‘We’ve sinned against your ancestors’

One local reparations campaigner believes that the Archbishop of Canterbury did not go far enough in apologising to Jamaicans on Sunday for the Anglican Church’s role in the transatlantic slave trade.

Delivering the sermon at the Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands’ 200th Anniversary Service at the National Arena in Kingston, The Most Reverend Honourable Justin Welby acknowledged the lifelong negative impact his predecessors created centuries ago.

“We are deeply, deeply, deeply sorry. We sinned against your ancestors. I would give anything for it to be reversed, but it cannot, so what makes for a better future? When we come to worship God, when we come to serve Jesus Christ, we are all equal, even those who have sinned terribly,” Welby said.

“And we are all equal,” he added. “What we have done remains in the present, both for good and evil.”

Welby’s apology comes three months after the United Reformed Church in the United Kingdom delivered a similar apology at the Webster Memorial United Church in St Andrew during an ecumenical service.

The Archbishop of Canterbury said the actions of the predecessors, who have failed terribly, cannot be ignored. But he added that the Church around the world has been forgiven by God for the things that have been confessed because Jesus bore those sins.

He then called on other church leaders to repent as well.

“We are now responsible to God for the action to do right. To repent – to say sorry – must involve reversing direction, going a different way,” Welby said. “We celebrate the past in which the living forgiveness of our Saviour and His ever-present love led the Church into seeking to do right too late, but it’s better late than never.”

He said the Anglican Church, in the 19th century, began to change from loving power to loving people as a way to right its wrongs.

Welby is a British Anglican bishop who, since 2013, has served as the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury in the Church of England. As Archbishop of Canterbury, he is the Primate of All England and the symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

On Friday, Welby said that a £100-million fund established to address the past wrongs of the Church and its role in slavery must be managed by the descendants of victims.

Noting that reparation is not necessarily an act of compensation, he said the impact of the fund will be guided closely by an oversight committee – made up primarily of representatives from the Caribbean and West Africa – that advises the Church.

“The nature of slavery was terrible; genocidal crime committed against people, things done to them. So the use of these monies must be done with people and under the advice and not with simply folks from far away doing what they’ve decided to do,” Welby, a member of the House of Lords in the British Parliament known for his public stance on controversial issues related to justice, said at a press conference.

Welby had commissioned a forensic audit of the Church of England’s finances to determine how the Church might have benefited from involvement in the Transatlantic slave trade.

The audit resulted, not only in acknowledgement of the Church’s involvement in what has been described as a crime against humanity, but also in the first substantial expression from any European beneficiary of enslaved labour to make available the £100 million.

For Professor Verene Shepherd, a Jamaican academic and champion for reparations, Welby has still not gone far enough.

She still has questions about the reparations owed after apologies are given for the harrowing legacy of slavery, which subjected millions of black men, women, and children to backbreaking labour, violence, and dehumanisation.

“He has apologised before, but it was important to do it [on Sunday] before the people of Jamaica, given the involvement of the Anglican Church in African chattel enslavement in Jamaica,” Shepherd told The Gleaner.

“But unless he acknowledged that chattel enslavement was illegal and that the Anglican Church participated in an illegal act, then the apology is incomplete. Sums of money have also been committed, but it is not enough, and the people of Jamaica did not participate in a conversation about the size of the debt owed,” she said.

She noted that former International Court of Justice judge Patrick Robinson on Saturday said during an event with the archbishop at The University of the West Indies, Mona, that his apology would be incomplete without acknowledging that chattel enslavement was illegal and that what the Anglican Church participated in was an illegal act.

Welby was in the island for a three-day visit to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands under the theme ‘Yesterday… Today… Tomorrow: Celebrating Service, Guarding Justice, Affirming Hope’.

ainsworth.morris@gleanerjm.com