Dear Editor,
On September 20th, President Irfaan Ali appeared on Good Morning Britain in the UK, to make the case for reparations for the original crime and ongoing legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. The public was treated to an example of white supremacy in action, in the offensive, insulting, dismissive, patronising and frankly racist behaviour of the interviewer Richard Madeley. We know the answer to the question of whether Madeley would dare to interview President Joe Biden of the US or President Emmanuel Macron of France in this way. The behaviour was shocking but perhaps not surprising to witness. Madeley’s privilege is not divorced from his country’s colonial past, even if his Prime Minister Rishi Sunak so far stubbornly refuses to acknowledge this. Just on Guyana, he might want to humble up himself and consider what Nick Draper wrote in the Stabroek News diaspora column some ten years ago: “The data show that across the whole of the Caribbean, the biggest single awards by far were concentrated in the territories that today make up Guyana. All of the top 12 awards paid worldwide to slave-owners, and a staggering 96 of the top 100 awards, were paid to slave-owners for enslaved people in Demerara, Berbice and Essequibo, together then known as British Guiana.”
President Ali did us all proud. He is to be commended for the calm and pointed way in which he responded to the entitled and illiterate table thumper, including emphasising that the palaces – and wealth – of the UK were made possible through empire, the blood, sweat, tears and material resources extracted from colonised bodies and lands. And that we are no longer ‘owned’ or indentured. I watched clips of the President’s elegant response and the exchange, and then immediately went to listen to The Mighty Sparrow’s (in)famous calypso, Phillip My Dear, about a man in the Queen’s bedroom, spelling out the intimacies of empire and power that Madeley was so infuriated to have to consider.
Reparations. Now.
Sincerely,
Alissa Trotz
