-----Original Message----- From: bristol_and_somerset-bounces@rootsweb.com [mailto:bristol_and_somerset-bounces@rootsweb.com] On Behalf Of gilesoakley@tiscali.co.uk Sent: Friday, 7 February 2014 09:54 To: bristol_and_somerset@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: [B&S] Notebook reveals chilling insight into Bristol'sslavetrade - Bristol Post >As I've said, matters of compensation are extremely difficult, and it's true that it's hard to know how far back it would be reasonable to go. Certainly reparations for British atrocities in Kenya during the Mau-Mau conflict of the 1950s seem fully justified, given that >there are living survivors and damaged victims. With slavery and the slave trade, which Britain did indeed have an honourable record in ending, it is far more difficult, but entirely worthwhile to enter debate over. I have filmed interviews with people whose >grandparents were slaves in the USA, so in fact the links in ancestral chains are not so very long. For the British, the Afro-Caribbean population are mainly descendants of slaves (plus indentured workers from Asia) who were treated appallingly long after slavery >was ended, as anyone with knowledge of the West Indies would know. I have no easy answers for any of these issues, but I do know they are worth dealing with in a more thoughtful way than some correspondents here have chosen to do. In 1940 the Nazis dropped a bomb on my grandparents' house totally destroying it with all contents, plus killing a cousin visiting at the time as well as severely injuring my mother and her parents. There wasn't an insurance payout. Should I now be demanding compensation from Germans today for losses incurred, and pain suffered, by my earlier generations? I think not. Slavery, burning of witches, raping and pillaging were considered the norm at the time, however abhorrent we think them to be from a modern perspective. We can't rewrite history, nor can money change it. Keith Wellington, NZ