Archbishop of Canterbury renews £100m slavery reparations pledge at Cape Coast Castle

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally, has reaffirmed the Church of England's commitment to a £100 million reparative justice fund during a pastoral visit to Cape Coast Castle, one of Ghana's most haunting monuments to the transatlantic slave trade. Her remarks, delivered at the very dungeons where enslaved Africans were held before being forced through the "Door of No Return" onto slave ships bound for the Americas, mark a significant moment in the Church's decades-long reckoning with its historical complicity in human bondage.

A first African pilgrimage laden with symbolism
Dame Sarah's visit to Ghana is her first pastoral trip to Africa since her installation as head of the global Anglican Communion at Canterbury Cathedral in March 2026 and her first as the first woman ever to hold the office. That fact alone lent added historical weight to a 10-day tour of Ghana and Cameroon undertaken at the invitation of the Archbishop of the Anglican Church's West Africa Province, Cyril Kobina Ben-Smith.

Reparative justice has run through nearly every stop of the Ghana leg of the journey. In Accra, the Archbishop broke ground on the Church of Ghana's Heritage Anglican Culture Village and Resorts, a planned pilgrimage site for members of the African diaspora tracing their ancestry to the slave trade.

In Kumasi, she paid a courtesy call on the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, at Manhyia Palace, a visit rich with its own historical resonance given that the Asante royal family's ties to Anglicanism date back to the baptism of Nana Agyeman Prempeh I and the Asantehemaa Yaa Akyaa during their political exile in the Seychelles in 1904.

She also commissioned a new clinic at St Monica's Nursing and Midwifery Training College in Mampong and met President John Mahama, who described her ascension as "historic."

"Deeply moved" at the dungeons
But it was at Cape Coast Castle a fortress originally built by Swedish traders in the 17th century, later occupied by the Danish and Dutch before falling under British control in 1664 that the Archbishop's reflections carried their sharpest edge. Touring the underground dungeons and the chapel that sits directly above them, she described the experience as deeply disorienting, noting that it threw her off balance and brought home the full weight of the evil of transatlantic slavery. She called the chapel positioned above the holding cells a stark illustration of how the Church itself was implicated in the machinery of the trade.

Acknowledging the institution's culpability without equivocation, the Archbishop stated plainly that the Church had played a part in the transatlantic slave trade, and that genuine repentance demanded concrete action rather than words alone a formulation she offered as the moral justification for the £100 million fund.

The origins of a "controversial" fund
The commitment traces back to an internal audit of the Church of England's historic endowment, which uncovered extensive financial entanglement with the machinery of slave trafficking. Investigators found that Queen Anne's Bounty, a church endowment fund established in 1704, had invested in the South Sea Company, an enterprise responsible for transporting more than 34,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Spanish Americas. The audit also revealed that Church-linked missionary societies had, at various points, owned plantations in the Caribbean worked by enslaved labour.

In response, the Church established what has become known internally as Project Spire the £100 million investment and research fund intended to support communities still living with the legacy of enslavement. Dame Sarah's predecessor, Justin Welby, had already apologized for the Church's historic links to slavery, calling them a source of shame.

The fund, however, has proven anything but settled Church business. An independent oversight group has argued the sum is grossly insufficient given the scale of generational harm caused by slavery, and has urged the Church to expand its commitment to as much as £1 billion. At the opposite extreme, a committee of Conservative MPs pressed the newly installed Archbishop to redirect the money toward clergy wages instead. Critics in Britain, including Tory MP Katie Lam, have gone further, arguing the fund embeds what she called a narrative of victimhood. The initiative is also reportedly facing a legal challenge over its legal grounds. Dame Sarah's decision to reaffirm the pledge on Ghanaian soil, standing inside the very dungeons the fund is meant to address, was therefore as much a political statement as a pastoral one.

Ghana's reparations diplomacy scores a point
For Ghana, which has positioned itself at the vanguard of a global reparations campaign, the Archbishop's renewed commitment lands as vindication of a strategy built on moral pressure rather than legal compulsion. Ghana has granted citizenship to more than a thousand members of the African diaspora in recent years and successfully lobbied the United Nations to recognize the transatlantic slave trade as among the gravest crimes against humanity.

Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa was unsparing in his praise, framing the Archbishop's Ghana visit as a signal that would compel sceptics and obstructionists inside the Church of England to reconsider their resistance. He invoked Christian teaching on confession as the precondition for redemption, arguing that an institution cannot claim salvation while withholding an honest reckoning with its sins.

A test of institutional resolve
Whether Project Spire survives its domestic critics in Britain intact, expands under continued pressure from reparations advocates, or is diluted by internal Church politics remains an open question. What is not in dispute is that Cape Coast Castle a UNESCO World Heritage Site that has hosted reflections from figures ranging from a sitting US vice president to successive Archbishops of Canterbury continues to function as one of the moral proving grounds where institutions with historical ties to slavery are compelled to state, publicly and unambiguously, where they stand. For Dame Sarah Mullally, barely five months into office, that reckoning has now been made in the most consequential setting possible.

Mustapha Bature Sallama.
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal investigation and Intelligence Analysis.
International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP
[email protected]
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References
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