GROS ISLET, Saint Lucia — Throughout the English-speaking Caribbean — and in Canada — Aug. 1 is observed as the day the British Empire’s official abolition of slavery took effect in 1834.

But as former British colonies mark Emancipation Day on Saturday, Caribbean leaders and activists pushing for reparatory justice say it’s also time to confront an overlooked truth about the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833: Emancipation compensated wealthy English slave owners for the loss of their human property, but not the formerly enslaved.

The British government borrowed 20 million pounds — equal to about 40% of its national budget — to reimburse planters for the loss of their slaves, considered by the law of the day to be property. The debt wasn’t fully paid off by British taxpayers until 2015.

“We have been brainwashed into mental slavery, and we have to start to rewrite our history from the standpoint of the hunted, and not from the standpoint of the hunter,” said Earl Bousquet, who serves as Saint Lucia’s envoy for reparations.

“We will be in a better position when that is done,” he added, “to get our people to better understand there was an Africa before slavery, and the Caribbean has been struggling for reparations from the very first day that the first enslaved African was kidnapped, shipped, insured, and landed in the Caribbean and the Americas.”

UN resolution, Ghana conference

That effort, launched in 2013 by then-Saint Vincent and Grenadines Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves with the backing of the Caribbean Community, or CARICOM, has gained fresh momentum this year after two significant developments.

In March, the United Nations adopted a resolution recognizing the transatlantic slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs.“

Three months later, Ghana hosted a high-level conference that brought together African and Caribbean leaders, policymakers, legal scholars and civil society groups to chart what organizers called the “Next Steps” of the global movement on slavery and reparatory justice.

For the Caribbean Community Reparations Commission, the U.N. resolution represents the strongest international recognition yet of their more than decade-long struggle to get their former colonial masters to address slavery and native genocide, and the enduring consequences.

“This historic recognition affirms what descendants of the victims of enslavement, scholars and advocates have long asserted: that the transatlantic trafficking of Africans and the system of racialized chattel enslavement was a brutal, dehumanizing crime whose devastating consequences continue to shape the social, economic, political, and developmental realities of nations and peoples across the Caribbean and the African diaspora,” the commission said in a statement on Friday, acknowledging Emancipation Day. “The resolution strengthens the moral and political foundation for reparatory justice.”

The U.N. resolution, spearheaded by Ghana, had the support of 123 countries. The United States, Israel and Argentina voted against it, while Canada, the United Kingdom and all 23 members of the European Union, including France and Denmark, were among the 52 countries that abstained.

The European countries all once colonized the nations that are now members of the political bloc of 14 independent nations. In the case of France, it ruled Saint-Domingue — present-day Haiti — widely regarded by historians as perhaps the most brutal and profitable slave colony in the Americas.

Home to the Caribbean’s largest enslaved population at one point, Saint-Domingue became the site of the only successful slave revolt leading to the founding of a Black nation in 1804 and the abolition of slavery.

After breaking the shackles of slavery, Haiti was forced to pay France an indemnity of 150 million francs in exchange for its recognition as a new nation. The amount, reduced to 90 million francs and the equivalent of more than $20 billion today, went to compensate French plantation owners for the loss of property. Haiti financed the payments from French banks, and did not finish paying the associated interest on the debt until 1947.

A new phase

“In the case of the Caribbean, the quest for reparatory justice is to repair the legacies of underdevelopment, which can be sourced ... to native genocide and the enslavement of African bodies,” Gonsalves, who described reparations as “an international human rights and justice matter,” said during a recent CARICOM Reparations Forum in St. Lucia.

“Immediately, that framing takes care of the objection by the Conservative and Labor parties in the United Kingdom and elsewhere,” said the former leader and now-senior adviser on the Jamaica-based Repair Campaign, which has drafted socioeconomic plans for CARICOM governments to take the movement to the next level.

The U.N. vote, said Gonsalves, had catapulted the Caribbean’s fight into a new phase. That vote took place on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which honors the memory of Africans who were enslaved over centuries. Ahead of the vote, Ghana President John Dramani Mahama delivered a powerful speech telling the room that the resolution was to safeguard against forgetting.

“The atrocities that were committed against enslaved Africans, the myriads of injustices that were borne of slavery and carried forward into successive social frameworks, took place specifically because they were considered objects,” he said. “They were forced, with their limbs chained and shackled, onto the cargo hold of a ship. They remained naked, packed like sardines, during the months-long journey through the Middle Passage. Not all those who were loaded onto the ships survived the voyage. A number of the ships sank, and many of the enslaved jumped overboard, choosing certain death to captivity.”

In June, African and Caribbean leaders meeting in Accra, the Ghanaian capital, adopted a 19-point framework calling for formal apologies of slavery from countries and institutions that profited from the institution, the creation of reparations mechanisms, the return of cultural artifacts and human remains, debt relief, educational initiatives and stronger international cooperation.

Reparatory justice

In its statement marking Emancipation Day, the CARICOM Reparations Commission said the commemoration “is inextricably linked with the movement for reparatory justice.”

