Reparations demands: Should Britian pay for slavery in Barbados? | Foreign Correspondent

foreign Barbados often looks too good to be true lured by crystal clear waters many come for the ultimate Caribbean getaway pleasant good morning we're heading over to the turtles of Carl Obi and then over by the shipwrecks people come to Barbados for three things we run our sunshine and our oceans it's just beautiful everything that I'm seeing I'm able to look down and see a turtle it's not something that you see in Georgia [Music] it's idyllic on the water today but centuries ago under British

rule this Bay was at the center of a cruel slave trade they kidnapped them and branded them with Hot Irons a Bloody Business model was born here landowners built lucrative sugar Empires run non-african slave labor 400 years old from your neighbor you build all those Empires for free now is the world's newest Republic it's demanding Old Colonial Masters right the wrongs of the past or you're listening pay you owe us I'm big time apology and reparations our folks are seek into emancipate themselv

es even if it means break-in with tradition Break in with the establishment this small Caribbean island has started a global fight it's prepared to take on the powerful institutions and individuals who made a fortune here for reparations but Generations after slavery was abolished can it convince them that it's owed a reckoning and repayment [Music] once you're in Barbados you're on Ireland time it's no wonder tourism is the main Money Maker here the economy is now dependent on visitors and almo

st half come from Britain it makes talk of reparations a tricky business Anthony Carter is the Calypso king of Barbados known here as Mighty Gabby at 75 he's a national icon thank you so much this is where I grew up as a boy all of this speech so this is a special place for you very much so made Boyhood respect fishing swimming playing Cricket he isn't afraid of talking about slavery and challenging Britain we don't have hatred we just want wrong things to be rated but at the same time we are ve

ry welcoming people Gabby grew up on the island when it was still a British colony for three centuries the country had lived under the crown which once endorsed slavery it wasn't until 1966 when he was a teenager that Barbados became an independent nation be kept the queen as its head of state and how do you feel about the British royal family now I'll tell you something I've been one of the fortunate or unfortunate people to have actually met them personally how you and I hate talking met Eliza

beth her husband I always felt that Elizabeth had quite a long time to apologize to us for slavery and to pay reparations and she did it last year in the days after the queen died Gabby sparked International uproar I wrote a poem called goodbye to rubbish there's anything wrong with speaking the truth it's the truth Elizabeth was not a great leader Charles is behaving differently it seems because the first thing he did he said that sleepy was was a terrible thing he admitted that but he didn't s

ay we are going to pay reparations so I'm looking forward to the day when that occurs the younger generation is prepared to carry on the fight good evening foreign pleasure of introducing one of my brothers in poetry it's a regular Open Mic poetry night had a bar just back from the tourist beaches in here it's mostly locals put your hands together for it Akim and with Cupid Tyler Prescott [Music] [Applause] I hear all this type of reparations maybe it's the broken Family Ties caused by generatio

nal genocide no generalized in the media could it be it came Chandler press code is more comfortable than most riffing on reparations he's a leading voice in the National conversation urging young people to get involved here's the black man to this pill usually when we hear reparations we think of money it is it is so much more than money and it's about and franchisement economically it's about another Healthcare System it's about education it's for indigenous people as well it came to see the f

uture where European investment frees Barbados from a Reliance on white patronage of Tourism [Music] [Applause] I think as a country we have to diversify our financial portfolio it can't just be tourism person poetry in Barbados and spoken word poetry specifically is rooted in the African oral tradition so give me black Joy instead I said give me black Joy instead give me give me black accomplishment Cindy Celeste is one of the organizers of this event and a regular performer too what are we fee

ling in this moment is it pride is it fear is it anger is it rage in the capital Bridge Town Cindy once used her poetry to speak on behalf of her Nation [Music] this matters swept the Caribbean protesters turned their anger on a statue that once stood in this Square British naval hero Horatio Nelson as Nelson fell Cindy Rose to sum up what the country felt in that moment how can he occupy a space right at the center of our seat of power without inciting public rage we should be ashamed that we l

et this continue for so long the younger generation which would be like my generation at forward is very in tune with the discussion of charting our own Barbadian identity and having historically been stripped of that identity what are we pouring into it and investing in it now 12 months later Cindy was back in the Square for an even bigger occasion the day Barbados became a republic and said goodbye to the crown d we finally raised the flag of a Nation no longer clinging to Colonial Court tales

for its identity those words are coming back to you aren't they can remember the moment hey wow I would love to believe that people felt the ear change the same way I did King Charles the then Prince of Wales is sitting in the audience I mean what's running through your head if we are proclaiming that we are a republic we can't just write it down and be quiet about it you know and so it's gonna make some people uncomfortable from The Darkest Days of our past and the appalling atrocity of slaver

