CBH Talk | Apology and Repair for Slavery: Grenada as a Case Study

To The People of Grenada

We, the undersigned, write to apologise for the actions of our ancestors in holding your ancestors in slavery…Slavery was and is a crime against humanity. Its damaging effects continue to the present day. 

Signed by descendants of Sir John Trevelyan

_{(pictured right: the Trevelyan family apology; image of one of their Grenadian sugar plantations)}

 

On February 27, 2023 a historic apology to the people of Grenada was signed by 106 descendants of the British aristocrat Sir John Trevelyan for their family’s role in slavery. The initiative was led by renowned British journalist and former BBC anchor Laura Trevelyan, who in 2016 first learned that her ancestors were absentee owners of 1000 enslaved Africans who worked on their sugar plantations in the 18th and 19th century. 

Together with the Grenadian government represented by Arley Gill, Chair of the Grenada National Reparations Committee, Laura and her family crafted a formal, public apology – an act of reparatory justice – which is the first and primary step in the 10-point reparations plan put forth by CARICOM. (CARICOM, or the Caribbean Community and Common Market, is the group of 20 developing countries in the Caribbean that work together to shape policies for the region.) 

Apology and reparatory justice for the sins of transatlantic slavery is a route that has yet to take hold in the United States. Can such acts of memorialization be effective here? Is it useful to compare the process in the British Caribbean with that here at home? What does “reparatory justice” even mean, and how is it different from “reparations?” 

These are just some of the questions that will be explored as Laura and Arley discuss reckoning with the cruel history and current legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. They will be joined by Anthony Bogues, co-curator of the current exhibition at the National African American Museum of History and Culture – In Slavery Wake- Making Black Freedom in the Modern World – and the inaugural director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University.

2025 has been named “The Year of Reparations” by the African Union. Learn more here.

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Participants

Anthony Bogues is a writer, scholar, curator and the author/editor of twelve books and over 100 articles  in the fields of African and African Diasporic political thought/theory, African and African diasporic intellectual history and Caribbean art. 

He is the Asa Messer professor of Humanities and Africana Studies, a professor in the department  of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University and a visiting professor of African and African Diaspora Thought at the Free University of Amsterdam, as well as a distinguished visiting professor and curator at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. In addition, he is the convenor of the UNCESCO project “Mapping Global Anti Black Racism.“ 

As a curator Bogues has curated major exhibitions in the Caribbean, South Africa, the United States, and Paris. Most recently he served as co-curator of the current exhibition at the National African American Museum of History and Culture – In Slavery Wake- Making Black Freedom in the Modern World.  

He is the curator of the art documentary, This Life: Black Life in the Time of the Now which premiered in December 2023 at Art Basel in Miami. He is the inaugural director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University where he has received numerous awards for his scholarship and research. He was recently awarded the honorary doctor of Literature from SOAS, University of London for his substantial contributions in the fields of African and African diaspora political thought and intellectual history and Caribbean art. 

Bogues is an associate editor of the Caribbean journal BIM and sits on the board of the Center for the Arts, Port Au Prince, Haiti and a member of the editorial collective, Boundary 2. He is the co-convenor and co curator of the Global Curatorial Project, a curatorial and exhibition project on the global history of racial slavery and colonialism with the National African American Museum of History and Culture at the Smithsonian. He is completing two visual documentaries titled Unfinished Conversations which tell  the oral / visual stories of racial  slavery and European colonialism and their afterlives.

 

Arley N. Salimbi Gill is an attorney with more than twenty five years in the legal profession. Before joining the legal fraternity, Mr. Gill was a history teacher in Grenada.

In addition, Mr. Gill was a parliamentarian for about four years in the Grenada Parliament and served as a Minister with responsibility for Culture, Information and Information Communication Technology in the Government of Grenada from 2008 to 2012. He then served as a magistrate in the Commonwealth of Dominica from 2013 to 2018. From 2019 to 2022, Mr. Gill served as Grenada’s ambassador to CARICOM.

He is a prolific current affairs writer and political, social, and cultural critic and commentator who has dedicated his life to the cause of reparations and reparatory justice for Indigenous Peoples and Africans and African descendants. He speaks locally, regionally, and internationally on the issue of slavery, the slave trade and the law, colonization, and reparations.

Gill is a graduate of the University of the West Indies, and the Hugh Wooding Law School in Trinidad and Tobago. He obtained an LLM in Maritime Law from the International Maritime Law Institute in Malta and holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from Keller Graduate School of Management (DeVry University) in the United States.

Mr. Gill is currently the Chair of the Grenada National Reparations Committee and a member of the CARICOM Reparations Commission.

 

Laura Trevelyan is a British American journalist and leading advocate for the Caribbean’s reparatory justice agenda. Laura enjoyed a 30-year BBC career reporting from all over the UK and the world. She witnessed history unfold, reporting live from Belfast as Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement was negotiated in 1998, from the Trump HQ on election night in 2016, and from the steps of the US Capitol during riots on January 6th 2021. She also reported from the eye of a hurricane, on the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, from refugee camps in Darfur, and on UK, US and Brazilian elections.

Before leaving the BBC, Laura went on a historic trip to Grenada in February 2023 where the Trevelyans’ publicly apologised to the Grenadian people for the role of their ancestors in enslaving Africans on the island. Laura delivered the inaugural Sir Tom Hopkinson lecture in March 2024 where she called on the British government and its leading research institutions to make a financial commitment to preserve endangered archives in the Caribbean.

She is a co-founder of Heirs of Slavery, a group of British people whose ancestors profited from the enslavement of Africans in the Caribbean. Heirs of Slavery is encouraging other families with similar histories to acknowledge this fraught past, and calling on Britain’s government to engage in reparatory justice talks with Caribbean governments. She is participating in UNESCO’s first dialogue for reparatory justice.

Born in London, Laura has a first-class honours degree in politics from Bristol University and a post-graduate diploma in newspaper journalism from Cardiff University, and lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband James Goldston, former president of ABC News and now President of Candle True Stories, a global documentary company. Laura and James met while learning their journalistic trade at Cardiff. The couple has three grown-up sons.

Laura is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Chancellor of Cardiff University. She’s the author of two books, A Very British Family; The Trevelyans and their World, and The Winchester; An American Dynasty.