“Political freedom, though hard won, did not erase the profound structural inequalities created by centuries of exploitation,” the commission said. “The wealth extracted from enslaved African labor financed the development of European empires while leaving Caribbean societies to contend with underdevelopment, economic dependency, and persistent racial disparities. These historical injustices continue to impede sustainable development and demand meaningful redress.”

Europe has yet to formally engage with the region over its reparations demands, outlined in a recently revised 10-point plan that covers issues from psychological trauma to health and education to compensation to repair the debt. At the same time, advocates acknowledge that getting public engagement in the Caribbean remains a huge challenge.

Outside the region, the movement is facing political pushback, particularly in Britain, whose empire spanned across the Caribbean. The right-wing Reform Party has said it would bar individuals from countries seeking reparations from obtaining a U.K. visa. Former home secretary and party member Suella Braverman has argued that the former colonies should repay the U.K. for what she described as Britain’s “investment, effort and contribution” that allowed Caribbean nations to become “flourishing democracies.”

The remarks drew a sharp rebuke last month from Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley. At the close of CARICOM’s summit in Saint Lucia, in which a session was devoted to reparatory justice, Mottley dismissed the suggestion that Caribbean nations should compensate the U.K. “for oppressing us, for enslaving us, and for treating us as chattel” as “asinine.”

To underscore the cruelty that existed, Mottley pointed to Barbados’ 1661 slave code and similar colonial-era slave laws, including France’s Code Noir, that came after. Blacks were described as “brutish” and “dangerous” in the Barbados law, which empowered owners and plantation overseers to torture, maim and even kill enslaved Africans. “All distinguished themselves by the treatment of human beings as chattel,” Mottley said.

“We’re not asking for charity,” she added. “We are asking to be able to ensure that justice can be done.”

A global movement

Caribbean leaders say the push for reparatory justice is now a global movement.

Alongside the U.N. resolution and Accra conference, there have been several notable figures who have addressed the matter. They include Pope Leo XIV, who has spoken about his family’s historical links to slavery, telling NBC news in the Vatican Gardens of Castel Gandolfo on Wednesday, “We have people who were both slaves and slave owners” on his mother’s side. Researchers have traced the Chicago-born pontiff’s genealogical ties to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and New Orleans.

French President Emmanuel Macron has also recognized the debate over France’s treatment of Haiti, a member of CARICOM, after independence. While he has not committed France to paying reparations or offered an apology, Macron has described King Charles X’s demand on Haiti as “unjust.” His comments and the establishment of a French-Haitian commission of historians to study the “impact” on Haiti came during the 200th anniversary of the 1825 agreement known as Haiti’s “independence debt.”

The French parliament has also taken steps. Three days after the U.N. vote, the National Assembly unanimously agreed to repeal the 1685 decree issued by King Louis XIV that established the Code Noir, or Black Code, which regulated slavery in Fance’s colonies. The decree had remained part of French law for nearly two centuries,. It classified humans as property and, like Barbados’ law, allowed slaves to be sold and murdered with impunity.

Pressure on King Charles

Mottley noted that King Charles III, before assuming the British throne, stated during a Commonwealth of Nations meeting in Rwanda “that reparations was a conversation whose time had come.”

The monarch is expected to be confronted with the issue, including calls for an apology, again in November when he attends the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Antigua and Barbuda.

Before then, Jamaica plans to ask the British monarch to formally seek the legal guidance of the London-based Privy Council on its reparations claims against Britain. Jamaica Culture Minister Olivia Grange recently announced in Parliament that officials will travel to Britain in September to submit a formal petition to the king.

The petition asks the king to seek advice on three legal questions from the court of last resort for Jamaica and other Caribbean countries: Was the forced transportation and enslavement of Africans lawful? Did it constitute “crimes against humanity?” And is the UK under any obligation to provide restoration to the Jamaican people for slavery and its enduring consequences?

The delegation, Grange said, chose Sept. 6 to make its presentation because it marks the anniversary of the 1781 departure of the Zong slave ship from West Africa to Jamaica with 442 enslaved Africans aboard.

“Throughout the journey the ship ran into trouble, and the captain kept throwing enslaved Africans overboard in order to claim insurance for loss of cargo,” she said in Parliament. “One hundred and forty enslaved Africans were killed. The ship finally arrived in Black River on 21 December 1781.”

Understanding Caribbean history

For Bousquet, the debate over reparations remains tied to how the Caribbean understands its own history, including slavery’s abolition and emancipation.

“It is up to national reparations committees, like in Saint Lucia and the other 11 CARICOM member states where they exist, to do more, much more, to continue to get people to understand that emancipation and abolition were never what we were told they were,” he said.

After the enslaved Africans were supposedly freed, they continued to be exploited, he stressed, remaining “slaves without chains” as they were forced into apprenticeship and indentured servitude to provide labor for plantation owners.

“One hundred and ninety-three years later, we now know, thanks to time and history,” Bousquet said, that emancipation and abolition created a “pause to allow the enslavers to find new ways to keep their wheels of fortune turning in the Caribbean.”

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