Slave trading: Why can’t King Charles simply say sorry?

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, The Independent

In the traditional West Indian living room, now few and far between in the UK as the group of individuals known as the Windrush generation begins to pass away, it is more than likely you will find a plate, or a teacup, or perhaps even a tiny ceramic bell, bearing the insignia of the royal family and, most likely, a photograph of the late Queen Elizabeth II and/or Prince Philip. Alongside the glass cabinets, the radiogram and the plastic-covered chairs, these trinkets represented the adulation of a generation who mistakenly believed that they would be considered as equals by the British public.

And, quite frankly, it makes me queasy. Since last week, King Charles III has been abroad as part of a “tour” of the Caribbean. It’s a move justified as a celebration of “people, culture and heritage,” but is really a self-serving PR exercise. Don’t forget about us, we’re still important. He’s visited the Bahamas, Guyana and Antigua and Barbuda, awkwardly danced at a Junkanoo street parade and displayed frustration at getting caught in a tropical downpour without a brolly — 73 whole seconds in the rain!

“We cannot change the actions of those who came before us,” he said in a speech at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua on Tuesday; shortly after Buckingham Palace released a statement (how curious that the “palace” releases the statements rather than the man himself), stating that Charles is politically neutral and not involved in “policy making” with regards to the possibility of a formal apology and reparations. “We can, however, learn from the past. The transatlantic trade in enslaved persons still casts a shadow over these islands,” the King added.

So shall we learn together? Personally, I’d like to refer him to the story of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, a formerly-enslaved Black man born on the coast of modern-day Ghana who lived in London in 1786 — and whose story is retold in historian Brooke Newman’s recent book The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of Slavery and the British Monarchy. One day, Cugoano, who by that point in his life moved in “high” circles, decided to send a parcel to George, Prince of Wales, King Charles III’s great-great-great-great-grandfather. It contained pamphlets which spoke to the brutality and obscenities of the transatlantic slave trade as it was taking place in the British Caribbean.

As a reminder, which Charles, despite his claims of “unflinching honesty” around the slave trade, did not care to give, it involved the trafficking of over 12.5 million Africans to the Americas. By the 1730s, Britain was the world’s biggest slave-trading nation. British men and women manipulated, coerced, raped, experimented upon, brutally murdered and utterly dehumanised thousands upon thousands of enslaved black people, some of whom are my ancestors — especially in colonies such as Jamaica, which was known for its particular violence. At a Maroon community at the foot of Jamaica’s Blue Mountains a few years ago, I held their shackles in my hands. They were heavy, and poisonous.

Cugoano implored the future king, Prince George, to consider the inhumanity and mistreatment of Africans, to end the “iniquitous traffic of buying and selling men”. But Prince George did nothing. This was particularly egregious considering, as Newman notes, that by that point, the monarchy had been profiting off the transatlantic slave trade for decades, investing in transatlantic slaving voyages, granting charters to slave-trading companies and relying on the money it generated. The insignia of at least two British monarchs was burned into the skin of some enslaved people. Bluntly, Charles’s ancestors directly made money from the stomach-churning sale of Black people, and, presumably, they felt no guilt about it.

Yet remarkably, King Charles has not released a formal apology on behalf of the nation or his family; something that would be considered the bare minimum by many. Instead, the palace released its statement that Charles is “not involved in policy making” with regards to the possibility of a formal apology. To apologise, to intervene, would mean taking genuine ownership and to shake the foundations of the monarchy itself. But it would also be a turn towards the kind of modernism that this king has long said he is in favour of.

The royal family has perfected the art of performance over the decades, as their influence and significance has waned and wavered. They have celebrated the Windrush generation, they have invited “influential Black Britons” to Buckingham Palace, they have dolled out controversial MBEs and OBEs. But, despite their tea-drinking tours and their impersonations of normality, they are the embodiment of the hierarchical, higher-than-thou class system that allows for some people to be at the top, and some to be at the very bottom.

Where there are kings and queens in Britain, there are always ghosts of the enslaved and the subjugated — the spectre looming, the reminder that we are far, far away from equality, the servant running to deliver the brolly to His Majesty on land where my people were once beaten into brutal submission.

Yet thankfully, while there is undoubtedly a long tradition of British Caribbeans who adore king and country, there has also long been a tradition of resistance. And as the calls come from inside the house, from brilliant activists across the Caribbean demanding justice, the insincerity of the monarchy is only becoming harder to ignore.