Reparations 3: Exploring Models for Reparation. # 177. 22/10/2024

Out of Many, One People

Welcome, to the concluding blog of a mini-series on reparations, but surely not a final blog on an issue which will continue to be around the Church, and increasingly the government for a long time to come. I guess there are people on both sides of the debate who will disagree with what I have written. Do let me know. And do invite to the blog others you think might be interested.

Reparations 3: Exploring Models for Reparation.

On what basis should Britain pay reparations to the countries of the Caribbean to whom we took Africans as slaves from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and what should be the Church of England’s involvement in the debate and its outcomes.

There are four possible models to consider in evaluating whether reparations should be made.

1. Back Pay.

When attempts are made to compute what Britain’s debts might be, this is the model often used, for example, Michael Banner’s ‘Britain’s Slavery Debt’, reviewed last week, uses the phrase ‘unremunerated labour’. However, as I wrote last week this is an unsatisfactory model for several reasons.

Firstly, those who suffered under slavery are dead and can not be recompensed. There is no widely recognised moral pathway by which financial loss in past centuries can be paid back by people of the present. Secondly, had such labour been remunerated, then estimating the extent to which it might have generated inherited capital for future generations, especially in a subsistence economy, is impossible to compute. It requires too many variables, such as the volume and the value of the slaves’ labour (subtracting the provision of their food – which in Barbados had to be imported) and subsequent interest rates. Thus, attempts to specify the size of the ‘slavery debt’ vary by a factor of 10. Such attempts fall under the judgement of Thomas Sowell in ‘The Search for Cosmic Justice’ that ‘determining the net balance  . . suggests hubris’ (p 14). The speculative nature of the figures means that no current government would consider working with them, whilst they price themselves out of consideration by their size.

2. Paternity.

Britain built the plantations required to produce sugar and other products. Britain imported the African slaves to run them. The societies of the Caribbean are Britain’s offspring. In his Preface to 'The Sociology of Slavery' Orlando Patterson wrote: "Jamaica and the other West Indian islands are unique in world history in that they present one of the rare cases of a human society being artificially created for the satisfaction of one clearly defined goal: that of making money through the production of sugar". Therefore the extent to which Britain has continuing responsibility for its Caribbean offspring requires consideration. Patterson’s phrase ‘unique in world history’ is weighty. It separates demands by the ‘artificially created’ Caribbean societies from other claimants. As regards the United States, where Ta-Nehisi Coates and others have argued for reparations, black people have always been part of a wider and much more complex society where, despite at times very high levels of racism and discrimination, nonetheless opportunities for development have been much greater, especially since the Civil Rights programmes of sixty years ago, so that highlighting the payment of reparations to descendants of slaves today (as now happens in some American States through direct cash payments) and which might be paid for by people of other backgrounds who are actually worse off is arbitrary and unjust.

As regards colonised societies elsewhere, these were certainly not the creation of the colonisers, and the frequent bracketing of ‘slavery and colonialism’ is careless. Colonialism produced both costs and benefits to the colonised areas, though to widely varying extents. Recent historical revisionism has rightly drawn attention to the costs, brutality and injustice of empire, but that revision will also be subject to re-revision, and it is clear that many formerly colonised countries have come through the process in better shape than before colonisation.

By contrast, as Patterson points out, the Caribbean islands were entirely Britain’s creation, and therefore responsibility. ‘I think if people make children they should be made to look after them’ was Kemi Badenoch’s claim in this week’s Sunday Times, reflecting on the frequency that as an MP she had to work with the Child Support Agency in chasing up neglectful fathers. Does the analogy that Britain ‘fathered’ Caribbean nations carry weight? If so, are fathers permanently responsible for their offspring, or does that responsibility ease off with the passing years. In what situations might they still have responsibility for the ‘adult’ child?