y which forever stays our history people of this island forged their path an extraordinary fortitude King Charles came very close to saying an apology at that transition ceremony but he didn't quite say it kind of the nature of the apologies that we've gotten building a future is difficult when this country Still Feels burdened by its past most of its 280 000 citizens are descendants of enslaved Africans when slavery ended in 1834 it was slave owners who were compensated barbados's Museum holds

the secrets of this dark history the records here give a glimpse into the lives of the people who suffered under slavery foreign ER is the Museum's deputy director and an expert on its collection from that time right so here's the Newton Journal the importance of this is for us it meant this was an inventory log for one of the Island's largest plantations the stock accounts enslaved humans Uber who's in a field going at age 20. Celia who's in the second gang at age 17. to a 17 year old woman out

cutting cane oh cutting game by hand yes cutting cane who's planting cane who's reading doing the same work manual labor that men are doing at the age of 17 and she is going to be in that job till she dies here we have someone called Phil Francis who's passed it four months so it's just a baby just a baby it's quite chilling the way there's just a giant black line through their name for us today looking back it just seems sore and you mean from birth till death from birth to death this was thei

r life that was their life the library is a book of even greater significance this is a manual on how to run a slave plantation the blueprint was replicated across the Americas instructions for the management of a plantation in Barbados and for the treatment of negroes this book is written by the influential Planters of the day what does it tell us about how enslaved people were treated on plantations it does it in a rather benign fashion I know from observation and experience that a certain deg

ree of discipline is necessary in the government of negroes at best the language of the book seeks to be benevolent the operational of that benevolence is far from it was oppressive it was sadistic it was torture the reality is that most enslaved people if they lived 15 or 20 years on a plantation and survived they were lucky um very early on Persons lost signal more than a decade working slaves to an early grave was the intention of Planters it was a financial calculation they were cheaper to r

eplace than keep alive and these Planters what did they go on to do Edward Drax whose family still owns a plantation in Barbados his descendants are sitting MPS in the British house of parliament at this time today the draxas are the only family on the island to have continuously operated a plantation since the start of slavery British MP Richard Drax is the current owner he's often described as one of the wealthiest members of the House of Commons James rocks brought sugar to Barbados he was on

e of the first Planters experimented with it that the families profits allowed them to still up to today 400 years later half a plantation on this island and the monies that they would have made had to be massive I'm meeting someone who knows more about the Drax Plantation than just about anyone hi Trevor nice to meet you right on uh-huh nice to meet you too thank you for taking us out to Drexel today start the journey out there Trevor Marshall is a local historian who for decades has wanted to

unlock Drax Hall's secrets they have not allowed anybody any historian white or black to have access to their records here we are at the grid the enigmatic and to some extent the mysterious draxore this is the place where the business model of using slaves on our tropical Farms which we call plantations this is where it was created Richard Drex lives in England and won't give us an interview so it looks like this is as close as we'll get into something very unexpected happens um John this guy ge

t through here quickly the manager gives us rare access to film inside the plantation yard lady and gentlemen drum roll drum roll you are looking at the oldest Plantation great house in the Western Hemisphere [Music] they function both as a fortress and a Dwelling Place you call this the plantation yard this is where the action took place this is where canes were brought to be grown this is where people were paying money in the poor slavery period This is where people were flogged discipline thi

s Mansion was built around the 1650s it's still at the heart of a working Plantation today for me as the descendant of slaves this always brings home to me what slavery was like it's my ancestors who built this who constructed this Who provided the labor it's a strange feeling to be here in the fields of Drax Hall the place where for almost two centuries slaves worked and when you hear you get a sense for just how tough this existence must have been it is hot it is oppressively humid when the Su

n hits your skin it just burns and this is where the generation slaves spent much of their lives cutting this cane by hand the wealth generated at Drax Hall hasn't flowed to many who live in its Shadows four generations of Chris Cox's family worked on the plantation as paid laborers after slavery ended [Music] when they went to where our Plantation I was a young boy fresh out of school that was a hard job being cutting that was that was a very very hard job now you could still see things from th

e sleeve there is nothing they had the Highlight shackles there are certain things that the slaves used to operate with that was still present in the plantation yeah and how did that make you feel seeing that stuff mine was kind of tough man Chris grew up here in a village originally created to house drax's slaves and then later the workers the plantation employed this is a cherish free in the 1980s the Barbadian government forced plantation owners across the island to sell land to their tenants

at below market value some say it was a form of reparations when I was younger I would fly up a new tree like no foreign Chris's father bought this plot from the draxxas the family plants at a kitchen Garden to keep food on the table like this breadfruit tree this is gonna make a love in there did you grow up eating this a lot yes this is one of the strong fools and Barbados some people even in chips I am Arts some living on the edge of the plantation still grow food out of necessity Chris's ni

