To my distant cousin Justin Welby: our family’s slavery history is truly awful. Let’s be open about it

I don’t know my newfound cousin Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury. We’re not close, in any sense. But we do have a mutual great-great-great-grandfather: Sir James Fergusson of Kilkerran, who died in 1838. He is five generations back on Welby’s side, six on mine. It is not as wildly unlikely as you may think – at six removes we all have 128 grandparents. But this particular historical figure is significant because of what he and tens of thousands of British people like him did – the fallout of which is still dividing and toxifying society today. Welby’s statement confessing Fergusson’s slave-owning past shows he may not know much about our shared forefathers. So here is some detail. Fergusson and the generation before him were owners of enslaved Black people in Jamaica and, for a while, Tobago. There were 160 to 200 people at any one time at the Jamaican sugar plantation Rozelle, with 75 at Bloody Bay in Tobago. It was an ongoing massacre. In the worst years, more than 20% of the adults died, mostly from disease and violence; infant deaths were so common they were not recorded. Before 1807, the year shipping humans from Africa was abolished,...