It is arguable that not only with the abolition of slavery in the 1830s through Lloyd George’s reference to ‘the slum of the Empire, and down to independence in the 1960s, the islands of the Caribbean were left with impoverished largely agrarian societies that were unable to provide a reasonable standard of living for all the population. In ‘How Britain Underdeveloped the Caribbean’ Hilary Beckles quotes the words of G Lewis written in 1968: ‘Britain had placed the labouring population of the West Indies where it was and could not divert itself of responsibility for its future’ (p 200). Piecemeal reparations, such as a grant for the establishment of the University of the West Indies in 1948, are not commensurate with the need.

How the ‘adult children’ of the Caribbean have fared since independence also needs consideration. Orlando Patterson is critical of the post- independence government of Jamaica, and it is certainly true that Barbados has fared much better, though partly for geographical reasons. But both economies began from a low base.

3. Damages.

Sadly, in recent years we have become accustomed to the payment of damages to those who have been abused by those in authority. People abused in childhood tend to carry enduring emotional scarring. Payment of damages gives recognition of the harm done, which may also bring some emotional comfort. But here too correlating the amount paid with the balm received may be impossible to compute. But the fact that public note has been taken of what the abused person has suffered is significant.

Reparations for slavery involves more than the economic injustice. It was a massive exercise of abuse on a societal and cultural as well as a physical plane. Arguably the abused societies still bear the scars. Not only was their labour taken, the slaves’ languages, religions and cultural practices were suppressed, but not completely obliterated and formed fragments of a new identity amongst the enslaved people. Orlando Patterson writes: ‘Thus there emerged in the post-emancipation period a dual culture, or as Curtin puts it ‘two Jamaicas’; one was the Afro-Jamaican cultural system, which was largely a consolidation and revitalization of patterns developed during slavery; the other was the European oriented cultural system, which was the revival of British civilization in the island after its disintegration during slavery. It is this dual cultural pattern which still forms the basis of Jamaican society’ (‘The Sociology of Slavery’). It is a duality of mind poignantly caught in her poem about a servant woman with which Joyce Gladwell prefaced her memoir ‘Brown Face, Big Master’: ‘She is living with a man to whom she is not married./ Down in the valley where she lives it is all right./ The people round her do the same./ Here at the rectory it is a sin.’

Despite  frequent resistance and rebellion under slavery - including the formation of independent Maroon societies of escaped slaves - slavery’s split psychological and emotional legacy of an unresolved ‘it is all right’/’it is a sin’ duality still carries forward transgenerational trauma. The result can be a continuing brittleness and insecurity of identity. Spending three weeks in Jamaica and Nigeria respectively in the 1970s gave me only the most fleeting of impressions, nonetheless in Nigeria my sense was that the relatively brief period of British rule was merely a passing phase; in Jamaica slavery’s  reverberations had lasting consequences. More immediately, when walking down Tottenham High Road it is possible to make a rough and ready distinction between West Africans and Afro-Caribbeans (of predominantly Jamaican background in this area) simply by their bearing, by whether or not their sense of identity is uncontested and internally secure, or whether – like the servant in Joyce Gladwell’s poem – it has inner stresses and tensions. The writer Malcolm Gladwell (Joyce’s son) has spoken of the ‘weight’ he senses black Americans carrying. (Unfortunately I can’t track down the reference). In so far as my partly subjective assessment has any force, then we are here dealing with a deep and damaging consequence of slavery. One that eludes financial computation, but which points the reparative question towards relational and reconciling responses. As Banner writes: ‘money may serve to address certain aspects of the case, while doing little or nothing to relate to non-material harms’ (p 105). Recognising the seriousness of such harms is an important aspect of the debate.

4. Repentance.

Michael Banner quotes the Book of Common Prayer’s confession of wrong-doing: ‘ the remembrance of them is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable’ (p 43). Nationally we are only just beginning to approach an awareness of the evil that we have committed; an evil whilst different in several respects from the Holocaust yet which bears comparison with us. Hardness of heart can make us refuse awareness of an evil which has largely lain hidden in plain sight for two centuries, but our faith should make Christians the forward scouts in recognising and then repenting of our nation’s evil past. When King Josiah heard the words of the book of the law which had lain hidden in the temple ‘he tore his clothes’ and was commended by the prophetess Huldah ‘because your heart was penitent, and you humbled yourself before the Lord’ (2 Kings 22:11 & 19). It is wholesome for the church and the nation to humble ourselves in recognition of the evil that our nation has committed.

