Former Virgin Islands senator presents arguments for Danish reparations and apology

By Wayne James

ST CROIX, USVI -- League for league, square mile for square mile, the Caribbean archipelago is the world’s most international region. There, since the 15th century, the Old and New Worlds have collided and the world’s people -- Native Americans, Europeans, Africans, and Asians -- have intermingled. For centuries, within eyeshot, and sometimes within a stone’s throw, Spain, England, France, Holland, Denmark, and Sweden vied for dominance and sought fabled riches. The region was also a principal site for the unfolding of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. And as such, the Caribbean is today the arena for heated discussions and diplomatic discourse on the ever-elusive reparations.

But if there is one nation that should pay reparations for its active participation in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, it is Denmark -- so much so that it could easily qualify as the initiative’s “poster nation.” Here are ten reasons why:

1) Because of excellent Danish record-keeping and archives, many people of the former Danish West Indies (present-day United States Virgin Islands) are able to trace their ancestry -- with uninterrupted documental evidence -- to persons who were enslaved in the Danish West Indies, in some cases even identifying the names of the slaving vessels upon which their ancestors were transported to the colony, and in rarer cases to the African nations whence their ancestors came.

2) When African people were enslaved and brought to the Danish West Indies, they were systematically separated from their African culture, families, belief systems, and self-identities, Denmark becoming the surrogate motherland. So, when Denmark sold the islands to the United States in 1917, the islands’ black population, in effect, became a people doubly displaced and, therefore, doubly traumatized.

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