Paying for compensation to slave-owners-right up until 2015

A friend, Erica Flegg, pointed out “What feels so weird about this is that it all passed off without comment until now.” ‘Now’ being a huge upsurge in the fight against racism led by #blacklivesmatter.

I remember first learning about this list something like five years ago. Like everybody my first impression hearing about a compensation list was to assume it was given to freed slaves in part apology for removing their lives, freedom, dignity and health — maybe even to help in their first faltering steps to freedom. Then being shocked, astounded and, well, sickened to learn it was paid to former slave owners in compensation for losing their ‘property’. And to think that appropriate, presumably, the enlightened anti-slaver whigs had to still consider Afrikans property in some sense.

The list gives no clue as to what happened to slaves immediately afterward.

There was something else I learned for the first time. I thought of slavery as out there. I think we all did as kids. London, Bristol and Liverpool might have the ships, the goods and receive the raw sugarcane and cotton, but the slavery was out there: men, women and children taken at gunpoint from Africa, shipped in terrible numbers, 1000s thrown overboard, such that sharks changed migratory patterns forever to gorge on the bodies; then the…