[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Paul Lashmar and Jonathan Smith (The Guardian) on Richard Drax and the reparations course of in Barbados.
The federal government of Barbados is contemplating plans to make a rich Conservative MP the primary particular person to pay reparations for his ancestor’s pivotal position in slavery.
The Observer understands that Richard Drax, MP for South Dorset, just lately travelled to the Caribbean island for a non-public assembly with the nation’s prime minister, Mia Mottley. A report is now earlier than Mottley’s cupboard laying out the subsequent steps, which embody authorized motion within the occasion that no settlement is reached with Drax.
Barbados grew to become a republic a yr in the past after it eliminated Queen Elizabeth II as head of state.
The Drax household pioneered the plantation system within the Seventeenth century and performed a serious position within the growth of sugar and slavery throughout the Caribbean and the US.
Barbados MP Trevor Prescod, chairman of Barbados Nationwide Activity Drive on Reparations, a part of the Caricom Reparations Fee, stated the UN had declared slavery to be a criminal offense towards humanity: “If the difficulty can’t be resolved we might take authorized motion within the worldwide courts. The case towards the Drax household can be for lots of of years of slavery, so it’s probably any damages would go properly past the worth of the land.”
International locations within the Caribbean neighborhood (Caricom) have been campaigning for the cost of reparations by former colonial powers and establishments which profited from slavery. That is the primary time a household has been singled out.
Among the many plans being thought of are that Seventeenth-century Drax Corridor is was an Afro-centric museum and that a big portion of the plantation is used for social housing for low-income Bajan households. There’s additionally a advice that Richard Drax pays for a number of the work.
David Comissiong, the Barbados ambassador to Caricom and deputy chairman of the duty pressure, stated that moreover Drax, different households whose ancestors benefited from slavery are being thought of together with the British royal household: “It’s now a matter that’s earlier than the federal government of Barbados. It’s being handled on the highest stage.
“Drax is fabulously rich immediately. The Drax household is the central household in the entire story of enslavement in Barbados. They’re the architects of slavery-based sugar manufacturing. They’ve a deep historic accountability. The method has solely simply begun and we belief that we can negotiate. If that doesn’t work, there are different strategies, together with litigation.
“Different households are concerned, although not as prominently because the Draxes. This reparations journey has begun. The matter is now for the cupboard of Barbados. It’s in movement. It’s being handled.”
Drax got here below the highlight in December 2020, after the Observer revealed he had not declared his inheritance of the 250-hectare (617 acres) Drax Corridor plantation. He did so solely after official paperwork surfaced which named him because the proprietor. He had inherited the plantation, valued at Bds$12.5m (£5.25m), from his father, Walter, in 2017.
Drax, 64, lives on the household’s mansion in Charborough Park, Dorset. He and his household are price at the least £150m and personal 23.5 sq. miles in Dorset, and an property and grouse moor in Yorkshire. The household additionally personal 125 Dorset properties personally or by way of household trusts and a £4.5m vacation villa on close by Sandbanks.
Drax’s ancestor, Sir James Drax, was one of many first Englishmen to colonise Barbados within the early Seventeenth century. He part-owned at the least two slave ships, the Samuel and the Hope.
The Drax household additionally owned a plantation in Jamaica, which they offered within the nineteenth century. When slavery was abolished throughout the British empire in 1833, the household acquired £4,293 12s 6d, a really giant sum in 1836, in compensation for liberating 189 enslaved folks.
Prescod added: “The Drax household had slave ships. They’d brokers within the African continent and kidnapped black African folks to work on their plantations right here in Barbados. I’ve little question that what would have motivated them was that they by no means perceived us to be equal to them, that we had been human beings. They thought of us as chattels.”
[Photograph above by Jonathan Smith: Richard Drax, MP for South Dorset, inherited 17th century Drax Hall in 2017. Plans being considered include turning the former plantation into an Afro-centric museum.]
For authentic article, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/26/barbados-tory-mp-pay-reparations-family-slave-richard-drax-caribbean-sugar-plantation
Additionally see our earlier put up https://repeatingislands.com/2020/12/15/the-shadow-of-slavery-hangs-over-the-gilded-life-of-richard-drax