To make amends for the horrors of transatlantic slavery and provide compensation to the descendants of enslaved individuals, an Anglican church organization is set to begin a £7 million reconciliation project in Barbados.
The United Society Partners in the Gospel (USPG), a missionary organization located in the United Kingdom that was founded in 1701 to convert the colonists to Christianity, will collaborate with regional and local partners in the Caribbean to provide funding for historical studies, entrepreneurial grants, and education. It will also encourage descendants of slaves to acquire land.
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The communities residing on the Codrington estate in eastern Barbados will be the focus of the project, which gets underway on Saturday. The land belonged to planter Christopher Codrington, who formerly had two prosperous sugar plantations there that brought in an estimated £5 million annually in today’s currency. It was left to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), which became USPG in the future.
According to Codrington’s will, he intended to build a theological college and employ 300 slaves to labor on the estate. Currently, a government-established trust that is collaborating with USPG on the project oversees managing the institution and the estate.
The USPG’s general secretary, Dr. Duncan Dormor, an Anglican clergyman, called the endeavor a crucial first step in redressing the wrongdoings and crimes committed by the church during the transatlantic slave trade. Further apologies from Anglican institutions were required, he continued.
“Back in 2006, then archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, made a very public statement apologizing on behalf of the Church of England for what went on at Codrington,” he noted. “That apology included and covered USPG. However, I felt that we had not expressed our regret and remorse with enough seriousness and detail. Just to say, ‘we’re sorry’ – sorry for what, and what are we going to do about it?”
Dormor stated that the experiences of those descended from slaves should direct the endeavor. A steering group including 11 members, including locals and regional figures like Caribbean historian Sir Hilary Beckles, has been established by USPG and the Codrington Trust. Beckles serves as the chair of a commission within the Caribbean Community (Caricom) that aims to get compensation from nations that enabled and profited from decades of forced labor.
Dormor said, expressing optimism that the USPG initiative will contribute to a greater understanding in the UK of the significance of assisting in the 200-year-overdue justice and reparations for those who were slaves and their offspring.
The USPG initiative was hailed by David Comissiong, the deputy head of the Barbados National Task Force on Reparations and the representative of Barbados to Caricom.
He declared: “While the task force considers the Codrington project to be a social justice project grounded in the principles of ecumenism rather than a ‘reparations’ or ‘reparatory justice’ project, we still feel obliged to put on record our admiration of the Christian spirit of justice that has been evinced by both the USPG and the Church Commissioners – the two entities of the Church of England that have thus far publicly acknowledged their implication in the crime of African enslavement and their determination to make some form of recompense.”
“We believe that the words and actions of these two Anglican religious bodies have the potential to help generate significant breakthroughs in Caricom’s reparations claims against both the Church of England and the national government of the UK and to help usher in a new era of reparatory justice, reconciliation and brotherhood, and we invite the USPG to augment the power of the initiative they have undertaken by committing to a ‘reparations conversation’ with our task force.”
Launched in 2021 at the first joint conference, the annual Africa Union-Caricom Day falls on September 7th, coinciding with the USPG project.
The project’s introduction on Africa Union-Caricom Day was significant, as noted by Kevin Farmer, executive secretary of Codrington Trust: “The majority of the people in the Caribbean were trafficked from the [African] continent. Joining forces on this day is a signal that this is an attempt to repair a very traumatic past.”
Farmer went on to say that the USPG initiative may serve as a template for the restitution and revitalization of slavery.
“This hasn’t been done in the region as yet,” he noted. “Here is a church that provided moral sanction to racialized slavery and enslavement and a church agent, USPG, coming 200 years later, recognizing the wrong and their complicity and part in it and speaking with descendants of the enslaved about how to seek repair and reconciliation.”
