Britain’s King Charles this week begins a controversial autumn tour of three key Caribbean Community states with simmering differences about slavery, growing demands for reparation payments and an intense debate about how Britain enriched itself for free, off the backs of enslaved Africans and its reluctance to face up to modern-day demands to make up for the colonial-era genocide.
The monarch will visit The Bahamas and Antigua, where he is still head of state – Though both are independent nations, neither is a republic like Guyana, Trinidad, Barbados or Dominica, so the King is still the highest-ranking constitutional office holder.
The three-day Bahamian visit begins on Oct. 27. Thereafter, Charles and his delegation will fly far south to Guyana for two days beginning Oct. 29 and then to Antigua for the biennial Commonwealth Leaders Summit from Nov. 1-4. The King was last in the region earlier this year for a visit to Bermuda.
But as he prepares for the first visit to the three Caricom states as a monarch, reparation movements and rights activists across the region are not only demanding that the King be prepared to own up to Britain’s role in the brutal slave trade, but argue that he must be prepared to issue a formal apology and set the stage for the kingdom to deal with growing demands for financial and other forms of reparations to today’s descendants.
For example, the Bahamas National Reparations Committee has made it clear that he would be highly unwelcomed if he comes “here empty-handed” without plans to apologize and to outline future steps on reparations.
“The time is now for reparations. The time is now for the republic. And the time is long past for our governments to stop preparing this country for guests and then hand us the bill. Don’t come here with your hands swinging; don’t come here empty-handed,” the commission said in a statement, according to Nassau-based newspaper, The Tribune.
It further railed against the fact that The Bahamas is still not a republic like other regional member nations.
“He is a holdover from an arrangement this country accepted at Independence. That was more than 50 years ago, and yet 53 years later, Bahamian boys and girls grow up learning that they can never be the head of state in their own country. That position is the reward of our former colonizers,” the BNRC statement continued. “Consequences of chattel slavery. Consequences of colonization. Consequences of a system that broke up families, worked bodies to death, packed human beings into the holds of ships like cargo for weeks on open water, and sold them on arrival.”
On his itinerary is a scheduled visit to a local park in the capital, but the committee noted that that event will allow him to “feel the spaces in which our ancestors toiled, and touch the narrow crevices that lead from the ocean to the island that our ancestors had to swim to after being shackled in the belly of a ship for months.”
For the visit to Guyana’s booming oil- and gas-rich economy, King Charles will head there as local President Irfaan Ali argues that the demand for reparations is a real issue in a recent interview with ITV News.
“This is beyond personal. It’s the collective pain of the country,” he said. “You who benefited tremendously from the darkest days of human history, benefited materially and financially, are now telling me that you don’t have enough financing to match your needs. As a country, we will continue to champion the issue of reparation because slavery was the worst indignity to humankind.”
On how to actually deal with reparations in payment and other forms, the Guyanese head of state noted that it is “not only about an apology, but how do we define reparation? Some would say it is through a valuation system, but in my humble opinion, you cannot ever value the type of injustice that took place, and you can never, you know, create a monetary mechanism to address that.”
And like the last Commonwealth summit in Samoa, in the Pacific two years ago, participating nations say they will also press the King to deal with the issue even though Buckingham Palace has already stated that he will not apologize, largely because such is not needed for acts that were not deemed illegal 400 years ago.
“The visit program will therefore not shy away from ‘the darkest days of our past’, as his majesty has described them, but – in keeping with the wishes of our host nations – it will principally be oriented to the vibrant present and promising future of each country,” a Buckingham Palace spokesperson stated as quoted by Reuters earlier this month.
