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Apologies for injustice matter

by
25 October 2024

Britain should pay reparations for slavery — and show contrition, argues Michael Banner

Alamy

A poster in Trafalgar Square during an event to mark the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, in August last year

A poster in Trafalgar Square during an event to mark the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, in August last ye...

AS I can readily testify, the subject of reparations arouses strong feelings (News, 17 September 2021). What strikes me, however, amid all the heat, is that I have never yet encountered an objection to the very idea of reparations.

I am very familiar with certain regular cavils to the case for Britain’s paying reparations to the Caribbean for the 200-year history of enslavement: “Slavery was legal back then”; “Britain was in the lead in abolishing slavery”; “Everyone kept slaves”; and so on. But no one seems to object to reparations as such. The idea that we need to make recompense for past wrongs is — at least in principle — generally accepted.

Those seeking reparations for enslavement and colonialism, however (such as CARICOM, the association of Caribbean nations), typically seek an apology as part of the process of repairing relationships. And this seems to create, for some, an “in principle” difficulty. Even those who are sympathetic to a general claim for reparations for transatlantic slavery can baulk here, finding something inherently difficult in the notion of our making an apology for something that they did 200 years ago.

In certain cases of simple restitution, there is no question of any need for an expression of remorse or regret. Imagine that it turns out that the Picasso that hangs in my study was, unbeknown to me, “acquired” from Jewish refugees back in the 1930s, on plainly fraudulent terms. Suppose I bought the picture in a perfectly regular way only last year — still, once the true provenance has come to light, I may be required to return the picture to the descendants of those unjustly deprived of their property. No one, however, would expect me to make an apology at the same time.

So, it might seem tempting to some of those pressing the case for reparations to let the matter of apology go. “Look at the bigger picture,” someone might say. “Be pragmatic!” One of the goals of reparations is to ensure that some of the wealth that flowed to Britain from the Caribbean should return to its source. For the sake of trying to lift the present generation out of poverty, perhaps one should press the case for reparations alone, and drop the demand for an apology, since it can cause trouble.

In my view, this would be wrong. Those who seek an apology are not making a mistake about the nature of apologising; and the case in question is, in fact, quite unlike the imagined case of the Picasso. The apology is not a “nice-to-have extra”, but part of the very substance of the moral repair at which reparations should aim.

 

WE FIND apologies for historic wrongs tricky for a very obvious reason. The practice of making an apology has, as its paradigm case, instances where I have perpetrated a wrong: the first apologies that we learn to make are usually for hitting, biting, or pulling the hair of, a sibling. And that is very simple.

But to imagine that the simple case determines the very limits of apologies would be about as crass as thinking, childishly, that saying “Please” and “Thank you” determines the limits of politeness. The boundaries of these practices are not quite so tight.

We can see this very clearly if we tweak the Picasso story just a little. Imagine that the claim for restitution comes from those who have suffered and are still suffering because of the loss; imagine, that is, that the picture in question was the refugees’ only asset, and that its forced sale at a false price caused them and their children great hardship.

And imagine, further, that the person responsible for that original “purchase” was my grandfather. Yes, I should return the picture — but I would certainly need to return it with an accompanying expression of apology and regret: “I am sorry that my family has been the cause of distress to yours.”

It would be morally tone-deaf, so to speak, to ignore the links between past and present in this case by packing the picture up and sending it home without a word — and it would be literal-minded, to a fault, to insist that an apology did not make sense. The fact is that we apologise for the deeds of others all the time when certain sorts of links exist: parents apologise for children, and children apologise for parents (especially teenage children) regularly.

In fact, even that tweak to our imagined scenario does not express the nature of the relationship of contemporary Britain to the Caribbean. We cannot be likened to someone who, out of the blue, discovers some dark and deeply hidden secret from the misty past. We modern-day British people might more accurately be compared to people with a spectacularly fine picture collection, who have shown not the slightest curiosity about how they came to have it.

Britain is, and has been for more than 300 years, an extraordinarily wealthy nation. About this fact, Britain has tacked between self-congratulation (weren’t we clever) and incuriosity (as if our wealth were a mere matter of extraordinary good fortune, like winning the lottery).

But the story of Europe’s wealth and the Caribbean’s deprivation is not a story of application and ingenuity and good luck (although all those played a part), but also one of gross exploitation and injustice; and, along with apologising for the wrongs of our nation’s past, we need to apologise for a later and consistent failure to interrogate the world’s persistent inequities.

 

REPARATIONS are due from Britain (and other enslaving nations) to the people of the Caribbean — and, along with that, an apology. No supposed punctiliousness about the nature of apologies stands in the way.

The Church of England, with its own burdens of guilt in this matter, has, I believe, an opportunity to show moral leadership in relation to the matter of reparations in general, and in relation to apologising in particular. Simple wrongs in simple cases can be dealt with by a simple sorry; gently bumping into someone as you pass through a doorway needs little more than a mumbled expression of regret.

But the crime of transatlantic slavery, like the Churches’ complicity with it, was of centuries-long duration, and no one-off word of apology could ever suffice. The extent and depths of these connections must be reflected in a form of apology which takes seriously the nature of the wrong as a stain on the very life and history of the Church — and that might take the form of an annual day of prayer and contrition marked by a remorseful commemoration of the sins of the past.

The Book of Common Prayer has us say of our misdoings: “The remembrance of them is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable.” A Church that could find a way of expressing that in relation the horrors of enslavement would make an important contribution to national and international life.

 

The Revd Dr Michael Banner is Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge. His book Britain’s Slavery Debt: Reparations now! is published by OUP at £14.99 (Church Times Bookshop £13.49); (Books, 23 August).

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