The Jamaican government has revealed they want £7 Billion as reparations from the United Kingdom for the Atlantic slave trade in the former British colony.

This is coming after the country country announced last week it is holding the British queen personally responsible for the atrocities her kingdom committed during centuries of slave trade.

The Caribbean island nation will file a petition that could seek billions of pounds in reparations, pending legal advice, Olivia Grange, Jamaica’s minister of sports, youth and culture, said according to a report on the British Mirror.

‘We are hoping for reparatory justice in all forms that one would expect if they are to really ensure that we get justice from injustices to repair the damages that our ancestors experienced,’ Grange told Reuters news agency in an interview at the weekend.

‘Our African ancestors were forcibly removed from their home and suffered unparalleled atrocities in Africa to carry out forced labour to the benefit of the British Empire,’ she said, adding: ‘Redress is well overdue.’

Jamaica was a centre of the slave trade, with the Spanish, then the British, forcibly transporting Africans to work on plantations of sugar cane, bananas and other crops that created fortunes for many of their owners.

An estimated 600,000 Africans were shipped to toil in Jamaica, according to the National Library of Jamaica.

Seized from Spain by the British in 1655, Jamaica was a British colony until it became independent in 1962. It is not clear whether Jamaica also intends to seek reparations from Spain.

According to Mail Online, the reparations petition is based on a private motion by Jamaican lawmaker Mike Henry, who said it was worth some £7.6 billion, a sum he estimated is roughly equivalent in today’s terms to what Britain paid to the slaveholders.

‘I am asking for the same amount of money to be paid to the slaves that was paid to the slave owners,’ said Henry, a member of the ruling Jamaica Labour Party.

In 2015, then British prime minister, James Cameron facilitated the payment of compensation to the descendants of former slaveowners who had to give up their slaves when the British abolished slavery.

Since then several British experts have argued that the country does not have to pay descendants of slaves as their forebarers already got their freedoms after Britain paid off their masters.

Meanwhile, the petition, with approval from Jamaica’s National Council on Reparations, will be filed pending advice from the attorney general and three legal teams, Grange said.

The attorney general will then send it to Queen Elizabeth, she added.

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Jamaica is set to petition Queen Elizabeth for compensation to all its citizens as slavery reparations.

The Caribbean country’s government is to petition the British monarchy for billions of pounds of compensation but critics say British taxpayers have already paid to free slaves.

Merchants made a fortune as slave traders in Jamaica after it became a British Colony in 1707.

Many Jamaicans are descendants of slaves who suffered under the oppressive regime.

The country gained independence from the UK in 1962 but has kept the Queen as head of state.

And now Jamaica wants compensation as the country’s Culture Minister announced the move to its House of Representatives.

Olivia ‘Babsy’ Grange said: “We are especially pleased to announce that we have made further steps in our strides towards seeking reparatory justice for the victims and descendants of the transatlantic slave trade.

“The petition is to be presented to the Queen of the UK and or the government of the UK.”

She said Jamaica’s National Council of Reparation had fully backed the petition and ministers had agreed that: “The Attorney General’s chambers would need to weigh up the merits of the petition in the eventuality of the government of Jamaica’s involvement in the petition and that it would be the responsibility of the Attorney General’s chambers to file the petition on behalf of the people of Jamaica.”

David Cameron faced calls to pay billions of pounds in slavery reparations when he visited the former colony in 2015. That year, taxpayers finally paid off debt from compensating slave owners when the practice was abolished in 1833.

Thomas Mace-Archer-Mills, historian and founder of the British Monarchists Society, said: “Britain has already paid its share and then some – the price of freedom for Jamaica’s slaves.

“There needs to come a day where individuals, peoples, and the nations of today need to take accountability for themselves, their own actions, and situations, and stop blaming centuries-old dead people and less savoury histories of the past.”

He added: “Britain through the slave acts of the 1800s actually went into debt buying the freedom of slaves throughout the empire.

“At the time, the British government paid 20 million pounds, the equivalent of around 17 billion pounds today – to compensate slave owners for the lost capital associated with freeing slaves.

“This pay-out was a massive 40% of the government’s budget and required many bonds to slave owners to effectuate the law.”

However, most descendants of enslaved people have argued against this logic, saying Britain only paid off the slave owners and not the actual slaves who suffered the cruelty of the transatlantic slave trade and whose descendants continue to suffer from the legacy of that era.

More than 20,000 people signed an online petition calling on the UK government to compensate “all Caribbean & African Descendants” last December.

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Juneteenth is one of America’s oldest holidays, marking the end of over 200 years of slavery inside modern day US.

The struggle for official recognition has lasted nearly as long.

Juneteenth has been celebrated on every 19 of June since as early as 1866.

Although Texas became the first state to observe Juneteenth as an official holiday in 1980.

It has taken more than four decades for others to copy Texas at a national level.

