Reparations movement ‘at a tipping point’, says Denis O’Brien

With two significant developments this week, the call for reparations for the crime of transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans and chattel slavery is “at a tipping point”. That’s according to The Repair Campaign, a social movement for reparatory justice in the Caribbean. Speaking at an event for foreign correspondents on Tuesday, Portugal’s President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa acknowledged that Portugal was responsible for crimes committed during transatlantic slavery and the colonial era, and that there was a need “to see how we can repair this”. Rebelo de Sousa said Portugal “takes full responsibility” for the wrongs of the past and that those crimes, including colonial massacres, had costs. “We have to pay the costs,” he said. “Are there actions that were not punished and those responsible were not arrested? Are there goods that were looted and not returned? Let’s see how we can repair this.” Portugal trafficked nearly six million Africans—more than any European nation. Meanwhile, the imminent return to Jamaica by the University of Glasgow of a 170-year old lizard specimen known as a giant galliwasp and believed to have been collected in the 1850’s is the first repatriation of a natural history specimen in the Caribbean. This opens...