GEORGETOWN, Guyana – This announcement was made by the Vice-Chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC), Professor Verene Shepherd at a news conference held at the regional headquarters of The University of the West Indies (UWI) June 10; and also revealed that the CRC was in the process of preparing a new round of letters of demand to be presented to additional countries identified as participants in the trafficking of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean.
The news conference was called by the Centre for Reparation Research (CRR) at the UWI to share with the Caribbean public, findings from the 2018 expanded Slave Voyages Database created by Professor David Eltis and his team of researchers.
This database 2.0 established in 1999 and updated in 2008 and 2018, has revealed 1,000 additional voyages undertaken by slavers from European states that were participants in one form or another in the trade in Africans to CARICOM member states and Cuba and or slavery. Among the less-publicised names are Sweden, Switzerland, Russia, Norway Hanse Towns Brandenburg and the Duchy of Courland (Latvia).
The Slave Voyages Database brings together the work of scholars over four decades and across five continents to track the movements of ships, their countries of origin and the numbers of people who were forcibly taken halfway across the world to…
