King Charles arrived in Antigua for the Commonwealth meeting on Friday after visiting the Bahamas, where he remains head of state, and Guyana, which replaced the British monarch with a president when it gained independence from Britain in 1966.
Although Charles has gone further than any of his predecessors in acknowledging his family’s historic links to slavery, the palace made it clear ahead of the visit that he wouldn’t be offering any formal apology – the king is constitutionally bound by the government’s stated position and can’t go further than it.
But the global context is inescapable at the end of a year that has seen “unprecedented developments” in the reparations movement, Natricia tells me.
In March a UN resolution, tabled by Ghana, declared the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity and called for reparatory justice, while Jamaica’s unprecedented slavery reparations petition to the king is due to be heard by the privy council next spring.
Amid this growing global pressure, campaigners told the Guardian ahead of the trip that if the king failed to meet this moment, it would raise serious questions about the future of the Commonwealth.
Then, in a move that took many by surprise, Andy Burnham opened the door to an official apology on behalf of the British state – while rejecting demands from Caribbean countries and campaigners for the UK to pay financial reparations, arguing that British people today could not be held liable for past wrongdoing.
This was a fairly seismic move – successive UK governments have refused both formal apology and reparations. In the UK, the rightwing media reacted with a focus on the impact on Charles himself, suggesting the king was “blind-sided” by Burnham’s announcement – although the palace insisted it had been made aware of it “in a timely manner”. In the Caribbean, Jamaica’s Sunday Observer went with the front page headline “Kicking and screaming!” to characterise the manner in which Britain had yielded to mounting international pressure.
Britain – and the Guardian’s – role in the slave trade
Nearly two centuries after emancipation, the true scale of Britain’s trafficking operations – which violently transported more than three million enslaved African men, women and children to colonial plantations in the Americas and Caribbean – is still not fully understood.
Last month, the Guardian revealed the findings of the Register of British Slave Traders, a three-year project by a team of specialist historians that documented for the first time the range of investors, from respectable men and women in provincial towns to kings and queens. It laid bare the extent of British involvement and underlined how slavery was not merely a footnote in British history, but helped shape the country.
Our extensive reporting forms part of the Cotton Capital series, which began in 2023 after the Guardian apologised for our own founders’ role in transatlantic enslavement, and launched a 10-year programme of restorative justice.
How has King Charles been received so far?
Ahead of the king’s tour, Labour MP, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, who chairs the all-party parliamentary group for Afrikan reparations, argued that the royal family and UK government had failed to grasp the momentum behind the reparations movement. “I think it would be wrong to think that we can continue with platitudes,” she told the Guardian.
But after the king’s first speech last week in the Bahamas, where he referenced the country’s culture being “born out of darkness”, that’s precisely what many felt he was doing.
“There was a lot of disappointment,” says Natricia. She reported on a previous Chogm in Rwanda in 2022, when the then Prince Charles described “the depths of my personal sorrow” at the suffering caused by the slave trade. “I remember how strong and resolved he appeared to be four years ago, and it felt that had become much weaker,” Natricia says.
His reception across the Caribbean has been mixed, she tells me. In the Bahamas, he was greeted by a cheering crowd, despite a handful of protesters chanting “pay us what you owe”. “That respect and that love is still there,” says Natricia.
But when he arrived in Guyana, where he has no meaningful constitutional role, younger people interviewed by the Guardian were perplexed by his visit. “They told us: ‘His visit doesn’t have anything to do with me, so I don’t really care,’” Natricia says. And the prime minister of Antigua, Gaston Browne, who is hosting King Charles and Queen Camilla this week, stepped out of a Sunday morning church service alongside the royal couple to tell ITV News he would like his island nation to become a republic.
The palace was no doubt keen to avoid the misjudgements of the Prince and Princess of Wales’ tour to the region four years ago, when images of William and Kate shaking hands with Jamaican children through a wire fence were described as a throwback to colonialism, and the visit was overshadowed by calls for reparations and enduring anger at the Windrush scandal.
And yet little seems to have been done to address local concerns about the amount of money governments are required to spend hosting a monarch who, as Natricia says, “is not even willing to formally apologise for the way that his family has been enriched by centuries of enslavement and colonialism”.
How has Burnham’s intervention changed the mood?
Burnham has flown out to Antigua, where the shift in the UK government’s stance is being greeted with some caution. “People recognise that something quite remarkable has happened,” says Natricia, “but they’re saying this is not going far enough.”
Caribbean governments and campaigners have welcomed Burnham’s announcement, but remain clear that agreeing on forms of reparations is still a priority for the region. Their manifesto for reparations from the UK and other former colonial powers published in June includes a specific call for acknowledgement that women bore the brunt of enslavement as well as detail about compensation.
(If you want to learn more about why reparations is about much more than hard cash, read historian Olivette Otele’s piece for Cotton Capital here.)
Much now depends on how the conversations develop this week. Chancellor John Healey, foreign secretary Ed Miliband and former prime minister Gordon Brown will join Burnham at the summit to launch a new drive to restructure debt for the poorest Commonwealth countries. The UK will also offer support with the transition to renewable energy and getting smaller countries “a louder voice on the world stage”.
What next for the reparations movement this week and beyond?
Although not on the official Chogm agenda, calls for apology and reparation will be impossible to ignore in Antigua this week.
For campaigners, this gathering is the culmination of more than a decade of calls from Caribbean leaders for Britain to acknowledge its role. Natricia has spoken to organisers ahead of the meeting who are preparing to deliver their message on billboards and T-shirts, and at events including a beach vigil to remember the enslaved and the launch of a “global reparations caravan” – described by organisers as an international movement combining reparations advocacy, demonstrations and culture.
She contrasts this festival of activism with the royal visits she remembers growing up in the eighties, “when you might have a small protest, mainly by Rastafarians or Pan Africanists”.
“Something has happened in the Caribbean,” she tells me. “You see it in this insistence that we are going to just get rid of all the vestiges of colonialism, more countries removing the king as head of state, people becoming aware of their African heritage and being proud of that. I have seen this amazing shift.”
Natricia is personally astonished by the sea change in global momentum for formal apology and financial repair, even in the course of this year. For her, it means reparations remain firmly on the table – regardless of the UK government’s current stance.
“It’s a wave that has resulted in Andy Burnham doing what no other prime minister has ever done,” she says. “So to me, if they could go from ‘We will never apologise’ to discussing apology, we’re moving in the right direction, and now there is hope that this is not just a pipe dream, it’s something that could happen.”
King Charles in Guyana, a country which replaced the British monarchy with a president when it gained independence from Britain in 1966. Photograph: Getty Images
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