The University of Glasgow is trying to acknowledge and atone for its past.
Last year a university report found that the school benefited greatly from the profits of slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries. Donations received by the university at the time would amount to between $27 million and $320 million today.
But now the university hopes to catch up on that.
In a ceremony on Friday, the school signed an agreement with the University of the Caribbean Antilles.
The University of Glasgow says it will raise and spend £20m (C$32m) to make amends over the next 20 years by building the Glasgow-Caribbean Center for Development Research.
Graham Campbell, Glasgow alderman and campaigner for Afro-Caribbean issues in Scotland, was an adviser to the report. Here is part of his conversation with As it happens guest host Helen Mann on the historic deal.
You were at Friday’s ceremony at the University of Glasgow where a Jamaican flag was raised on campus. What does it mean for you to see this at this time?
It meant a lot to us.
This is the first time, as far as I know, that the flag of the University of Glasgow has been flown. So it was a very great privilege for us to see this happen.
It was a very emotional day for us as the University of the West Indies and the University of Glasgow put together this truly historic memorandum.
A beautiful plaque was unveiled and the universities made a very strong gesture of restorative justice.
What exactly has the University of Glasgow pledged to do with this £20m?
It will be a Caribbean department for research.
He will make scholarships. He will, of course, do specialized studies and this commitment, I suppose, to the truth.
It was slightly misreported as we award £20m in reparations. That’s not quite it. But this is certainly not the last gesture of restorative justice. We expect much more.
What it has done is put the idea into British institutions, particularly Scottish ones, that we need to fix. We have to make amends.
Tell me what you hope this decision will accomplish – not just within the University of Glasgow – but in broader terms, beyond the university as well, by looking at the past and addressing it.
The historical memory of Scotland, shall we say, has been that of an organized forgetting of the legacy of slavery and colonialism.
Scots tend to see this as an English thing. When in fact Glasgow was very deeply involved in slavery and in fact was one of the main beneficiaries in that the city was enriched with three products produced from enslaved Africans and of plantations. These were tobacco, sugar and cotton.
These were the cheap substances that British ships carried with enslaved Africans as part of the Triangular Trade.
One cannot therefore speak of these goods without slavery as Glasgow, unfortunately, in its history, has done.
We have a legend of merchants, tobacco merchants, sugar lords, cotton kings – but we also forgot slavery in this story.
the BBC spoke to an academic who questions that effort and said, “To suggest that people alive today are responsible for the sins of their ancestors is a step too far.” As institutions like the University of Glasgow grapple with how to make up for past links to slavery, what do you say to people like this academic who oppose either reconciliation or reparations or both?
I would say, first of all, to this one in particular…go read some other books. You are a profoundly ignorant person.
So you think anyone with that view is profoundly ignorant?
I think this person is profoundly ignorant. I think it’s no surprise that there’s general ignorance amongst the public because of course we weren’t told Scotland had this [history].
Even if you made the history of the slave trade in the Atlantic, you were not told that Scotland was part of it. You’ve been told about Liverpool, Bristol and London, maybe, if you learned that at school.
In international law, it is an accepted fact that reparations are paid in situations where countries pay for historical crimes of the past.
The Japanese do it for the South Koreans, for the comfort women. The Holocaust is reparations paid by Germany, Austria and Switzerland, still to this day and will be for some time.
So if that’s true of the Holocaust, how true is that of a crime, a holocaust that lasted nearly 300 years, that robbed Africa, West Africa, of its working-age population, of its best, youngest, fittest and brightest, destroyed its economy, then helped build the new world?
It cannot be said that slavery did not massively benefit the development of Western Europe and North America.
We inherited this wealth – and I say we, I mean all the citizens who live in these countries now, including myself – we inherit these buildings, these institutions, these structures, which derive their wealth from these things.
It is still current money. It’s not spent money. There are still scholarships from those slave plantation origins, which pay for scientists, engineers to do scholarships now. So it’s not the past. People are now taking advantage of this money.
Writes John McGill. Produced by Katie Geleff. The questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
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