The granddaughter of former South African President Nelson Mandela has demanded that the British Royal Family pay reparations for its role in colonialism in Africa.
In an interview on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, Ndileka Mandela, said that for “healing” to begin, the Royal Family of the United Kingdom should commit to paying reparations to black people.
“If there can be an acknowledgement of what was done to countries to colonise because we are still suffering a great deal from colonisation, in as far as our culture as Black people is concerned,” she said.
When pressed if she thought the Royal Family specifically should pay reparations, the climate activist and eldest grandchild of Nelson Mandela said: “Yes I would. That’s where healing begins.”
“So there has got to be first admission of the fact that yes, we acknowledge that we displaced you as a people. Then we can talk of reparations,” she continued.
Following the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in Britain following the death of George Floyd in the United States in 2020, there have been growing calls from leftists within the UK and former colonies for the country to give out reparations to the descendants of those impacted by the slave trade or colonialism.
This comes despite the fact that Britain was arguably the most active country in stamping out the slave trade, paying dearly in treasure and blood to do so.
Following the passage of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807 — the first country in the history of the world to do so — the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron captured an estimated 1,600 slave trade ships and freed some 150,000 African slaves.
The British government was not only a central actor in ending the Transatlantic slave trade but the Barbary and East African slave trades as well. During its efforts to stamp out slavery, some 1,587 British sailors lost their lives.
Mandela, who was speaking from the United Nations COP28 climate change conference in the oil-rich Arabian nation of Dubai, went on to claim that “climate apartheid” was a result of colonial history in Africa.
The South African activist was not alone at the green agenda summit in blaming colonialism for the allegedly disproportionate impact of supposedly man-made climate change on developing countries in the so-called ‘Global South’.
Socialist Bolivian Vice President David Choquehuanca claimed in Dubai that “neocolonial, capitalist, imperialist, patriarchal, Western culture” was to blame for “Mother Earth” being in crisis.
The in-name-only ‘Conservative’ government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in the United Kingdom has previously expressed support for the notion of wealthier Western nations sending its wealth to countries like Pakistan as climate change “reparations”.
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