According to a top government official, Jamaica intends to seek restitution from the United Kingdom for the Atlantic slave trade in the former British territory.
According to Olivia Grange, Jamaica’s minister of sports, youth, and culture, the Caribbean island nation will submit a petition seeking billions of pounds in compensation, pending legal advice.
She expressed the hope that the country will receive “reparatory justice in all forms” to “correct the damages that our forefathers suffered.”
Although all of the former British colonies in the Caribbean were part in the slave trade, Jamaica will be the only one to seek restitution.
It comes a decade after The Caribbean Community, a regional organisation, set out to ask for reparations from Britain, France and the Netherlands in 2013.
Ms Grange added: ‘Our African ancestors were forcibly removed from their home and suffered unparalleled atrocities in Africa to carry out forced labour to the benefit of the British Empire,’ she said, adding: ‘Redress is well overdue.’
During emancipation in 1834, Britain paid £20 million in reparations to British planters in the Caribbean, the equivalent of £200 billion today.
Slavery was common in Jamaica, with the Spanish, then the British, forcefully transferring Africans to work on sugar cane, banana, and other plantations that made riches for their owners.
The British seized Jamaica from Spain in 1655, and it remained a British territory until 1962, when it gained independence.
Jamaica was taken by the British 200 years later, in 1655, and would go on to become a vital part of Britain’s sugar supply – a highly sought after commodity in the eighteenth century.
