Monument to slavery
Richard Drax, a Conservative MP, who has inherited his family’s ancestral sugar plantation, is under huge pressure to hand back hundreds of acres of prime real estate on the holiday island so that it can be turned into a monument to slavery.
If Drax refuses, Barbados will seek to apply for compensation from an international arbitration court. Any ruling in Barbados’ favour could see the island pursue the wealthy descendants of other slave-owning families.
David Denny, general secretary of the Caribbean Movement for Peace and Integration, said: “Any descendants of white plantation owners who have benefited from the slave trade should be asked to pay reparations, including the Cumberbatch family.”
Denny, who has been campaigning for Drax to pay reparations, said: “The money should be used to turn the local clinic into a hospital, support local schools, and improve infrastructure and housing.”
David Comissiong, Barbados’ ambassador to the Caribbean community and deputy chairman of the island’s national commission on reparations, is also agitating for Drax and other slave-owning families to pay damages.
The question of how to deal with Drax Hall, owned by the Dorset MP, has been discussed by the Barbados cabinet and the UK politician has met with Mia Mottley, the island’s prime minister and chairman of the wider Caribbean committee on slave reparations.
When asked if descendants of the Cumberbatch estate would be pursued, Comissiong said: “This is at the earliest stages. We are just beginning. A lot of this history is only really now coming to light.”
Cumberbatch’s ancestors were paid thousands of pounds in compensation when slavery was abolished in the 1830s, a sum now worth in the region of £1 million ($1.9m). The British government at the time took out a loan to pay off slave owners across the Empire, a sum that was only finally paid off in 2015.
It is unclear if the family money helped Cumberbatch, who was educated at Harrow School. He is the son of the actress Wanda Ventham, who, he said, had encouraged him not to use his real name in his acting career because she was concerned that he could face claims for reparations over family links to slavery.
The 2012 film 12 Years a Slave is based on the 1853 memoir of the same name by the former slave Solomon Northup, who was at one time owned by the plantation owner William Ford, a historical figure represented on screen by Cumberbatch.
The British star portrayed the plantation owner as a relatively benign but weak man, a depiction which was contested by Ford’s descendants, who said he was described favourably in Northup’s memoir, which states: “There never was a more kind, noble, candid, Christian man than William Ford.”
Cumberbatch has also previously played William Pitt the Younger in the film Amazing Grace, about Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807, a role the actor has suggested he took by way of apology for his family history.
