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February 9 2025 - 2:20pm
“As Caribbean people we are not going to forget our history, we don’t just want to hear an apology — we want reparations,” said David Lammy to Parliament in 2018. Now, in 2025, he is the Foreign Secretary that, according to the Telegraph, might hold talks in April with representatives from Caribbean nations which have demanded trillions of dollars as reparations for the Atlantic Slave Trade.
The Labour government has denied such reports and repeatedly stated that Britain will not pay reparations and it is not on the agenda. Yet, the argument isn’t going away anytime soon. And the more intense the calls for reparations become, the Labour government might crumble to its activist base.
The argument for reparations is a simple one. It is argued that since the UK was the most important single driver of the Atlantic Slave Trade, it is justice for the country to atone for its sins. This would mean the descendants of black slaves are recompensed for the centuries of unpaid labor and exploitation that Britain profited from, especially as it was the slave owners who were compensated for the loss of their “property” when slavery was abolished.
And, advocates argue, reparations can be a useful tool in redressing the poverty and inequality produced by colonialism and neo-colonialism that are still noticeable in many African countries, or indeed in Afro-Caribbean communities in Western countries. As Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Afrikan Reparations, put it: “Reparations at its core is about equality and justice.”
But the crude redistributionist logic of reparations ironically locks in the same paternalistic relationship that undergirded colonialism. All the power and agency is in the hands of the former colonial power who must pay up to their former subjects, who can only plead or admonish them to exercise it while powerless themselves. In effect, it will become a kind of racial noblesse oblige. This is no relationship of equality.
In any case, a huge amount of money has already been given in aid over decades to poor African countries which experienced both slavery and colonialism in order to help modernize their economies and accelerate social development. In part, this was because it was recognized that something had to be done to redress the abject condition of many African countries in the post-colonial era. But the effects have been exiguous. Just as the system of international development aid has become a means not of alleviating inequality, poverty and dependency but of merely managing it, the same fate will befall reparations no matter how it is branded or the “radical” rhetoric that accompanies it.
There is an uneasy history that British people have to come to terms with, as do the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Belgians and many other nationalities. Indeed, the proliferation of books, films, TV shows and debates on imperial history is proof that an attempt is at least being made. Whether one accepts it or not, transatlantic slavery and its abolition are both part of British history. But reparations is ultimately the wrong way to come to terms with the untold misery inflicted on millions of people hundreds of years ago. No one alive is morally culpable for it — the dead have no claim on us. As the French Afro-Caribbean post-colonial writer Frantz Fanon once said, we bear no guilt and owe no reparations for crimes committed long before we were born.
Our responsibility as a society can only be to transform this history away from a burden that haunts us to an inspiration for a better, freer society for future generations. This would honor the sacrifices made by people of all ethnicities that brought us the freedom and opportunity we have now, and only now. Blood was shed in order to abolish slavery, and abolish it forever. That was reparation enough. Can anyone put a price on that?
Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.
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