#british-slavery-complicity

#british-slavery-complicity

In April 1675, John Howe, a naval officer, sought to win Pepys' support by offering a small enslaved boy, hoping he was seasoned to endure the cold weather in England.

The case is one of the most notorious examples of British involvement in illegal enslavement in Brazil, said historian Joseph Mulhern and a stark symbol of how, even after the UK Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, British citizens and companies profited from slavery in Latin America's biggest country for another half century.

Yusupha Mbye's mother pushes his wheelchair slowly across the tiled compound of their home in Kanifing, about 11km (seven miles) from The Gambia's capital, Banjul. The late-afternoon sun hangs low as she pauses to straighten a wrap over his legs, stopping briefly to catch her breath. He has been in this wheelchair since he was a teenager, she told Al Jazeera, wiping away tears. Twenty-six years later, I am still caring for him.

Britain once ruled over the largest empire in history. For many Britons, it remains a source of pride. Others argue its power was built on a legacy of brutality, colonial conquest and the enslavement of millions. Can Britain reckon with that past and make amends?

On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron appeared before the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland the annual Alpine gathering of the global elite to declare that now is not a time for new imperialism or new colonialism. This, of course, was a reference to the current ambitions of Macron's counterpart in the United States, Donald Trump, who, in addition to recently kidnapping the president of Venezuela and repeatedly threatening to seize the Panama Canal,

The palace, rebuilt after a fire destroyed it in 1834, is falling apart. There have been 36 fire incidents since 2016. Water leaks, heating failures and sewerage problems plague the heart of this Unesco world heritage site. Fixing Westminster would save money in the long run. An upgrade is also a matter of safety and legacy.

Sheldon Coore, 47, says Huddersfield is all he has ever known since his mother brought him to the UK in 1988 at just 16 months old to join his grandparents, who settled during Windrush. He was handed an Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) jail term in 2005 after he put a man in a headlock and stole 20 from his pocket, having already racked up a string of previous convictions to fund his drug addiction.

These decisions and moves by the UK, say analysts, raise doubts about whether its words are in keeping with its actions in the Horn of Africa. Amgad Fareid Eltayeb, a Sudanese policy analyst, said the UK's credibility is increasingly judged by the risks it is willing, or unwilling, to take. When people believe your words and your actions diverge, they stop treating you as a broker and start treating you as an interest manager, he told Al Jazeera.

In an interview with the Guardian, Richard Hermer, the government's most senior law officer and a close ally of Keir Starmer, said that in a complicated and dangerous world, leaders should be able to use statecraft to consider other factors when establishing whether to hold allies to account. In his first public comments since Britain's reaction to the US attack on Venezuela and threats toward Greenland, Hermer refrained from singling out the Trump administration,

The data, painstakingly gathered and verified by ELSC, reveals the operation of a system, not something which is centrally directed, of course but something which is organic, multipolar, self-reinforcing and mutually exacerbating. A system which seeks to raise intolerably the personal cost to any individual who speaks or acts in light of their conscience seeks to reduce civil society's capacity to call out genocide and to demand at the same time robust action by our governments.

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The librarian sat me in front of a microfilm reader and brought out roll after roll of film. I stayed there for hours, squinting to decipher the archaic handwriting in the Free Negro Book, which was published annually in South Carolina before the Civil War. The names in each year's edition were alphabetized, but only roughly-all of the surnames starting with A came before all of the surnames starting with B, but Agee might come before Anderson, or it might come after.