‘Any descendants of white plantation owners who have benefitted from the slave trade should be asked to pay reparations’
The family of Benedict Cumberbatch could soon face a legal battle and potential demands for reparation payments due to its slave-owning ancestors.
According to The Telegraph, the seventh great-grandfather of the Oscar-nominated star bought the Cleland plantation in Barbados in 1728, which was home to 250 slaves until the abolition of slavery.
The slave plantation is reported to have made the Cumberbatch family a small fortune as they were paid thousands of pounds in compensation when slavery was abolished.
The government of Barbados is reportedly preparing to fight for reparations from the ancestors of slave-owning families, which might include the Cumberbatch family.
Richard Drax, a Conservative MP, who has inherited his family’s ancestral sugar plantation, is under pressure to hand back hundreds of acres of real estate on the holiday island so that it can be turned into a monument to slavery, the publisher reported.
If Drax refuses, Barbados will seek to apply for compensation from an international arbitration court.
Any ruling in Barbados’s favour, The Telegraph suggested, 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, told the publication: “Any descendants of white plantation owners who have benefitted from the slave trade should be asked to pay reparations, including the Cumberbatch family.”
David Comissiong, Barbados’s ambassador to the Caribbean community and deputy chairman of the island’s national commission on reparations, also wants Drax and other slave-owning families to pay damages.
When pressed on whether the Cumberbatch’s family should pay damages, Comissiong said plans were at the “earliest stages” and “a lot of history is only really now coming to light”.
Cumberbatch’s ancestors were reportedly paid thousands of pounds in compensation when slavery was abolished in the 1830s, a sum now worth in the region of £1 million.
The 2012 film 12 Years Slave is based on the 1853 memoir of the same name by the former slave Solomon Northup. Northup was once owned by plantation owner William Ford, a historical figure represented on screen by Cumberbatch.
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