Benedict Cumberbatch may be forced to compensate for ancestors’ role in slave trade: Report

Benedict Cumberbatch’s family could be asked to compensate to Barbados on behalf of his ancestors’ role in the slave trade.

Cumberbatch played the role of a plantation owner in the Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave, bought the Barbados, in 1728.

His seventh great-grandfather purchased a plantation in the Cleland plantation in St Andrew, Barbados in 1728, per The Telegraph. Abraham Parry Cumberbatch was paid thousands of pounds in compensation by the British government after slavery was abolished. The slave plantation reportedly added to the Cumberbatch family’s wealth.

The plantation then became home to 250 slaves until slavery was abolished more than 100 years later. When the Slavery Abolition Act was put into place in 1834 - effectively outlawing the practice within the British Empire - the government of the day compensated slave-owning operations and individuals for their losses.

The Cumberbatch family were handed £6,000 in compensation for their loss of 'human property' - in today's money that amounts to around £3.6 million. The British Government at the time had taken out a loan to repay slave owners across the Empire. It was a total of £20 million (£17 billion today), taking up a whopping 40 per cent of the government budget, which was only repaid as recently as 2015.

The government in Barbados is now in the process of fighting for the ancestors of slave-owning families to pay back reparations.

Barbados's National Task Force on Reparations, part of the Caricom Reparations Commission (Caricom), previously focused on seeking reparations from colonial powers and wealthy institutions that made hefty profits from slavery, The Guardian reported. Recently, however, it singled out a specific family for the first time, targeting the British Conservative MP Richard Drax over his family's ownership of a vast sugar plantation on the island.

David Comissiong, the Barbados ambassador to Caricom and deputy chairman of the state's task force, told the outlet last month that Drax and other families could face litigation if they don't agree to pay reparations. “It is now a matter that is before the government of Barbados,” he told the newspaper. “It is being dealt with at the highest level.”

Now, the Cumberbatch family faces being targeted for reparations claim. When pressed by The Telegraph on whether Cumberbatch's family would be pursued, Comissiong did not rule it out.

He said, “This is at the earliest stages. We are just beginning. A lot of this history is only really now coming to light.”