A ‘shameful chapter’

ST JOHN’S, Antigua (CMC) — Britain’s King Charles Tuesday described the Atlantic slave trade as a “shameful chapter” in history, even as he acknowledged that “none of us, of course, would be here today were it not for our history, which has shaped us in myriad ways.

“History is not ours to choose or to change. It is bequeathed to us in complex synthesis by forebears we can never know. Our inheritance includes both their achievements and their failures, the good they did as well as the wrongs,” the British monarch told the opening ceremony of the 28th Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), a grouping of 56 former colonies of the British empire.

In his long-anticipated address in which delegates had been told that King Charles would speak about slavery with “unflinching honesty” and “sincere sorrow”, the head of the Commonwealth said history can be hard to compass, viewed as it is through the prism of time, which can be both clarifying and distorting “and yet its consequences resonate with contemporary force”.