$18m to be spent on project

“We are deeply disturbed and ashamed of this history and we wish to say sorry. To repent of this history.”

That was part of an apology for slavery yesterday from general secretary of the United Kingdom-based United Society Partners in the Gospel (USPG), Reverend Duncan Dormor, for the Codrington Estate’s role in the enslavement of Africans.

It was followed by the announcement during a press conference at the historic Codrington College in St John of a $18 million reparations project to address the enduring wounds caused by slavery.

“I am here to express on behalf of the USPG, the successor organisation to SPG (Society For Propagation of The Gospel in Foreign Parts) . . . our wholehearted and profound apology to what SPG did here at Codrington,” Dormor said.

The priest said he was expressing deep remorse for the Society’s actions, for the historic damage and the intergenerational legacies that unfolded as the agency “fully acknowledge and accept responsibility for those historic actions”. The USPG is the Anglican mission agency that partners with churches and communities worldwide.

The multimillion-dollar project is to redress the wrongs of the SPG in relation to how it owned, managed and exploited the black labour of African descent at Codrington Estates, St John, during the system of plantation slavery.

Dormor said the Renewal & Reconciliation: The Codrington Reparations Project was in partnership with Codrington Trust/Church in the Province of the West Indies, in Barbados.

Build trust

USPG has pledged, in response to proposals Codrington Trust advanced, that the funds will be spent over the next ten to 15 years in four areas of collaboration with the descendants of the enslaved. The project is expected to build trust and relationship, conduct research to locate burial places of enslaved persons who worked on the estates, document findings and establish monuments to memorialise those persons, and connect kinship and family groups.

It is also aimed at recognising some areas as sacred spaces, engage in academic work to record and to present the full story of estates over a period of enslavement and Emancipation, build a facility to house artefacts and ensure the tragedy is never forgotten.

The project will also attempt to improve the circumstances of descendants of slaves now living on estates by helping them to acquire freehold lots, and to create opportunities of entrepreneurship and scholarship among the tenants.

Dormor said USPG was “deeply ashamed of our past links to slavery”.

“We recognise that it is not simply enough to repent in thought and word, but we must take action, working in partnership with Codrington where the descendants of enslaved persons are still deeply impacted by the generational trauma that came from the Codrington Plantations.”

He stated that the SPG owned and managed the Codrington Estates which “exploited the labour of enslaved classes of African descent within the brutal racialised system of chattel slavery”.

Under that system, he said, there were “individuals who lived, worked and died under the most appalling and degrading conditions, and died without receiving their freedom”.

Archbishop Howard Gregory, primate and metropolitan of the Church of the Province in the West Indies, in a statement read by retired archbishop and former chairman of the Codrington Trust, The Most Reverend Dr John Holder, said: “It is our hope that, through this reparations project, there will be serious reckoning with the history of the relationship between the Codrington Trust and USPG, but also a process of renewal and reconciliation that will be healing of the pain of the past.”

Programme advisor in Government’s Office of Reparations and Economic Enfranchisement, Rodney Grant, who was present, welcomed the initiative. ( JS)

From left, general secretary of USPG, Reverend Duncan Dormor; trustee of USPG, Reverend Dr Carlton Turner; executive secretary of the Codrington Trust Kevin Farmer, and retired Archbishop and former chairman of the Codrington Trust the Most Reverend Dr John Holder, during the Codrington Reparations Project press conference at Codrington College yesterday.

(Picture by Jameel Springer.)