Reparations for slavery and war: who gets to decide?

Compensation for tangible property and intangible dignity are two different concepts, but we use the same word for both.

Burnt-out cars in Tottenham, 7th October 1985. Photo by Jim Moody, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The part of London, England known as Tottenham had been mostly farmland until the Victorian era, except for the neighbourhood of Bruce Grove with its Georgian villas. This street leads to Bruce Castle which once belonged to Roland Hill, the inventor of the postage stamp. In those days, Broadwater Farm was the name of a dairy farm nearby. The Stoke Newington & Edmonton Railway, opened in 1872, brought Cockneys out of the East End to settle eight miles north in newly-built terraced housing, where they mingled with Russian-speaking migrants seeking political asylum or just a better life in Britain.

In 1909, the ‘Tottenham Outrage’ left four dead after a police shoot-out with Latvian anarchist thieves. This was a precursor to 1911’s better-known Siege of Sydney Street, in which the young Winston Churchill deployed troops on the streets of London to defeat another gang of expropriating Baltic radicals.

Today, the working-class neighbourhoods of Tottenham and Edmonton are still known for being rough, and politically charged. A friend of mine who put a Tottenham address on his curriculum vitae could never get a job interview, despite the fact that he was qualified with skills that were in high demand. He changed his CV to show his address as ‘Bruce Grove’ instead. It seemed prospective employers didn’t know that is an area of Tottenham, and he started getting job offers immediately.

Tottenham’s modern reputation was in some respects deserved. The 1985 riot at the Broadwater Farm housing project, in which unarmed policeman Keith Blakelock was stabbed 43 times and almost decapitated, made some people wary of the neighbourhood’s residents. A black woman, Cynthia Jarrett, had died of a heart attack during a police raid on her home, triggering one of the UK’s most serious riots of the period. Hard-left union activist Bernie Grant, who had become the leader of the local council that year, departed from the usual protocol by appearing to endorse the “bloody good hiding” that his constituents had given the police. The progressive left including Grant also worked successfully to overturn the convictions of three men imprisoned for the murder of PC Blakelock. That crime remains unsolved after almost four decades.

Bernie Grant was one of the three black Members of Parliament elected to represent the Labour Party in 1987, the first MPs of African heritage in modern Britain. He was also a Pan-Africanist, involved with the state of black communities all over the world, not just the multi-racial neighbourhood he was to represent. That work included becoming the chairperson of the African Reparations Movement in the UK. I met Grant in person a few times at local community events. Grant’s biography, written by his schoolteacher father Eric, is available on the Internet Archive.

While in Parliament in 1989, Grant made a hip-hop record in aid of the African National Congress, but this was no charity fund-raiser; it was a call to arms. The lyrics were about the situation in South Africa and Angola, with Grant rapping about the ‘freedom fighters’ on the 16th parallel. At the time, with Nelson Mandela still in prison, the hard left’s solution for apartheid was to send as many automatic weapons to the African proletariat as possible, shipping these guns via communist regimes such as East Germany.

The basic idea was that a civil war would be won at the cost of an unspecified number of black lives, and majority rule would emerge dialectically out of the chaos, with South Africa presumably becoming a Soviet satellite state just as communism was collapsing in Europe. I know that progressives calling for bloody vengeance and communism is on-trend today, but back in the 1980’s that was not the sort of thing a member of Parliament would normally do. It does remind us that Bernie Grant’s socialist revolution was international as well as local. I still have my copy of that hip-hop record. I rate the B-side instrumental.

Generations of migration

Grant was a migrant from Guyana on the South American continent who arrived in the UK in 1963. Because of its status as a British colony, Guyana was linked to the transatlantic slave trade, including the production of sugar. You may have heard of Demerara sugar, named after a place in Guyana. Because of these plantation workers brought against their will from Africa, Guyana was considered part of the Caribbean, culturally speaking.

The Empire Windrush was a German ship seized by the British military at the end of World War II – to the victor go the spoils. It arrived in London from the Caribbean on 22nd June 1948 with 800 migrants on board, giving its name to the ‘Windrush generation’. Some of those young men and their families came to Tottenham.

Due to previous generations of migration from the East, Tottenham was a Jewish neighbourhood before it became a black neighbourhood. When Jews had arrived in the Port of London during the 19th century, they settled close to the docks in slum neighbourhoods such as Whitechapel. As they earned a little more money, they moved further out to the Victorian suburbs which included Tottenham, Stamford Hill and Golders Green in North London, to get away from the smoke and the soot of the East End.

Tottenham Hotspur is the UK’s premier-league Jewish football club. It used to be owned by electronics entrepreneur Alan Sugar, who’s now more famous for hosting UK TV’s version of ‘The Apprentice’. In Yiddish, the word for sugar is of course ‘Zucker’, as in Zuckerberg – the sugar hill. I never met Baron Sugar, but his chauffeur nearly ran me over in his Rolls Royce, identified by its number-plate ‘AMS 1’, coming out of the White Hart Lane football stadium one time. It might have been ironic for Bernie Grant, whose ancestors had likely worked on the plantations in Guyana, that the wealthiest Jew in Tottenham was called ‘Sugar’.

In the 1990’s, there were still two bagel bakeries on Tottenham High Road and several of my neighbours worked in the garment trade, using tailoring skills that Jewish migrants from the East had passed down to their descendants. Alan Sugar’s father was one of those London tailors.

The multiple meanings of ‘reparation’

When the Berlin Wall was demolished and Germany subsequently reunified, further claims for reparations were made by the Jewish community for losses of property during World War II. New documents became available as the archives of the Warsaw Pact state which had been the German ‘Democratic’ Republic were opened up. Officially, there were no National Socialists in East Germany.

