Allowances | A debt to slaves

Troubled by their family past, descendants of former British slave owners are to donate 100,000 pounds (C$160,000) to a slavery research fund in Grenada. This aristocratic family hopes to make amends for this stain on their honor.

The descendant

Laura Trevelyan is the BBC’s New York correspondent. In 2016, one of his cousins, John Dower, discovered during bibliographic research that six of his ancestors owned estates in Grenada where 1,004 slaves worked. These plantations had been sold in 1860 and then forgotten. M^me Trevelyan took that research further and traveled to Granada last year to shoot a documentary about her slave-owning ancestors for the BBC. “We met her then,” says Arley Gill, chairman of the Grenada Reparations Commission, who will be at the University of Ottawa next Thursday for a lecture on monetary reparations due to former slaves. . “She later participated via video in our annual reparations forum. And she will formally come to Grenada on February 27 to hand over the sum of 100,000 pounds which will launch the research fund on the consequences of slavery at the University of the West Indies.

The compensation

The problem is that the Trevelyan family received in 1835 an indemnity of 27,000 pounds for the “expropriation” of their slaves, freed by the prohibition of slavery. This equates to nearly three million pounds (just under five million Canadian dollars) currently. “We hope that other members of the Trevelyan family will also pay reparations,” said Mr.^e Gil. Amissi Manirabona, a law professor at the University of Montreal who studies crimes against humanity in particular, believes that the sums at stake are less important than the gesture. “For victims of crimes like slavery, an apology and a gesture like this are important,” said Ms.^e Manirabona. Historian Wendell Adjetey, a specialist in the African diaspora at McGill University, is less enthusiastic. “It’s a move in the right direction, but it shouldn’t become a way for descendants of slavers to clear their family names,” Adjetey said.

For his part, Toronto lawyer and activist Anthony Morgan, who claimed in 2019 in the magazine Ricochet a Canadian reparations program for victims of slavery, says the Trevelyan family’s donation is positive because it puts pressure on institutions like the British royal family and the Bank of England to pay also repairs.

A millennium of the slave trade

UNESCO estimates that 30 million Africans were enslaved and moved to another region between the IX^e and the 19th^e century. Two-thirds of this violence took place between 1400 and 1900, and it is estimated that the slave trade in the Atlantic, bound for the Americas, made between 10 and 15 million victims. In Canada, tens of thousands of Africans were enslaved, according to Mr.^e Morgan.

Others

The daily The Guardian listed two other families with slave ancestors who recently announced similar donations to the Trevelyan family. A Conservative MP, Richard Drax, also made headlines last year because Barbados wants to nationalize a plantation still owned by the Drax family. “In December, the Dutch government apologized for slavery,” says Ms.^e Gil. The movement is much less advanced in southern Europe, Latin America and the Islamic world, he said.

Africa

The reparations debate should also include African countries, according to Nathan Nunn, an economist at Harvard and the University of British Columbia. “The African countries most affected by the Atlantic slave trade are now economically less advanced,” says Nunn, who combed through hundreds of databases to come to this conclusion. “The most affected countries also have a lower degree of interpersonal trust. Atlantic slavery is partly responsible for underdevelopment in Africa. Slavery to North Africa and the Middle East did not have the same effect, although it involved more victims than slavery to the Americas, because it spread over a longer period, over a millennium, and was therefore less intensive, according to Nunn.