Reparations commission says Jamaica would be due £2.3 trillion

(Jamaica Observer) – The National Commission on Reparations (NCR) says Jamaica would be due at least £2.3 trillion (approximately J$416.3 trillion) from any slavery reparations paid by Britain to the region.

This money would be able to pay off Jamaica’s national debt of $2 trillion and set the nation on a new economic path.

The figure was based on the NCR’s calculation of Jamaica’s 30.64 per cent of the £7.5 trillion calculated by British academic theologian, Dr Robert Beckford, as being owed by Britain to its former colonies.

The information was included in the NCR’s report which was finally completed and tabled in the House of Representatives last Tuesday.

Beckford, who was born to Jamaican parents in Northampton, England, and was raised in the Pentecostal Church, has focused on the role Britain played in the slave trade in his latest documentary — The Empire Pays Back — on Channel Four Television, which calculates how much money African- Caribbean nations would be owed if they were compensated for slavery, which he described as “one of the major scars on British history”.

But, according to the Professor Verene Shepherd who chaired Jamaican commission, even Professor Beckford’s figure is incomplete, as it does not include provisions for the differentiated labour classifications under slavery — field, artisan, domestic, and supervisory.

The NCR report also claimed that Beckford failed to take into account the pre-arrival suffering and trauma of capture in Africa, the march to the coast, and storage in dungeons.

“It also does not include the trauma and pain of the ‘Middle Passage’ journey, punishment, death through execution and the sexploitation which were daily features of the plantation society, both during and after slavery. And it excludes the cost of repatriation,” Shepherd’s team reported.

“There is no doubt that the enslaved suffered… the punishment meted out to the enslaved people was severe, and this level of suffering must be accounted for in any demand for repair and restorative justice,” the report added.