First Minister Humza Yousaf has been urged to take a stand on the payment of reparations for Scotland’s role in the slave trade, starting by backing the return of a £1.6 million school fund to Jamaica.
The Scottish Government failed to intervene in the future of the ***** Bequest under the leadership of former first minister Nicola Sturgeon, despite demands for a resolution from historians, teaching unions and SNP MSPs.
The fund was established following the death in 1828 of Forres-born slave trader James Dick, with the money to be used to support parish schoolmasters in the counties of Aberdeenshire, Banff and Moray. To this day, it still distributes grants for teachers and school equipment in the north-east.
However, its future has been under scrutiny since two historians, David Alston and Donald Morrison, published a paper in 2021 that said the bequest was “a direct legacy of slavery and the slave trade”. They called for the money to be redirected to benefit schools in Jamaica.
Now, the pair have issued a fresh plea for Government intervention, asking Mr Yousaf to help “make progress towards ending the scandal of the continued operation of the ***** Bequest Trust”.
The historians’ research into James ***** found he had been active in the slave trade in Jamaica for two decades, from 1762.
Working with his business partner Robert Milligan, in 1779 they offered for sale the captured French ship Nancy and 208 enslaved Africans who had been embarked at Cape Verde in Senegal. No fewer than 238 Africans had already died on the journey.
In the same year, the pair sold 300 enslaved Africans who had been transported on different ships.
On his return to London, Milligan was the driving force behind the construction of London's West India Docks, but his statue was removed from the Docklands area in 2020, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests.