‘Reparations’ had been a widely-used word in English after the First World War, when the Weimar Republic found itself having to pay for losses incurred due to the deposed Kaiser’s campaigns. The treaty reparations obtained from the German state in 1919 onwards included money for the victorious governments, territory reclaimed for neighbouring states, and limitations for the size of the German armed forces. There was no need to wait decades for results, because the Allied Powers had the means to enforce the settlement imposed.

Resentment about the German people having to pay these reparations was frequently cited as a motive for National Socialism. Claims for reparations arising from the Second World War from the surviving Jewish community were like those in the Treaty of Versailles and other treaties, in one respect; they arose from relatively recent events, still in living memory.

In other respects, these two types of reparation were very different: Jewish families claimed compensation for specific and personal items they had lost, such as a painting by Gustav Klimt. The story of the recovery of just such a painting was portrayed by Anglo-Russian actress Helen Mirren in the 2015 movie ‘Woman in Gold’. These claims for reparations after the Second World War lasted many decades in some cases, due to the reluctance you might expect to hand over money and property that had been looted from Jewish people. The opportunity for reparations after the end of Soviet communism in Europe meant some of the claims by Holocaust survivors and their relatives were still ongoing in the 1990’s.

One case I’m familiar with took place in the town of Ladenburg in southern Germany, where Carl Benz invented the automobile. This ancient Roman town had a small Jewish community of around a hundred people in the 1930’s. A family home on Bahnhofstrasse was seized by the Gestapo and the contents looted, including another valuable painting that hung on one of the walls. The Hirsch family was able to produce a photograph which showed relatives standing in this room of the house, with this specific painting in the background, providing a clear documentary link to the ownership of that painting before the National Socialist regime stole it. That house became Gestapo headquarters for the Ladenburg district, and it is still the town’s police station today.

When Bernie Grant talked about reparations for the transatlantic slave trade, perhaps the first person with a seat in the Houses of Parliament to do so, this was a quite different concept under the same name. He wasn’t talking about reparations for personal property, or for recent events. He was making a claim on behalf of the descendants of Africans who were exploited by the transatlantic slave trade in general, hundreds of years earlier, and the return of cultural artefacts to their countries of origin. This was a different sense of the word ‘reparations’ than that used by his Jewish constituents regarding losses by family in Germany. Enslaved Africans such as Olaudah Equiano weren’t allowed private property, which was simply taken from them, as he related in The Interesting Narrative.

Documentary evidence of specific property that had been stolen from people in that slave trade was not generally available, and that wasn’t really the point. The claim was not for property, but the indignity of the slave trade, the economic harms to Africans, and the fact that people had been taken from their native lands to work on plantations. Because those individuals had been treated as property in the chattel slavery system, the argument was made that compensation was due. After all, Britain had compensated the slave owners for their lost ‘property’ upon outlawing the trade. There were claims on behalf of descendants of slaves, those Africans who had died on the sea journey, by the Caribbean nations where slaves had been made to work against their will, and the African regions which had lost so many people.

Bernie Grant’s ideas about transatlantic slave trade reparations are now mainstream in the United States, the Caribbean and elsewhere, more than twenty years after his death. In October 2024, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer agreed to start discussions on reparations with the Commonwealth of former British colonies. Given that it’s Starmer involved, we might expect nothing more than discussions. Alternatively, he might do something radical to assuage his progressive guilt, like when he handed over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius against the will of the islands’ former residents.

How much is enough?

Various attempts have been made to put a precise figure on the amount of money owed to each descendant of the transatlantic slave trade, a very different task to putting a value on a painting which may still be hanging on some gallery wall. How does anybody put a price on human dignity, or make a meaningful calculation of economic loss over centuries? For the United Nations, that figure is more than $24 trillion US dollars for Britain alone, just one of the countries involved in that particular slave trade.

The details of who will pay this sum are not clear. We can put a valuation on a sugar company, but putting a price on human dignity and the dislocation of a huge number of people from their land of origin is much more challenging to quantify. Arguably, putting a price on a human effectively uses the techniques of the slave trade to make the unquantifiable, quantifiable. Should government step in and use tax money to compensate certain Africans and not others, depending on whether or not applicants for reparations can prove colonial ancestry? That would be controversial in a community like Tottenham which now includes migrants who have arrived directly from Africa, not via the Caribbean plantations. If you compensate someone for crimes against their ancestors in general, rather than compensation for specific private property, how much is enough?

Was it Jewish constituents being paid reparations for the injustices that their families had suffered which inspired Bernie Grant to claim reparations on behalf of Africans? The demand for justice is similar, but the context of the transatlantic slave trade is different from the European wars of the 20th century. Neither the black community in Britain, the Caribbean nations nor the modern African states in the region from which those slaves came have the leverage that the Allied Powers had on Germany in 1918 and again in 1945. Not even the United Nations can force Britain to hand over the trillions of dollars demanded. These claims for transatlantic slave trade reparations are reminiscent of the Situationist slogan: be realistic, demand the impossible.

Tottenham has not fared much better since Bernie Grant’s death in the year 2000. The 2011 riots after the shooting by police of Mark Duggan, which spread all over London resulting in five other deaths, have been cited by Thomas Sowell as the inspiration for the 2020 riots across the USA in the name of ‘Black Lives Matter’.

The demand for generalised reparations with no prospect of being paid serves as the engine of a permanent resentment which can be exploited for political means. As Sowell reportedly put it, “Black votes matter to many politicians – more so than black lives. That is why such politicians must try to keep black voters fearful, angry and resentful.”