ece rondelle lives next door in a house also on the family plot [Music] Bill's groceries everything is tough everything no you have to create a kitchen Garden or a garden and of course living is flat your food she's looking for work while Raising a Son who's almost three people has never tried to survive I tell you my family and other families are dressed so on we have Mr Drax what he used to do and to the fact that he's so wealthy do you think the Drax family owes people in this community an ap

ology I technically people just came into the morning sorry but there were 11 people in this community yes now that for beginners yes that will help historian Trevor Marshall also believes the Drax family owe the island more than an apology drugs ores not just slaves but Barbados reparations he wants them to pay up while also opening the plantation to the public the average barbarians should be able to come in here and see the famous drop top the average Barbarian cannot come in here it's been d

emands for reparation since slavery ended in 1834 but today it's the official policy of the Barbados government they've combined with 14 other Caribbean Nations to make their case David commission is the Deputy chair of the national reparations task force Mr commercial welcome thank you welcome to Barbados thank you this is a conversation who's Chang has come reparations is about saying look you committed a crime during those centuries or you profited from that crime we were disadvantaged and im

poverished and starved of resources because of that crime now is the time that you have to help repair some of the damage some people when they think about reparations might think it is simply a financial payment reparations is about first of all an acknowledgment an apology a proper apology and then a sitting with the victims or the representatives of the victims and working out a package of compensation the task Falls recently worked up a plan to seek compensation from the Drax family why shou

ld Richard Drex pay for things that his ancestors did centuries ago this was the slavery family in Barbados the role of that family goes right through the history of Barbados there are several British families now that have held up their hands and said yes we concede and we say we must make reparation why doesn't that logic and moral conscience at play so the Drax family [Music] it's not just individuals who are being held to account on barbados's rugged Atlantic Coast a powerful institution is

trying to make amends for its Slave past rington college is one of the Caribbean's most distinguished Anglican seminaries it's finding a new voice we're together again [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] see what that's being brought miles across the Atlantic into something that we did not want for ourselves the college's principal Michael Clark is hosting this Workshop about blending Christianity with African spiritualities it is a small step for us especially here within t

he Caribbean the church is perceived as part of that Colonial machinery but the church doesn't just represent the religion of slave owners it was one of them these grounds were once a sugar Plantation run by an Anglican missionary organization it was bequeathed to the property from the codrington family in 1710. it kept slaves here for over a hundred years this small exhibit at quadranton College brings together some of the old archives and records from this place there are photographs of wooden

houses that slaves would have lived in and it even talks about just how many slaves were here it says Christopher codderington's will provided that 300 slaves be regularly maintained on his Estates foreign our nearest neighbor would be the African continent and from the days of enslavement the codringtons it appeared they had their own slave ships so they would have brought them in at their being here which is concept being the Anglican Church first apologized for its role in Caribbean slavery

in 2006. can you tell me what it felt like when you had to be the one to give an apology here hold you as the descendant of a Slave apologize to other descendants of slaves for him to live in there are you supposed to be doing it on behalf of the institution last year the church apologized again and promised a 190 million dollar fund to invest in communities affected by slavery did you feel like an apology changed anything for the people here it's good to have the apology but it's almost like it

's you know as we say Barbie sometimes too little too late I think we have we have come to a place where we no longer wait for emancipation our folks are seek and emancipate themselves even if it means breaking with tradition breaking with the establishment everybody has to face that moral question the Anglican Church has posed it very clearly it was a sin and we acknowledge it we apologize for it and we we must do something to help repair the damage and that moral question is being posed to the

British government the British government have shown that they're quite unwilling to negotiate on this issue what makes you think that will ever change you have important British companies and institutions like the bank of England saying yes we were involved and we apologize lies of London the pressure is building on the on the British government David says the royal family needs to be held to account too King Charles is supporting research examining the monarchy's links to slavery I think Char

les Australia to send a message to his government that the time has come for you to get on board I expect that the Royal Family will sooner rather than later make apology and and peer reparations [Music] there's one more place I need to visit before leaving the island this was the Newton Plantation a few decades ago a mass slave burial side was discovered in this field I'm thinking about what I'd read in that ledger the babies who died here the 17 year old girl who will work in these fields cutt

ing cane for our whole life you stand here and you think about would a harsh and inhumane existence it must have been and the reason they were here was because they were born black we are remarkable people I mean we are people who placed in one of the most evil and barbaric societies our people held on to their intrinsic Humanity we are going to make a success of the Republic of Barbados reparations are no reparations but we know what is due to us we know what was taken from us [Music] foreign