Jamaica wants Britain to pay for slavery

From his bungalow on a hill in western Jamaica, Willie Thompson surveys the same lush valley that one of his great-great-grandmothers was forced to harvest for sugar cane more than 180 years ago.

"I am an African descendant," he says, whippet-thin and grizzled at 78. "She came here with the chains on her feet, on a slave trade ship."

Thompson knows that when Parliament voted in 1833 to abolish slavery in Britain's colonies, Earl Grey's government was made to pay compensation of almost £2-billion (R36-billion) in today's money.

And, after an exhausting day spent scratching out a living by farming yams, he wonders what might have been if Nana Bracket and her comrades, rather than the ancestor of British Prime Minister David Cameron who owned them, had received the equivalent of £415000 today. "The English made a lot of money back then. A lot of money," he says, with a sigh. "I think it is fair for we to get a bit of compensation for what all our people been through."

A coalition of 14 Caribbean states, including Jamaica, agrees with Thompson and is now mounting the first united campaign for reparations from Britain over its role in the Atlantic slave trade.

The group is ready to sue in the courts and has hired Leigh Day, the London law firm that last year won £20-million for Kenyans tortured by the British during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s.

This month it will unveil a list of 10 demands for Britain, France and the Netherlands, including funds likely to total billions.

Professor Verene Shepherd, the chairman of Jamaica's reparations committee, said British colonisers had disfigured the Caribbean.

"The planters were given compensation, but not one cent went to the freed Jamaicans."