Heirs of slave owners apologize to descendants of slaves at Jamaica’s annual Emancipation Day

Jamaica’s celebration of the Emancipation Day on August 1, 2024, took an emotional turn as some individuals and families rendered apologies to people whose ancestors were adversely affected by slavery.

Emancipation Day is celebrated across the Caribbean every year on the first of August and is recognised as a public holiday in many of the islands. The event, held at the Seville Heritage Park in Saint Ann, has been a feature of the celebrations since 1997.

This year’s celebrations came with an unexpected twist; it presented an opportunity to the individuals and groups whose family members enabled, partook of, or profited from the transatlantic slave trade to apologise in person to the descendants of those affected by the incident.

The event was organized by the Jamaica National Commission on Reparations, the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, and the country’s Ministry of Culture.

Significant features of the program included re-enactments and poignant poetry that set the scene and erased the centuries between the audience and the enslaved men, women, and children who once stood on Jamaican soil.

At midnight on the day of the celebration, a hush fell over the crowd gathered, especially as the pageantry and performances that led up to that charged silence had been designed to evoke the anguish of slavery.

The silence was, however, broken by a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, signaling freedom, hope, and the definitive end to the centuries-long transatlantic slave movement that allowed Europeans to abduct, traffic, murder and inflict suffering on Africans.

Speaking at the event were Joseph Harker, the Guardian’s Senior Editor in charge of Diversity and Development, who delivered an apology via a video message, and members of the Heirs of Slavery, a group of people who have discovered that their ancestors facilitated or profited from transatlantic slavery.

Harker reiterated the commitment made a year ago during an apology from the Guardian’s owner to “raising awareness of this brutal and dehumanising era, and to creating a 10-year programme of restorative justice in full consultation with communities still affected by its legacies.”

That which caused substantial emotional turmoil was an apology from Kate Thomas and Aidee Walker, two New Zealand sisters who had travelled to Jamaica to address the atrocities of their ancestors, the clan Malcolm of Argyll.

A part of their presentation read: “We acknowledge the wealth created by our ancestors through the chattel enslavement of your ancestors, and the injustice of financial compensation paid by the British government to the enslavers. The enduring and damaging legacy of this injustice continues to the present day. We share a history as descendants of both enslavers and the enslaved. Our history is intertwined with your history, and your history is intertwined with ours.”

They went ahead to pledge to continue working hard in order to turn their apologies into concrete reparative action, an act which was followed by applause from the audience.

Laura Trevelyan, a British journalist and member of the Heirs of Slavery group, supported the sisters through the reparations process. She said their apology “shows how global the influence of the transatlantic slave trade truly was, reaching across the Pacific Ocean”. She hoped their actions would open up a debate in Oceania region about the region’s historical links to slavery.

The story of the sisters demonstrates the intrigue and complexities of the reparations movement. Available details show that their fourth great-grandmother, Mary Johnson, was of African descent and a housekeeper in the Malcolm household. She had five children with John Malcolm, including their third great-grandfather, Neill Malcolm.

Earlier on Wednesday, July 31, Walker and Thomas noted that their involvement with New Zealand’s Māori people had prompted them to explore their ancestry.

Walker, a film-maker, spoke about the trauma of having one’s identity stolen by colonisation: “My partner is Māori and his grandparents were beaten for speaking Māori in school, and we have seen the effects that losing their language has had on his family.”

Olivia Grange, Jamaica’s Culture Minister asserts that “these apologies may be small steps, but they are important steps on the journey towards reparatory justice.”