As Black History Month arrives, the manager of the Soul Sanctuary Gospel Choir joins the descendants of both enslavers and enslaved, and asks why sorry seems to be the hardest word.

For the past two decades I’ve been the manager of a gospel choir. For Black History Month this year, I’ve been working with gospel singer, songwriter and author Tracey Jane Campbell and film director and co-founder of Heirs of Slavery John Dower on a word-and-music piece called “The Rivers of Repair”, which addresses Britain’s involvement in the Caribbean, through African chattel enslavement, since the seventeenth century. To my shame, I had almost no idea of the sheer scale of the inhumanity and cultural genocide of Britain’s actions against enslaved Caribbeans. I must assume that I am not alone.

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