KING Charles 111 has been inaugurated in luxurious splendour to a job he has held for seven months amid festering sores pertaining to the evils of slavery and indentureship.
These issues are particularly raw in the Caribbean, where the responses to Charles’ grandiose coronation ranged from cold indifference to bitter outrage.
The clamour for reparations for slavery, the United Nations-declared crime against humanity, has picked up fresh momentum in Caribbean territories.
This is propelled by the admission by descendants of aristocrats, including the publishers of the British Guardian newspaper, of their forebearers’ ownership of slaves and plantations.
In a few cases – such as in Grenada – descendants of owners have coupled apologies with payments to the current generation of 19th-century slaves.
“My forefathers did something horribly wrong,” the Trevelyan family of Britain said in a plaintive statement.
The proprietors of the Guardian have funded an elaborate study, titled Cotton Capital, and said that over the next decade, they would grant the equivalent of TT $100 million.
Descendants of former wealthy slave owners have formed an activist group and are calling for reparative justice while admitting a colonial past of corruption and racism.
The slave trade has been exposed as linked to a wide swath of British blue blood, including members of the Royal family.
The group’s founders are upset that Britain has never formally apologised for chattel slavery.
They said the monstrous system and “its after-effects still harm people’s lives in Britain, as well as in the Caribbean countries where our ancestors made money.”
During a 2021 visit to Jamaica and other Caribbean countries, a carefree Prince William and his wife stoked ugly memories of the bygone plantation class by waving from an open-back vehicle and carrying out other acts of snobbery.
On the eve of his coronation, King Charles was asked by groups in 12 former colonies to apologise for “the horrific impact of genocide and colonialism of indigenous and enslaved peoples…”
Several Caricom countries were involved in the petition.
Trinidad and Tobago did not take part and the administration of Dr. Keith Rowley has virtually disbanded the national reparations committee.
Charles ignored the heartfelt plea.
While there is no activist movement with respect to Indian indentureship in the Caribbean, there remains great unease over unresolved issues relating to the system of servitude.
There are simmering calls for an apology and some measure of reparations.
Some 500,000 Indian labourers were shipped to Caribbean countries from 1838 to 1917 to replace emancipated slaves.
As with the slave trade, thousands of Indian workers died along the treacherous passage, which was dubbed “kala pani” (dark waters).
Indentured workers – disparagingly termed “bound coolies” – endured repression and abuse, with heavy workloads, arduous days on the field, poor nutrition and housing, and an absence of health care.
Indentured labourers, like slaves, were routinely whipped and suffered life-threatening ailments, such as hookworm, anaemia, and dysentery, in a wretched atmosphere of miasma.
Infant mortality was high, as were the incidence of suicide and depression.
During the British Raj of 1858 to 1947, the economy of India, the largest colony, was exploited and millions of its people were murdered, starved or otherwise horribly oppressed.
A sign during the construction of railways – No Dogs and Indians Allowed – symbolised institutional cruelty.
The deaths of some three million people from hunger in the 1943 Bengali famine and during other acts of plunder and torture were six times more than British casualties in World War 11.
Britain commercialised industries for its sole benefit, siphoning revenues and leaving India in enormous debt and its people in crippling poverty.
Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill’s legacy includes fierce opposition to Indian freedom and antagonism toward Mahatma Gandhi, branding the revered father of the nation as a “malignant subversive fanatic.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently told his country that “a new history has been created,” but Britain’s dark imperial oppression is not easily forgotten.
A prominent author, Kapil Komireddi has said that the British monarchy “holds precisely zero relevance to Indians today; they are of no importance.”
Charles, who is also the titular head of the Commonwealth, was seemingly not affected by these troubling and enduring issues.
The costly coronation pageantry took place even as thousands of British workers, including doctors, engage in the largest pay strike in 40 years.
King Charles and his wide-eyed believers won’t easily be deterred.
