On September 7, United Society Partners in the Gospel (USPG) began acting on its earlier promise to give £7 million to the descendants of enslaved people in Barbados.
The Rev. Dr. Duncan Dormor of USPG said the project is an effort to embody an apology offered by Rowan Williams in 2006, when he served as Archbishop of Canterbury.
“That apology included and covered USPG,” Dormor said in The Guardian. “However, I felt that we had not expressed our regret and remorse with enough seriousness and detail. Just to say, ‘We’re sorry’ — sorry for what, and what are we going to do about it?”
The project will focus on communities living on the estate surrounding Codrington College in eastern Barbados. The estate was owned by royal governor and planter Christopher Codrington, and was among the largest of Barbados’ plantations at the time of his death in 1710. He bequeathed it to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which later became USPG. Codrington College, the oldest Anglican theological college in the Western Hemisphere, was built by the SPG on the estate grounds in 1714.
USPG announced its plan in September 2023. “USPG is deeply ashamed of our past links to slavery,” Dormor said then. “We recognize that it is not simply enough to repent in thought and word, but we must take action, working in partnership with Codrington, where the descendants of enslaved persons are still deeply impacted by the generational trauma that came from the Codrington Plantations.”
USPG and the Codrington Trust have appointed an 11-member steering committee, which includes local residents and regional representatives such as the Caribbean historian Sir Hilary Beckles. Beckles is chairman of a Caribbean Community Commission (Caricom) that seeks reparations from countries that facilitated and benefited from centuries of chattel slavery.
David Comissiong, the Barbados ambassador to Caricom and the deputy chair of the Barbados National Task Force on Reparations, welcomed the project: “While the task force considers the Codrington project to be a social justice project grounded in the principles of ecumenism rather than a ‘reparations’ or ‘reparatory justice’ project, we still feel obliged to put on record our admiration of the Christian spirit of justice that has been evinced by both the USPG and the Church Commissioners — the two entities of the Church of England that have thus far publicly acknowledged their implication in the crime of African enslavement and their determination to make some form of recompense.
“We believe that the words and actions of these two Anglican religious bodies have the potential to help generate significant breakthroughs in Caricom’s reparations claims against both the Church of England and the national government of the U.K. and to help usher in a new era of reparatory justice, reconciliation and brotherhood, and we invite the USPG to augment the power of the initiative they have undertaken by committing to a ‘reparations conversation’ with our task force.”
