Some residents of the historic Codrington Estate in St John are feeling shut out of a multimillion-dollar reparations project they say is meant to benefit them.
They are calling on the Codrington Trust to open real lines of communication on the roughly 700-acre estate, stretching from Consett Bay to The Lodge School, which has stood since the 1700s.
“The trust is not communicating with the people,” long-time resident Ian Brathwaite told the DAILY NATION.
Keith Forde, who has been raising concerns about the project, said the $18 million reparations initiative – set to be disbursed at $1.8 million a year over ten years – was developed without any real consultation with the people living on the estate.
“We’ve got documentation from the USPG [United Society Partners in the Gospel] confirming that there has not been any consultation with the residents on the estate. The only thing the residents will be consulted on is how the burial places should be memorialised.
“When you look at the make-up of the project, you’ve only got two parties – the Codrington Trust and the USPG – and no representative of the tenants. Simply by that fact, it cannot be a reparative project for the atrocities that were committed on the estate,” Forde charged.
He also raised questions about the source of the project’s proposals.
“They’re saying there was a report done in 2020,” he said, while questioning why a copy of it was not provided.
He pointed to a United Kingdom architecture firm’s website describing a project it did for the trust, aimed at helping it “attract investors so they can provide themselves with a stable financial future” – proposals he said closely resembled the road-repair plan now being pitched to tenants as reparative justice.
“If proposals are meant to put you in a steady financial future, how is that reparative justice on the estate?” he asked.
Brathwaite, who helped form the Farmers and Tenants Union out of one of the project’s early public meetings, described being turned away from a more recent meeting at Codrington College.
“The guard came politely to us and told us no one knew about the meeting and asked us to leave,” he said.
Residents said they had also asked the trust for copies of its accounts going back ten to 15 years, without success.
Asked what reparations should look like, Forde called for a medical programme addressing hereditary illnesses linked to slavery-era diets, an education programme spanning primary through tertiary levels, and a genuine voice for residents in managing the estate.
“At the end of the day, it is we that are living on the estate. Anything that happens on this estate would affect us, not them,” he said.
Efforts were made to get a response from the Codrington Trust on the residents’ concerns. When Anglican Bishop of Barbados Michael Maxwell, one of the trustees, was contacted, he referred all queries to Kevin Farmer, the trust’s executive secretary.
Farmer indicated he would be in a position to address questions on the matter next week, once he has returned to the island. (DDS)
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