- Reparatory justice now centers compensation for gender-based violence, elevating survivors' harms within global demands for redress.
- Acknowledgment rescues erased histories of extreme sexual violence and reproductive exploitation, enslaved women treated as property, captured by women were currency.
- Legacies persist: misogynoir, adultification, and ignored grooming of Black girls continue harms and shape contemporary racialized gender violence.
- Remembering resistance: Black women were central freedom fighters; reparatory focus can broaden scholarship and support rising Black women historians.
Sarah, Betty, Doll, Nan – just a few of the names commonly given to enslaved African women during the transatlantic slave trade.
We know that they would have suffered unspeakable sexual violence. But now that history is being given greater prominence.
Last month, Ghana hosted an “historic” reparations conference, where the Caribbean Community (Caricom) presented its updated 10-point plan for reparative justice. Billed as Next Steps, the event was the first major gathering since the landmark UN resolution in March to declare the transatlantic slave trade as the gravest crime against humanity. It concluded with the adoption of a global framework for reparatory justice, including a call for formal apologies, fair compensation and debt relief.
What was particularly striking was the specific demand for compensation for gender-based violence, placing the issue front and centre in the global campaign for repair and redress. Speaking at the conference, Ghana’s president, John Mahama, said “the historical experiences of women and girls cannot remain footnotes in the global narrative”.
I spoke with Prof Olivette Otele, a historian, about why the move to address what the feminist activist and writer Stella Dadzie has described as the “historical amnesia” about the horrors experienced by enslaved women has been a long time coming.
Resurrecting history
“As somebody who has been working on this history for several decades, I am very happy,” says Otele, a distinguished research professor of the legacies and memory of slavery at Soas University of London who serves on the Guardian’s Legacies of Enslavement advisory panel. “There was a lot of consultation about this. This is something that was missing. We can finally share that history, but also the role that women played and the extreme violence they experienced.”
Of the 20 million Africans forcefully transported across the Atlantic, about 30% were women, and 1.2 million experienced sexual violence, according to data in the Caricom plan. A 2023 report by Brattle on reparations for transatlantic chattel slavery said it was “reasonable to assume that 100% of enslaved women over the age of 10 were subjected to sexual abuse by enslavers”.
During the transatlantic slave trade, a child took the legal status of the mother through partus sequitur ventrem (“that which is born follows the womb”), which was codified in 1662 in Virginia, then a British colony. “From that moment it meant that, as an enslaved woman, you were the property of the owner,” Otele says. “Women were currency, they could be bought, exchanged. They were a reproductive tool being impregnated to extract more enslaved people, more labour, more profit.”
The legacies of that history continue today, Otele says, in misogynoir (the term coined by the Black feminist Moya Bailey to refer to a form of prejudice and sexism directed at Black women) and the adultification of young Black girls through to the trope of the angry Black woman.
“I think this will open the debate on gender-based violence,” she says, adding that, just as it is right that the grooming of white working-class girls is finally being discussed, the experiences of Black girls should also be acknowledged. We talk about the grooming of white working-class girls, but “we never talk about the grooming of young Black girls”, she says. “They are at the bottom of the social ladder like young white girls, yet their stories are ignored.”
Resistance fighters
But it is also important to remember the role of Black women in resistance – freedom fighters such as Queen Nzinga of Ndongo (now Angola), or Solitude, a dual-heritage woman from Guadeloupe who fought French colonial troops sent by Napoleon to reinstate enslavement while pregnant (she was executed the day after she gave birth), Nanny of the Maroons in Jamaica, Nanny Grigg in Barbados.
“Women were always at the forefront of resistance and Black liberation,” Otele says. “They were working in the houses so would have information about what was happening in the master’s house.”
What next?
Historians including Hilary Beckles, Barbara Bush, Verene Shepherd and Stella Dadzie have shed light on this forgotten history, but there is more to be done, Otele says.
“For those who have looked at this history I applaud them, but very few Black women have been able to do so,” she says. “For a long time it’s been said they would be too partial.
“But there are a handful of Black women coming up who are working on this history who are now mid-career. I hope this will open the door.”
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Editor’s picks
Regional spotlight
Manchester | I hosted an afternoon tea event last month. Our caterer, Oh You Pretty Things, delivered a wonderful spread of Manchester food. One highlight was the Vimto mocktails.
Many Mancunians are enthusiastically proud of this delightful brand, who history is so representative of the Manchester experience. John Noel Nichols was 25 when he created it in 1908. The international trademark is registered in Guyana (previously known as British Guyana). Its success in the US was due to its popularity across many countries in Africa and Asia.
The brand has managed to stay relevant and radical throughout the years, including winning an award in 2018 for its anti-advertising campaign and creating mascots such as Justin the Vimtoad that resonate and get their story of vim and vigour across. Keisha Thompson, Manchester programme manager
Sea Islands | The Sea Islands and coastal lands of the 12,000 sq mile Gullah Geechee corridor are more than just a physical place; it is where our indigenous African culture and traditions survived, flourished, and continue to persist.
One of our top priorities for repair in descendant communities is addressing land loss and promoting responsible land stewardship. Historically, African American families have experienced significant land loss due to discriminatory policies and practices, including delinquent tax sales, eminent domain and heirs’ property title disputes. These systemic barriers have contributed to the loss of generational wealth and community stability.
Land loss remains a critical issue affecting Black communities across the US, making efforts to preserve, protect and restore land ownership an essential part of our work in advancing equity and justice. To be displaced from Gullah Geechee lands is to disrupt more than a home; it unsettles one’s very being and the anchored connections to who we be. Angel Parson, US south-east programme manager
Jamaica | Officials will travel to the UK on 6 September to formally lodge a petition with King Charles to seek legal guidance on their slavery reparations claim from Britain, Jamaica’s culture minister Olivia Grange, has confirmed. She also announced a plan to raise public awareness about why reparations are important. Her ministry will be producing a “One Hundred Discussion Points on Reparations” document and integrating “reparatory justice and the history of our people in the curriculum of all schools at every level of education” – further evidence that the Caribbean is serious about pursuing reparations and is taking concrete steps towards an outcome. Natricia Duncan, Caribbean correspondent
What we’re enjoying
This month I really enjoyed Hurvin Anderson’s first major solo show at Tate Britain in London. Anderson is a master at using vibrant colour and perspective to create lush Caribbean landscapes that you want to walk into. But seeing so many works together really brings home how the concepts of time and distance cleverly infuse Anderson’s thinking, and how meaning can be inscribed and deciphered by returning to the same images over several years.
Anderson, who was was born in Handsworth, Birmingham, with parents from Jamaica, creates art that touches on nostalgia and community, departures and disconnection. In many works, particularly the Passenger Opportunity, the eras of enslavement, colonialism, Windrush migration, and the present all speak to one another like a wall of cinematic memories. There are so many stirring and thought-provoking works; personally, I just want to go back and sit among the dappled purple leaves of Wait a Moment. Courtney Yusuf, audio producer
