Former slave-trading colonial powers should pay Barbados $4.9 trillion (£3.9 trillion) in reparations, the Caribbean country’s leftist prime minister demanded.
Speaking at the London School of Economics this week, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley redoubled her push for slavery reparations, saying that the movement demanding payment for historical wrongs had become a more pressing issue following the resurgence of Black Lives Matter and the killing of George Floyd in the United States in 2020.
The leftist Bajan leader, of the Barbados Labour Party, claimed that her country was owed a staggering $4.9 trillion in reparations for slavery from former colonial powers, but acknowledged that repayment of the supposed debt would “take time”.
“We’re not expecting that the reparatory damages will be paid in a year, or two, or five because the extraction of wealth and the damages took place over centuries. But we are demanding that we be seen and that we are heard,” Mottley said according to the left-wing Guardian newspaper.
The Barbadian prime minister cited figures compiled by the Boston-based Brattle Group, which has claimed that Britain owes $24 trillion to 14 different countries over the transatlantic slave trade. The group has also asserted that France owes $9.2 trillion, the Netherlands owes $4.86 trillion, and Spain owes $17.1 trillion for their roles in slavery.
For comparison, the annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Barbados is estimated by the International Monetary Fund to be around $6.2 billion this year, meaning that the demanded reparations would amount to 790 times the yearly economic output of the entire country.
“These numbers, if taken out of context, can appear to be staggering. But in relation to the total wealth accumulated over a period of time, the numbers are actually minuscule,” Mottley said.
The leftist leader said that Western nations paying reparations would allow the world to “move on in strength rather than languishing in the shadows of a disgraceful history,” adding that the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement allowed “the world recognised that we could no longer ignore the trauma of four centuries of enslavement and barbarism and of denying people their humanity.”
Mottley, who oversaw the removal of Queen Elizabeth II as the official head of state of Barbados in 2021, has sought to replace British influence over its former colony by forging closer ties with Communist China.
Barbados has joined Beijing’s controversial Belt and Road global influence scheme and Mottley has praised Chinese dictator Xi Jinping for supposedly eliminating poverty in China, a feat the CCP accomplished through artificially lowering the standard of poverty.
The calls for reparations from Mottley came days after the granddaughter of former South African President Nelson Mandela demanded that the British Royal Family personally pay for its role in colonialism in Africa. Ndileka Mandela told the BBC last week that payoffs to Africa would be necessary for the “healing” to begin.
Despite the Royal Family’s commitment to remaining politically neutral, King Charles III recently declared that the “time has come” to acknowledge the lasting effects of slavery and has also expressed support for research into the Royal Family’s historical role in the slave trade.
For his part, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak rejected the idea of the UK paying trillions in reparations for slavery, saying that “trying to unpick our history is not the right way forward and is not something we will focus our energies on.”