Benedict Cumberbatch (London, age 46) has occasionally admitted that his family’s slave-owning past in Barbados weighs heavily on him. Something that could now become additionally expensive. The Caribbean country, a former British colony that proclaimed an independent republic in November 2021 – after 396 years under the control of the British monarchy – plans to sue the descendants of cotton and sugar plantation owners, including the actor’s family, who played a plantation owner in New Orleans in 12 Years a Slave (2013). The interpreter, made famous by his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes in the acclaimed BBC series Sherlock, could reckon with the damage his 18th- and 19th-century ancestors wreaked on The Telegraph newspaper in the not-too-distant future.
“All descendants of white plantation owners who benefited from the slave trade should be required to pay reparations, including the Cumberbatch family,” David Denny, general secretary of the Caribbean Movement for Peace and Peace Movement, told the same British newspaper Integration. In recent months, the Barbados government has accelerated the establishment of a commission tasked with investigating and taking action to repair the damage caused by slave-owning families. “The money should be used to convert local clinics into hospitals, support schools and improve the country’s infrastructure and housing,” Denny added in his statements to The Telegraph.
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to clear debts
Cumberbatch recently acknowledged that he accepted his role in Amazing Grace (2006), a film that tells of British MP William Wilberforce’s fight against the slave trade in the 18th century and its abolition in 1807, as well as the Oscar-winning 12 years Slavery (2013), was trying to pay off debts with the damage done by their ancestors.
The co-protagonist of the Doctor Strange saga (2016) also recounted that when he was just starting out as an actor, his mother suggested that he change his real last name in order to avoid future claims for damages for his family’s slave-trading past, as reported by the British newspaper The Guardian in 2014, a year after the premiere of the acclaimed Steve McQueen film.
Joshua Cumberbatch, the actor’s great-grandfather’s great-grandfather, acquired the Cleland plantation (in the south of the country) in 1728 to grow sugar in northern Barbados, where they owned up to 250 slaves. The lands were in the hands of the family for almost a century, from which they amassed their wealth. After the abolition of slavery in 1834, the then British government awarded pecuniary compensation to landowners who lost their land and the Cumberbatch clan was then paid £6,000 (€6,780), an amount which currently stands at one million (€1,129,813). euros), according to calculations by The Telegraph.
But Cumberbatch’s family isn’t the only ones under the Barbados government’s radar: British MP and Conservative Party member Richard Drax, who inherited the territory’s largest sugar plantation, has already been ordered by the island to return his property and to pay for the damage caused. Drax is under pressure to return the land to the country and if he refuses, the Barbados government will seek redress in an international tribunal, The Guardian reported last November. If the verdict goes in favor of the island, the politician will be the first descendant of slave-owning families to be successfully prosecuted. Something that could become the perfect backdrop for the Cumberbatch clan to be one of the next to pay. “It’s still in the early stages. Much of that history is now coming to light,” David Commissiong, Ambassador of Barbados to the Caribbean Community and Vice President of the country’s National Reparations Commission, told The Telegraph.