David Cameron Tells Jamaicans to Get Over Slavery — Yet His Family Profited From Slave Labor

David Cameron is in Jamaica on a state visit this week, and he had a request of his Caribbean hosts: move on from slavery and forget about reparations.

He didn’t say it so bluntly, but it’s pretty easy to read between the lines and interpret the meaning behind what he said.

Here are his exact words, said during his speech at Jamaica’s parliament and reported by the BBC.

“I do hope that, as friends who have gone through so much together since those darkest of times, we can move on from this painful legacy and continue to build for the future.”

Jamaica and the rest of the the British Caribbean has been calling on Downing Street to pay reparations to the descendants of slaves for some time now. But, as the Guardian reports, Downing Street has gone on record to say that they don’t believe that apologies for slavery and monetary reparations will heal this painful legacy of slavery that Cameron spoke about.

Sir Hilary Beckles, the chair of the Caribbean Reparations Commission, demanded that Britain address the reparations issue ahead of Cameron’s visit to the island. He addressed Cameron directly in an open lettler published in the Jamaica Observer.

“You are a grandson of the Jamaican soil who has been privileged and enriched by your forebears’ sins of the enslavement of our ancestors… You are, Sir, a prized product of this land and the bonanza benefits reaped by your family and inherited by you continue to bind us together like birds of a feather.”

If you’re wondering why he says “grandson of Jamaican soil,” then you may not know that David Cameron has a family connection to people who participated and benefited from the Atlantic Slave Trade.

Documents unearthed in 2013 reveal that many of the wealthiest families in Britain made their fortunes from slavery and from the reparations that were paid to British slave-owners after slavery was abolished. According to an article in the Independent, published in 2013, one-fifth of rich Victorian Britons accumulated all or at least a portion of their fortunes from slavery.

“There was a feeding frenzy around the compensation,” said Dr Nick Draper from the University College London, who examined the compensation papers. One family who owned over 450 slaves was given £20,511, which would be about £17m today.

David Cameron also had a relative who got reparations for owning slaves. The records indicate that Cameron’s cousin six times removed, General Sir James Duff, received reparations for his “freed” slaves on the Grange Estate in Jamaica.

He was paid £4,101, the equivalent to more than £3m today.

There’s more. According to the records, published in a Guardian article, Cameron’s wife also has family connections to the slave trade. She is the descendant of William Jolliffe, who received £4,000 in compensation for 164 slaves after owning an estate in St Lucia.

There’s no record of David Cameron making a comment on this revelation.

But when TV-chef Ainsley Harriott discovered that he had slave-owners in his family background, he expressed shock and disappointment that the slaves themselves were never compensated.

“You would think the government would have given at least some money to the freed slaves who need to find homes and start new lives,” he said. “It seems a bit barbaric. It’s like the rich protecting the rich.”

The David Cameron Jamaica trip is meant to strengthen ties between the Caribbean and Britain at a time when new trading partners like China and Venezuela are investing in the islands, an article on BBC News notes.

He’s the first sitting British prime minister to visit Jamaica in 14 years, and it looks like he’s going to continue to focus on “the future” and dismiss the topic of reparations and “centuries-old” issues.

But Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, while she was “aware of the obvious sensitivities” David Cameron mentioned, maintained that Jamaica was “involved in a process under the auspices of the Caribbean Community [Caricom] to engage the UK on the matter.”

So, in other words, the reparations discussion isn’t over.

[Photo by Paul Ellis / Getty Images]