The Oscar-nominated actor faces legal action over his family’s historic links to the slave trade in Barbados, according to Sky News and the Daily Telegraph report.
A Caribbean island official, David Commissioning, told the Daily Telegraph that the island nation, which was a British colony until 1966, was in the “early stages” of trying to get compensation from the ancestors of Cumberbatch.
On November 30, 2021, the island also became a republic after having had British Queen Elizabeth as head of state until then.
Plantation purchased
The diary describes how Joshua Cumberbatch, who was the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of Benedict Cumberbatch, bought the Cleland plantation in the north of the island in 1728.
250 slaves lived there until slavery was banned a hundred years later. The prohibition of slavery led to the Cumberbatch family and other slave owners in the British Empire receiving compensation from the British government.
In recent years, many Caribbean island states have debated the consequences of slavery.
In Barbados, activists also want British Conservative MP Richard Drax to give up the sugar cane plantation he inherited on the island. The plantation was established with slave labor in 1620.
