Antigua wants Harvard to step up reparation payments

Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne. Gov’t of Antigua and Barbuda Sign up for our Caribbean Life email newsletter to get news, updates, and local insights delivered straight to your inbox! Antigua’s government has lashed out at the world famous Harvard University saying the time has come for it to begin making reparation payments to the island for the millions it made during the colonial era from the trans Atlantic African slave trade. Speaking on a weekend radio program, Prime Minister Gaston Browne argued that the university has a direct connection and link to Antigua and Barbuda having benefited from free slave labor that helped the school to establish its early wealth and its general foundations. He spoke as a team from Harvard’s & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative was on the island in recent days to research the university’s links with Antigua and to try to trace and identify the descendants of enslaved individuals who were attached or linked in any way to plantations a planter named Isaac Royal Jr. who had invested and had owned the Royal plantation that is listed as the financier of some very early programs at Harvard’s law school. So far researchers say...