Benedict Cumberbatch's ancestors owned slaves in Barbados in the 1700s and 1800s. Reports alleged the actor was facing reparation-payment claims.
. When slavery was abolished throughout most of the British Empire in 1833, the British government compensated former slave owners for their financial losses.
Although the Cumberbatch family no longer owns the property, Cumberbatch has acknowledged his family history, commenting in a 2007 interview with Scottish newspaper the Scotsman, that his mother told him not to use his last name professionally to avoid reparation claims. Cumberbatch has acted in several films about slavery: first in the 2007 film “Amazing Grace,” where he plays former British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, who is sympathetic to slave abolition, and then in 2013 as a Southern plantation owner and slaveholder, William Prince Ford, in “12 Years a Slave,” which won the 2014 Oscar for best picture.
As more countries in the Caribbean gained independence, various nations formed CARICOM in hopes of boosting the region’s economy. In 2013, the organization — whichsuch as Jamaica, the Bahamas, Haiti, Guyana, Belize and Barbados — formed the CARICOM Reparations Commission, or CRC.
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