But the idea has gained more support following the death of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement and the election of Joe Biden as president.

Now a bill to make it a federal holiday has passed through the US Senate (all senators vote for Juneteenth unanimously)

And House of representatives (415 votes in favour, while 14 were against).

So what exactly is Juneteenth?

Slavery lasted for over two centuries in what is now the United States

The name comes from a combination of “June” and “nineteenth”.

The date it was believed slavery finally came to an end in the US.

That date is also known as Emancipation Day and Freedom Day.

President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation – which formally freed all slaves – more than two years earlier.

But it took time, and the end of the American civil war, before it became a reality for everyone.

Texas is of the Confederate states – a group of slave-holding states that fought against the Union in the American Civil War.

It was the last state to surrender to the Union Army, and also the last where enslaved African-Americans learn of their freedom.

By the time Union General Gordon Granger read the emancipation document in the city of Galveston on 19 June 1865, the war has ended and Confederate sympathiser have assassinated Lincoln inside a theatre.

Campaign for a national holiday

It took 155 years for Juneteenth to be officially recognised as a holiday nationwide

Nikola Hannah-Jones, a New York Times journalist and author of an award-winning series on the history of slavery in the US, was one of the voices calling for a national endorsement of Juneteenth.

“That the US doesn’t have an Emancipation Day to mark our abolishing an institution antithetical to our founding ideals of freedom and liberty speaks to the ongoing cover-up and our inability, still, to acknowledge what we did and who we are. Juneteenth should be a national holiday,” she tweeted on 11 June, 2020.

But this year, the US government is making that happen.

During the debate in the House, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat, said she had introduced the legislation to make Juneteenth a federal holiday “to commemorate the end of chattel slavery, America’s original sin, and to bring about celebration”.

Some 46 out of 50 states (and the District of Columbia) already observed or officially celebrated Juneteenth in some way, and civil rights organisations had lobbied for years to make the event federal.

Last year, a number of corporations – including Apple, Nike and Twitter – announced that the date would be a paid holiday.

Also on that list is the American Football’s governing body, the National Football League. The NFL has been criticised in the past few years for ostracising the former San Francisco 49ers player Colin Kaepernick, who famously “took the knee” during the national anthem in protest against racism and police brutality.

How does Juneteenth relate to the Black Lives Matter movement?

The lobby for official status for Juneteenth was endorsed by TV series Black-ish

Activists have promoted awareness of the date in recent years, including nationwide events organised by the Black Lives Matter movement.

The push included a Juneteenth-themed episode of Black-ish, a US comedy series showing the lives of an American upper-middle class family.

The episode, which aired originally in October 2017, and was shown again last year, openly asked for Juneteenth to be recognised as a national holiday.

Ongoing protests and a growing awareness of systemic racism has given Juneteenth new prominence.

Has the US government ever apologised for slavery?

Democrat US President Bill Clinton apologised for the slave trade during a trip to Africa in 1998.

Then years later, the US House of Representatives issued an apology that also included the decades of segregation laws against black Americans.

The move was followed the year after by the US Senate.

But for many, these apologies do not go far enough.

There are calls in America for reparations to descendants of slaves, although the issue is deeply divisive: in a poll conducted in 2019, 74% of black Americans showed support for payments while 85% of white Americans opposed them.

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If all went ahead as planned, economists estimate that such payments will be made to an estimated 40 million African Americans. Any federal reparations program could cost trillions of dollars, they estimate.

Reparations have been used in other circumstances to offset large moral and economic debts – Japanese Americans interned during World War Two received payments, families of Holocaust survivors also received reparations and Blacks in post-apartheid South Africa were settled in some form.

But the United States has never made much headway in discussions of whether or how to compensate African Americans for more than 200 years of slavery and help make up for racial inequality.

HR-40, a bill to fund the study of “slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies” has been floated in Congress for more than 30 years, but never taken up for a full vote.

Biden told the Washington Post last year that “we must acknowledge that there can be no realization of the American dream without grappling with the original sin of slavery, and the centuries-long campaign of violence, fear, and trauma wrought upon Black people in this country.”

But like nearly all of the Democratic presidential candidates at the time, he did not embrace the idea of specific payments to enslaved people’s descendants, instead promising “major actions to address systemic racism” and further study.

Some say this could rekindle the conversation on reparations for Africa as well. In 1999, the African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission called for the European countries to pay $777 trillion to Africa within five years.

One problem in the discussion of financial reparations for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, is which former slave trading and slave-holding nations might owe financial reparations to Africa. About a quarter-million enslaved Africans disembarked in the US between 1626 and 1875, whereas 5.1 million disembarked in Brazil between 1401 and 1875. Does Brazil owe reparations to Africa? Or does Portugal, a slave-trading nation, owe reparations to Brazil, which was then its colony?

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