The Americas | Slavery reparations

Blood money

Pressure grows for compensation for the Caribbean trade

|PORT OF SPAIN

LAST month Rodney Leon, a Haitian-American architect, won a competition for a memorial to victims of the slave trade. His white marble “Ark of Return”, shaped somewhat like a paper boat, will stand outside the UN headquarters in New York. Inside the building, some Caribbean leaders have used their annual General Assembly speaking slots to call for financial compensation for this great wrong. “We have recently seen a number of leaders apologising,” said the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Baldwin Spencer. They should now “match their words with concrete and material benefits”.

This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline “Blood money”

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