Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby
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Dr. Sonjah Stanley Niaah
By Prince Moore
The Church of England's most senior bishop has revealed his family's ties to slavery in Jamaica.
The UK's Daily Mail newspaper reported on Tuesday that Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby had disclosed that his ancestor owned enslaved people on a plantation in Jamaica and was compensated by the British government when slavery was abolished.
In a personal statement, Dr Welby reaffirmed his commitment to addressing the legacies of slavery.
He revealed that he recently made the discovery that his late biological father, Sir Anthony Montague Browne, who was a private secretary to Winston Churchill, 'had an ancestral connection to the enslavement of people in Jamaica and Tobago'.
Montague Browne, the son of a British army colonel, was born in May 1923.
He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and then joined the RAF.
He died in 2013 aged 89.
First step
In response to this development, Dr. Sonjah Stanley Niaah, Director of the Centre for Reparation Research at the University of the West Indies, Mona, said admission by the Archbishop of Canterbury of his family's ties to slavery in Jamaica is an important first step.
But, she said there is need for real action for reparation as outlined in the CARICOM Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice.
"What we would want is real action in relation to repair," she told Radio Jamaica News, while acknowlwedging that the Church of England has already provided £100 million "in terms of its own acknowledgment and contribution to this repair."
"I think these steps are important; I would want to see many more of those steps being made by families, institutions, but most of all, by a state, such as Britain," she said.
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