An Inheritance We Cannot Refuse

Some months ago, Canada abstained from a landmark United Nations General Assembly resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans the gravest crime against humanity. Resolution 80/250, led by Ghana, passed with 123 votes in favour, three against and 52 abstentions. Jamaica and the rest of CARICOM supported it. Canada did not. That abstention matters now.

On September 6, Jamaica sent a government delegation to Britain to petition King Charles III, Jamaica’s head of state, to refer three questions concerning slavery and reparatory justice to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Jamaica asked Britain to confront slavery’s legal consequences and their continuing effects. The King responded with an agreement to refer the request. But the petition raises a question closer to home: what does Canada owe to its own history of slavery, racial dispossession and inherited inequality?

Canada prefers another story about itself: the northern terminus of the Underground Railroad, where enslaved African Americans fled toward freedom. That history is real, but incomplete. Slavery existed in the French and British colonies that became Canada. More than 4,000 people of African descent were enslaved in territories that became Canada; Indigenous people were enslaved here too. Canada was part of the slaveholding Atlantic world.

Nova Scotia makes this history especially clear. Loyalists arriving after the American Revolution brought enslaved people with them as property. More than 3,000 Black Loyalists also arrived after Britain promised freedom to enslaved people who supported the Crown. They were promised land, yet many received smaller or inferior plots, delayed grants, or no land at all. Freedom came without the material conditions necessary to make freedom meaningful.

The connection to Jamaica is direct. In 1796, nearly 600 Jamaican Maroons were forcibly relocated to Nova Scotia after resisting British colonial rule. They laboured on the Halifax Citadel and Government House before many left for Sierra Leone. Jamaica and Nova Scotia therefore share histories of enslavement, deportation, resettlement and struggles over land.

The date of Jamaica’s petition is symbolically charged. On September 6, 1781, the slave ship Zong departed the West African coast for Jamaica carrying more than 400 captive Africans. During the voyage, more than 130 African men, women and children were thrown alive into the Atlantic. The ship’s owners did not face a murder prosecution. Instead, the deaths became an insurance dispute: the owners sought compensation for Africans treated as lost cargo. In Gregson v. Gilbert, law converted human beings into property and mass killing into financial loss.

September 6 should matter to Canadians too. The Zong belonged to an Atlantic legal and economic order in which British North America also participated. The deeper issue is not simply history. It is inheritance. What have we inherited?

We usually understand inheritance literally: houses, land, money and estates. But societies also inherit institutions, racial classifications, political arrangements and assumptions about ownership and belonging. Figurative inheritances often protect literal ones. Canada’s history of slavery cannot be confined to a commemorative footnote because racial hierarchies shaping land, labour and political membership did not disappear with emancipation.

Africville tells a later chapter. For generations, the Black community on the northern edge of Halifax paid municipal taxes while being denied many public services. In the 1960s, Halifax demolished the community in the name of urban renewal. Africville was not slavery, and the two should not be collapsed. Its significance is that inherited relations of race, property, land and belonging can assume new institutional forms. The question is what relations endure.

Law presents a striking paradox. Estates pass between generations, trusts endure, corporations possess legal continuity, and property titles remain recognizable across centuries. Yet when descendants of enslaved or dispossessed peoples point to injuries whose consequences have crossed generations, history is declared too remote. We recognize inherited wealth while resisting inherited injury. Canada’s abstention exposes that contradiction. Reparatory justice begins where commemoration is no longer enough.

Jamaica is right to ask what responsibility follows from slavery. Canadians should hear an echo. What responsibilities follow from slavery in colonial Canada, unequal treatment of Black Loyalists, displacement of Black communities, and institutions formed within racial orders whose effects continued after formal emancipation? These questions require us to ask something larger: what do we owe each other?

That question has literal and figurative dimensions. Land, money, education, institutional investment and redistribution matter. But reparatory justice cannot stop with compensation. We must also ask what inherited arrangements should no longer govern our lives. Must repair always be administered from above? Must Canadian identity still imagine slavery as primarily an American or Caribbean problem?

Canada cannot celebrate the Underground Railroad while marginalizing enslaved people who lived here, Black Loyalists whose promised land was withheld, Jamaican Maroons forcibly relocated to Nova Scotia, or Black communities displaced in the name of progress. Grassroots reparatory imagination is therefore indispensable. Repair might mean restoring land, strengthening communal landholding, investing in education and health, teaching Canada’s slavery alongside Black Loyalist dispossession, the Maroons and Africville, and building diasporic networks through which Black communities exchange resources and knowledge. Reparatory justice is not simply about settling an old account. It is about deciding what relationships should replace the ones we inherited.

Jamaica’s September 6 petition matters because it demands that Britain confront what it helped create. Canada’s abstention matters because the struggle is not merely over how slavery is remembered, but over what follows from that history now. Yet injustice is not all we inherited. We also inherited marronage, Black Loyalist struggle and collective resistance. Inheritance is both material and imaginative.

Property, wealth and debt travel across generations. So do racial hierarchies, political traditions, and possibilities for living otherwise. Jamaica asked the King what Britain owes. Canada should support the asking, while confronting its own inheritance: enslavement within its colonies, unequal freedom after emancipation, Black Loyalist dispossession, the forced relocation of Jamaican Maroons and the destruction of Africville. The larger reparatory question belongs here too: What have we inherited? What must be repaired? What must be refused? And what kinds of relationships can we build from here? That is where reparatory justice moves beyond settling the past. It becomes the work of making new worlds – a new kind of freedom.