Such humility facilitates but does not predicate the form that reparatory repentance takes. It can be tainted by condescension from the giver, just as some people from Caribbean backgrounds have warned against reparations potential for consolidating a victimhood mentality rather than alleviating it. Thus, according to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy ‘(Frantz) Fanon rejects the idea of reparations, for example, precisely because that idea would link Black people to the past in a crucial way and make that link inextricable from imagining justice. In place of the past, Fanon appeals to the openness and undetermined character of the future’. In Britain, Tony Sewell has similarly argued that seeking reparations is backward looking and overly dependent.

Meanwhile for both the British Government and the Church of England the arguments above weigh in the favour of both explicitly recognising the disgrace of our predatory exploitation of slave labour in the Caribbean and its continuing consequences, and for taking public and financial steps to respond to demands from the Caribbean for reparation.

Responses.

By the Church of England.

The Church of England has agreed to set aside a fund of £100 million. This figure was drawn up by the Church Commissioners as a response to the investment in the early eighteenth century of money from Queen Ann’s Bounty in the South Sea Company, which was a trader in slaves. Further investigations have questioned whether the Church of England did actually gain any income from the slave trading arm of the Company. However, as argued above, attempting to identify a specific amount of money as a suitable reparation to past slave-trading is not an obvious moral response as well as beyond the possibility of convincing computation.

However the Church of England needs to face the moral issues raised under points 2 and 3 above  - namely that as the established church in a Christian nation, and so widely held to be morally accountable for the actions of that nation, the Church colluded for two centuries in a national policy that was murderous, brutal and exploitative. Even if the case is open as to whether the church’s finances directly benefitted, most certainly her members did, and went on to give freely to the church of wealth gained by appalling means, which for over a century was uncontested by the church. We can only feel the disgrace of P D Curtin’s historical judgement: ‘Perhaps the most valuable ally of the planting class was the clergy of the Established church, although the planters took little interest in religion’ (The Two Jamaicas, p 48), whilst according to Patterson a ‘contemporary observer found the clergy ‘of a character so vile’ as to be unmentionable and concluded that ‘they are generally the most finished [accomplished] of our Debauchers’’ (Sociology of Slavery, p 40).

So in face of the Church of England’s neglect of the slaves’ well-being  Michael Banner rightly argues that ‘money is likely to be deemed as an appropriate means of trying to make amends’ (p 43). We have seen that any specific amount is likely to be arbitrary, but the proposed £100 million is substantial enough amount to indicate seriousness. Because the primary area of suffering is in the islands of the Caribbean therefore the money should be spent on those islands, primary for the relief of basic poverty. One model worth bearing in mind is Tear Fund’s Church and Community Projects, which mobilise local congregations to consult with the local community what communal needs they can together most effectively address. It is important to avoid the danger endemic in affirmative action programmes of the benefits going primarily to those who are already the most advantaged within disadvantaged communities. (One suspects that this could be the case of the programme by Trinity College, Cambridge of granting scholarships, as Banner outlines).

Such a distortion is one of many weaknesses in the subsequent report on the Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice. Far more seriously than just seeming to benefit already privileged entrepreneurs and professionals, the report increased the proposed sum ten-fold, albeit chiefly through voluntary gifts but nonetheless with significant further ancillary costs for the Church. It also sought to extend the remit from the Caribbean to what could be the entire global economy. A further indication of the group’s extraordinary and illusory over-reach was in even implying basic changes to the Church’s understanding of salvation. The only wise response is for the report to be left to gather dust and expire.

