Gaston Browne, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, has written to the Warden of All Souls College to ask that the College pays reparations to the country. Mr Browne said that the College had benefited from profits earned by enslaved labour on the islands.
The College’s library was constructed with a £10,000 endowment from Christopher Codrington, which is now worth around £1.7 million. Codrington owned 900 acres of land on Antigua, the larger and more mountainous of the two islands which make up the country. The smaller island of Barbuda, now famous for its pink sand beaches beloved by Princess Diana, was inherited from his father, who secured a lease of the island at no cost in 1685. His sugarcane plantations were tended by enslaved people.
The use of enslaved labour on the island was not stopped by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, although the island’s enslaved population were still emancipated at that time. After Christopher Codrington’s death in 1710, the owners of his Barbuda plantations were compensated with a payment of £8,823. 8s. 9d under the Slave Compensation Act 1837 for the loss of 411 enslaved persons. The UK Treasury was still making payments under this act until 2015.
Mr Browne’s letter suggested to Sir John Vickers, Warden of All Souls, that the College should “repay its debt to enslaved persons on Antigua and Barbuda, who were the real source of benefit to all souls.” The proposed reparations would take the form of the creation of a scholarship to the college for “eligible Antiguans and Barbudans”, and donations to the Five Islands (Antigua) campus of the University of the West Indies”.
When approached for comment, All Souls referred Cherwell to a statement on its website reading: “Over the last three years the College has taken several steps to address the problematic nature of the Codrington legacy. It has erected a large memorial plaque at the entrance to the Library, ‘In memory of those who worked in slavery on the Codrington plantations in the West Indies’. It has pledged a series of donations to Codrington College, Barbados (a theological college also founded by a bequest in Codrington’s will) to a total of £100,000. And it has set up three fully funded graduate studentships at Oxford for students from the Caribbean; in effect, £6 million of the College’s endowment is now set aside, on a permanent basis, to produce the income that funds these studentships.” All Souls recently removed Codrington’s name from its library. The College did not remove a statue of Codrington from the library’s centre.
Common Ground told Cherwell they supported Mr Browne’s call for direct reparations from the College. They added: “We want to echo the sentiments of Rhodes Must Fall Oxford, who have already voiced their support for the initiative, and also expressed their disappointment at the fact that the statue of Christopher Codrington still remains standing within the college. By allowing the Codrington statue to remain in place the College is unable to fully stand in solidarity with Black communities both here and in the Carribean. It also shows a failure to truly comprehend the full extent of the dehumanisation, exploitation and trauma on which the College’s wealth stands. The efforts to repair past damages with current studentships offered to students in Barbados are undermined by their continued commitment to upholding the statue and the lack of direct reparations.
“It is positive to hear that the college has responded and agreed to investigate academic initiatives relating to the Codrington legacy and reach conclusions in the coming academic term. We sincerely hope that the college chooses to take action and pay reparations where they are owed. Back in November 2020, after All Souls announced that they will be preserving the statue of Codrington, Common Ground responded to say that we believe the College needs to go beyond acknowledgment if it truly wants to express its ‘abhorrence of slavery’ and stand in solidarity with those affected by colonial injustice. We feel that paying direct reparations to Antigua and Barbuda would be a step in the right direction for All Souls on the way to truly facing up to the atrocities on which the foundations of the College are built.”
The Office of the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda has been approached for comment.
Image: Andrew Shiva / CC BY-SA 4.0
