The great-great-grandson of 19th-century British Prime Minister William Gladstone said he was horrified to learn seven years ago that his ancestors were slave owners in Jamaica and Guyana.
And former BBC journalist Laura Trevelyan said she learned after records of Britain’s Slave Compensation Commission were put online in 2013 that one of her ancestors, Sir John Trevelyan, owned sugar cane plantations in Grenada and about 1,000 enslaved people.
They spoke at a meeting at UN headquarters in New York this past week where, for the first time, descendants of slave owners and enslaved people in former British colonies in the Caribbean sat at the same table with diplomats and experts from those nations discussing the contentious issue of reparations.
“This was a historic event,” said Trevelyan, who moderated the meeting on the sidelines of the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent’s week-long session. From about the year 1500, millions of West Africans were sent to work mainly on plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas, including the southern United States. UN human rights chief Volker Turk told the forum that an estimated 25 million to 30 million Africans were uprooted for the purpose of slavery.
Few nations have apologised for their role in slavery, and reparations have been the subject of much debate.
The Geneva-based Human Rights Council has called for global action for years, including reparations, apologies and educational reforms to make amends for racism against people of African descent. The 15-nation Caribbean Community, known as CARICOM, has a 10-point plan for reparatory justice, starting with demands for European countries where enslaved people were kept and traded to issue formal apologies.
Türk noted a European Union statement in 2023 profoundly regretting the “untold suffering” caused by the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the African Union’s designation of 2025 as the “Year of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations”.
At the meeting of descendants of enslaved people and slave owners on Tuesday, Trevelyan spoke of her family’s decision to apologise to Grenada and to make a contribution of 100,000 British pounds toward education in the Caribbean island nation.
Going to Grenada with family and apologising “wasn’t exactly smooth sailing”, said Trevelyan, who left the BBC and has become a campaigner for reparations. There were protests by one group that thought the apology was inadequate and the money not enough.
Also at the meeting was Aidee Walker, who said she was shocked when a DNA test revealed she was not only predominantly Scots-Irish but also part Nigerian, then discovered that her great-great-great-grandfather, who moved to New Zealand, was the son of a slave owner in Jamaica named John Malcolm and an African housekeeper.