Benedict Cumberbatch has one of the most successful careers in Hollywood at the moment.
The chameleon actor can slip on a cloak to play Dr Stephen Strange, put on a detective hat to play the iconic Sherlock Holmes, and even play a western domineering rancher in The Power of the Dog.
With numerous nominations and awards, the English actor is adored by cinephiles and critics alike.
However, unsettling news has come out about the popular man’s family history.
Abraham Cumberbatch, Cumberbatch’s ancestor, allegedly purchased the Cleland plantation in the 18th century. When the plantation was forced to close, the actor’s family reportedly received £6 000 from the government, which amounts to £3.6m (R73 603 632) today.
The Academy award nominated actor has spoken about his family’s dark history.
“We have our past – you don’t have to look far to see the slave-owning past. We were part of the whole sugar industry, which is a shocker,’’ Cumberbatch told The Telegraph in 2018.
Despite this, the actor played the role of Ford, an American plantation owner, in the 2013 seminal film 12 Years A Slave.
Barbados’s National Task Force on Reparations is reportedly now pursuing reparations from the descendants of wealthy slave owners.
This is according to The Telegraph, which said that this task force has not ruled out targeting Cumberbatch’s family as their ancestors reportedly ran a 250-slave sugar plantation on the island.
David Denny, the general secretary of the Caribbean Movement for Peace and Integration and a key reparations activist, told The Telegraph that any descendants of white plantation owners who benefited from the slave trade, including the Cumberbatch family, should be asked to pay reparations.
According to slaveryremembrance.org, a London merchant corporation conducted the initial colonisation of Barbados in 1627 with eighty free and ten enslaved people. The company made significant investments in export crop production, first focusing on tobacco.
‘’Initially, Barbadian planters used white British labourers as indentured servants (a form of labour where an individual is under contract to work without a salary to repay a loan) to work on their farms.
‘’From the middle of the 1600s onward, planters began to purchase ever more enslaved workers to supplement and, eventually, to replace indentured labourers. By the end of the century, Barbados’s labour force was almost wholly enslaved,’’ said Slavery Remembrance.
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