Just under a month ago, a landmark vote was passed. The United Nations voted to describe the transatlantic chattel slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”. This was the culmination of a long journey and decades of work. But it is by no means the end.
I spoke to Ebony Riddell Bamber, director of the Scott Trust’s Legacies of Enslavement programme, about what the vote means, and the Guardian’s role in the global effort.
A win obscured by technicalities
Ebony Riddell Bamber has just returned from the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, held in Geneva, which included discussions on what reparations entail in practice. The response to the vote among the community, Ebony said, was broadly positive. For something that, for a long time, was a “fringe issue,” it was an achievement to see the slave trade recognised for the crime it was, and compensation for its consequences to be called for – consequences that continue to reverberate in terms of economic dispossession, displacement and cultural erasure.
To the casual observer, there was much to be infuriated about with how the vote played out: while 123 countries voted in favour of the resolution, there were 52 abstentions, including from many European countries and two of the nations most responsible for the trafficking of millions of Africans across the Atlantic – the US and the UK. But Ebony told me this was, in fact, a glass-half-full result. In the past these countries would “probably have voted against it”. The technical reasons for the abstentions did not negate the seriousness of the charge. The UK chargé d’affaires to the UN said that, while the UK recognised the suffering that had been inflicted on millions, “no single set of atrocities should be regarded as more or less significant than another”. It was also interesting, Ebony observed, that international law was invoked as a reason for not endorsing reparations. The fact that the slave trade was not “illegal at the time”, according to the UK and other countries who argued the same point of law, meant that no crime was committed, and therefore compensation could not be recognised by domestic justice systems.
Time is running out for excuses
These justifications can be viewed as cop-outs or as anxieties about this vote not being merely symbolic. The west is “nervous”, wrote the Caribbean analyst Kenneth Mohammed, that “once it officially recognises that this atrocity was foundational and still alive in its consequences, the old script becomes harder to sustain. Then questions follow. About debt. About underdevelopment. About museum collections. About trade structures. About who was compensated and who never was.” That nervousness is a part of a wider moment of backlash against the progress and growth of racial justice movements, and the exploitation of that by rightwing populist parties. In the UK, the Reform party jumped on the vote results, declaring that if it ever forms a government it would deny new visas to anyone from a country seeking reparations from Britain.
Still, that old script is being rewritten by a growing “global diasporic movement”, Ebony said, given momentum by the Caribbean Community’s (Caricom) Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice in 2014, but now includes African countries as well. The UN vote was proposed by Ghana’s president John Dramani Mahama, and the framework for it was drafted by Zimbabwean writer Panashe Chigumadzi.
The Guardian’s role in restorative justice
It has been three years since the launch of the Legacies of Enslavement programme, backed by the Guardian’s owner, the Scott Trust. The restorative justice programme was launched in response to the discovery that the newspaper’s 19th-century founders were connected to transatlantic enslavement. It includes community-led repair, truth-telling and raising awareness of Britain’s involvement in slavery, as well as aiming to increase the scope and ambition of the Guardian’s journalism, especially in covering underreported regions (an effort The Long Wave is a part of). I asked Ebony about her reflections on the work done so far, and how it is part of the wider, historical effort that culminated in the UN vote.
“One of the biggest things that struck me doing this work is that we never ask or reflect on what reparations for transatlantic enslavement could be. Many people we have had the privilege to engage with are being asked this question for the first time,” she said. And so the series is receiving “very precious information that has huge value” on what people’s “liberatory vision is”. One is simply the desire for there “to be a level playing field to have a better life,” Ebony added. “One of the legacies of enslavement is that that playing field does not exist.” In Jamaica, the preoccupation has been “very much education and training for young people. In the US Sea Islands, it is about land and property retention.”
Ebony also mentioned the climate emergency across the Caribbean, and the desire for communities vulnerable to it to be supported and to build resilience in such conditions. And then there is “preserving culture, heritage, history, connecting with the knowledge and food ways of our ancestors, decolonising curricula”. As Ebony listed these desires, it struck me that visions of liberation frequently return to recognising and rebalancing a state of western hegemony built on enslaved labour, not only in economic terms, but also in terms of culture and dignity.
The Guardian’s role in this lies in its ability to marshal not just funds and journalism, but also “convening power”, bringing together international organisations, academics, and local communities to ameliorate the fundamental imbalances brought about by colossal historical exploitation and enrichment. Reparations, Ebony told me, “take many different forms”.
An unstoppable momentum
That is an enormous task for all concerned, but Ebony said the effort to recognise the legacies of enslavement and the importance and means of reparative justice is “moving in the right direction” and building “momentum”, standing on the shoulders of those who laboured for years in far more hostile climates. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of work to be done,” she added, and challenges of pushback remain, but “there’s not the ability to block or shut down the discussion any more”. She observes that one of the learnings from the team’s work over the past three years is that there is a desire to be “in community both globally and locally”. “Wanting to reconnect across the diaspora,” she said, underpins all of the work, a fact that is demonstrated in the sort of growing collaboration of African and Caribbean countries that culminated in the UN vote. “There is momentum in working in lockstep. We are in a different place globally, but there is power in that collaborative force.”