus on the challenges of our time rather than the easy business of passing judgment on the past. The PM is attempting to establish a new centre of trade expertise that will help developing and poorer countries, including some Commonwealth members, compete in global markets and connect them with UK businesses. He is focusing on trade between Commonwealth members which, let’s remember, include Australia, New Zealand and Canada, to the benefit of the poorest. It would be a pity if that positive and feasible agenda were compromised by a focus on slavery. We cannot undo the past and we cannot usefully apologise for it. We can however transform the present, and the Commonwealth is an interesting context in which to try.
Melanie McDonagh is an Evening Standard columnist
