To dismiss the transatlantic slave trade as ancient history, and to suggest that its descendants should simply forget about it and move on is worse than being overly-simplistic. It is a profound insult to our collective intelligence and a direct denial of economic and structural reality.

For any modern British politician to treat this as a closed chapter ignores a continuous line of exploitation and financial extraction that stretched well into the 21st century.

Recent pronouncements by the leader of the UK Opposition Kemi Badenoch, who asserted that there is no need for a formal British apology, and labelled the gesture a “distraction”, are deeply unfortunate. Such remarks reveal a complete refusal to grasp how the ledger of history works. To treat an apology as an unnecessary burden or a mere political inconvenience is to pretend that the violence of the past is disconnected from the privileges of the present.

As a student of history and a pan-Africanist whose ancestors suffered the unspeakable atrocities of slavery, and whose nation, Jamaica, was systematically left underdeveloped throughout centuries of slavery and colonialism, I believe that we must never let our history be minimised. It is deeply myopic to reduce and dismiss centuries of exploitation, oppression, and systemic extraction to a modern cash flow request for “more money”. The wealth that built cities across Britain did not appear in a vacuum. It was stripped directly from our soil and extracted from the stolen lives of our people.

When you strip a house of its foundation and leave a family in the rain, you do not call it generosity, or accuse them of “asking for more money” when they demand that you help fix the roof and foundation you destroyed. It is not a handout. It is a debt of history.

The structural underdevelopment we contend with today across the Global South and the African Diaspora cannot be separated from the deliberate policies enacted at the time of Emancipation. When slavery was abolished, the British State actively prioritised the financial security of the oppressors over the human rights of the oppressed, and the development of their communities and nations. This was manifested first through the deceptive Apprenticeship System, which extracted four additional years of forced labour under a different name to ease the transition for wealthy planters.

Furthermore, the scale of generational wealth built on the backs of enslaved Jamaicans was matched only by the generational debt imposed on the public to pay for it. The British Government paid £20 million to compensate slave owners for their “loss of property” — a massive sum that required a loan so immense it was only fully settled on February 1, 2015; the modern-day worth of the said loan being estimated at £17 billion!

For nearly 180 years, generations of taxpayers, including the children and grandchildren of the Caribbean Diaspora who migrated to Britain, unknowingly helped service the debt that paid off the very people who enslaved their ancestors. When billions in modern equivalent value were funnelled into the British economy while the liberated were left with no land, no capital, and no infrastructure, “just moving on” is an impossibility. The economic wounds are not centuries old; the ledger was only closed a decade ago, and the structural inequities it created remain entirely unresolved.

The partnership between Britain and its former colonies across Africa and its diaspora must include British leadership stop treating justice for the human, social, and economic atrocities of the enslavement of our peoples as a transaction, and start treating it as a reckoning. Acknowledging this structural damage, recognising that the legacies of slavery still live on, committing to reparative justice is not dwelling on the past. That is looking forward.

Alando Terrelonge is an attorney-at-law, Member of Parliament, and minister of state in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade.

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