Recently, I discovered that our family owned slaves in Barbados. I watched an interesting BBC programme, presented by David Olosoga, where he described a UCL project to list in a database all those British people who had been compensated by the government after the abolition of slavery. I think his point was that much British wealth and the empire is based on the African holocaust and we are as implicated in slavery as our American cousins but are in greater denial. You can put your surname into the database and it will tell you if your family was compensated and by how much.
I joked with my brother about this and said I thought our involvement was unlikely but he thought we had been involved since there were some West Indian cricketeers who shared our name. He thought it was an odd surname for a West Indian until he worked it out. I was mortified to find out he was right after I had submitted our name to the database – our family owned quite a few slaves.
I wondered where the money had gone – since we are not a particularly wealthy family – how had I benefitted and how to make amends.
At first, I wanted to deny that I was a direct descendent – but that excuse will not do – how direct do you have to be for it to matter? I defended myself because I have not directly enslaved anyone, but I thought I had benefited from the enslavement of others, (and perhaps I still do in my consumption of cheap goods). I and my immediate ancestors have had the privilege of a private education (this was where some of the money went) which has enabled access to better jobs and higher incomes than the descendants of slaves.
How to make amends? I am reading ‘Blood Legacy’ by Alex Renton, a journalist grappling with just such a dilemma. My second thought was to research my family to find out how direct a beneficiary I was and, in the course of this, work out how to make amends. Alex Renton, using his extensive family archives, has done precisely this. I don’t have any archives to rely upon and I haven’t reached the end of the book where he makes some decisions as to what to do. So I am hoping that he will do the work for me.
Walking whilst ill 