But whilst a financial response is important in giving material substance to the repentance that the Church is called to express just as important is the relational dimension. To some degree this has been met by the Church’s acknowledgement of past racism, including to communities in this country with roots in the Caribbean. This needs to bear fruit in a consistent attitude at all levels in the Church of a humbled, welcoming, affirmative approach to black people. But there is also the need for a more public demonstration. I think the use of an annual event, as seen with Racial Justice Sunday, Black History Month. Such repetitive events risk becoming institutional and performative, and ultimately rather dreary, rather than genuine, continuing expressions of love and unity, whilst also containing shades of grief and shame. By contrast, a major enduring monument gives physical expression to our awareness of the deep wrong in our past. If that should primarily be a national monument, as argued below, a Church created monument would be a supplement to it, or in a worse case, the national monument. Westminster Abbey would be the obvious venue. But if nothing is done nationally in Trafalgar Square, could St Martin’s in the Fields be the site of a very public memorial?

By the Nation.

In the run up to the Commonwealth Heads of State meeting the issue of reparations has been informally raised and publicly rejected. Indeed, in discussing reparations the Commonwealth provides an important context. In the ‘critical debate’ reviewed in ‘Reparations 1’ of this series (blog #175) it was argued that what should be determinative was aid to the nations now most in need rather than our past involvement in slavery. Surely Haiti is in far greater need than Jamaica. Certainly. But there is a valid ‘conservative’ argument for a relational approach that suggests we should work with our historical roots and current interactions rather than simply on need. As regards Government fear that any reparations to the Caribbean would unleash a torrent of similar demands from a range of former colonies, the case has been made above that slavery puts the Caribbean nations in a unique position. As Beckles argues, no other colony ‘has been created for such a singular purpose’ (p xi).

Payment of reparations along with some form of public memorial would be important in the debate over empire and colonisation. Maturity for a nation, as for an individual, comes from growing recognition of both strengths and weaknesses; sources of pride and of shame. Britain bears guilt and shame for at least one aspect of our behaviour in the progress to the ‘one world’ of globalisation. Our overall role in that process can not be evaluated intelligently if we vainly try to identify only our positive contributions. Paradoxically realism over the evils of our enslaving and open recognition of the harm created also enables recognition of the good that we have offered to the world – the rule of law, of reliable contracts, democratic processes, individual rights. Opponents of ‘decolonisation’ (such as Professor Doug Stokes, seem my review of his book at #131) rightly warn that criticism of Britain’s past wrongs leads us to a far too easy embarrassment or reluctance in standing up for our virtues which are desperately needed in today’s world. But to do so can only be rank hypocrisy if we brush under the carpet any accountability for past slavery. Hypocrisy that was seen at its most unblushing in David Cameron’s words to the Jamaican Parliament in September 2015: ‘But I do hope that as friends who have gone through so much together since those darkest times, we can move on from this painful legacy and continue to build for the future’. But his re-casting of slavery as the shared experience of ‘brothers-in-arms’ and not as Britain’s brutal abuse of black slaves simply indicates the sort of double-think British governments will have to resort to until we make open acknowledgement of the ‘legacy’ – painful indeed for Jamaicans but very profitable for Britain – that we have encumbered Caribbean governments with.

Part of that acknowledgement is public recognition, especially through some highly visible public monument, as discussed above as regards a Church response. The fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square continues to be a missed opportunity. Certainly we need something that so enters our national consciousness that the long history of our enslavement of African peoples in the Caribbean is not just history’s one more ‘damned thing after another’ but written deeply into our self-understanding.

Financial reparations are a much more difficult issues to settle, given that an objectively ascertainable amount is impossible, the need in the islands virtually bottomless, and the accountability of the Caribbean governments themselves for their problems is up for dispute. In particular, is it possible for bi-partite discussions to reach such a conclusion that the issue is now finalised: adequate reparation has been made, and the matter is forever off the table? Meanwhile Britain can start making unilateral steps. At the discussion two weeks ago Professor Alan Lester suggested that the offer of green technology was an appropriate way forward. First steps need to be taken. Possible conclusions are unknown, but meanwhile decisive recognition of guilt and the initiation of financial responses are at least moves towards reparation and reconciliation.

Related blogs on this topic:

# 75 Reparations – a Sighting Shot

# 104 A Magazine Edition + the Church Commissioners £100 million

# 151 The Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice – a Discussion

#175 Reparations 1 – Reflections on a Critical Discussion

# 176 Reparations 2 – Review of ‘Britain’s Slavery Debt’ by Michael Banner