Actor Benedict Cumberbatch is facing a claim for compensation for his family’s slave past in Barbados. Recognizing the family’s past and how much it weighs on him, the 46-year-old Briton may have to compensate the descendants of slaves bought for cotton and sugar plantations in the 18th and 19th centuries.
According to The Telegraphin 1728, the seventh great-grandfather of the protagonist of Doctor StrangeAbraham Cumberbatch, bought the Cleland plantation to grow sugar in northern Barbados, where he once had around 250 slaves.
The lands were in the family’s possession for nearly a century until slavery was abolished in 1834 and the British government offered compensation to owners who lost their land, receiving, at the time, £6,000 (approximately $7,181). value that currently, according to the British newspaper, amounts to about 1.2 million dollars.
In 2018, in an interview for The TelegraphBenedict Cumberbatch called this part of his family history “shocking.”
We have our past. You don’t have to look far to find our family’s slave past. We were part of the entire sugar industry, which is shocking.
Ironically, the actor played the American owner of a cotton plantation in the film 12 years a slavereleased in 2013. Citing an interview from 2007, an article in the New York Times recalled that Benedict Cumberbatch’s mother advised him to take a stage name for fear that he could become a target for the descendants of slaves seeking reparations, something the star of Sherlock finally did not.
As reported by The TelegraphDavid Commissiong, a senior official from the Caribbean island nation who participates in the National Reparations Commission, reported that the department is in the “early stages” of trying to obtain reparations from the Cumberbatch family.
Waiting to take on the Emmy winner’s case for now, the Barbados government has begun negotiations with British millionaire and Conservative MP Richard Drax, whose ancestors owned the island’s largest slave plantation. . The outcome of Drax’s ruling would determine whether or not the island could continue the redress claims of former slave-owning families, including Cumberbatch’s.