Antoinette Fernandez, the ‘Reparations Officer’ of the left-wing progressive Green Party in the United Kingdom, is a descendant of a wealthy family of monarchs in Nigeria that was heavily involved in the Transatlantic slave trade, GB News has reported.
The Green Party advocates for a ‘holistic process of atonement and reparations’ for the descendants of African slaves in the British Empire, as part of their broader ‘social justice’ platform. The party’s plan is to give ‘monetary compensation’ to these individuals.
The person in charge of preparing this initiative, Fernandez, however, is the daughter of Antonio Deinde Fernandez, a Nigerian businessman and former Nigerian Ambassador to the UN, who passed away in 2015. He was one of the wealthiest men in Africa; and made his fortune in oil, gas, and mining.
Fernandez’s mother is a descendant of the monarchs of Lagos, known as the ‘Obas’, who were heavily involved in the Transatlantic slave trade and made fortunes on commissions for sold slaves. ‘One of her [Fernandez’s] ancient relatives owned 1,400 slaves, and a second brought back slaves that had been sent to Brazil to build houses in Lagos, according to a historian,’ GB News writes.
‘Fernandez’s mother is a descendant of the monarchs of Lagos, known as the “Obas,” who were heavily involved in the Transatlantic slave trade and made fortunes on commissions for sold slaves’
Representatives from both Reform UK and the Conservative Party have come out to comment on the revelation about the UK Greens activist’s ancestry, calling her a hypocrite. In response, the Green Party has claimed that the comments about Fernandez’s lineage are ‘racist’ and ‘bad-faith attempt to undermine the case for reparative justice’.
The Green Party gained the second most local council seats in the elections held in England last week, 441. The right-wing populist Reform UK gained the most by far, 1452; while the incumbent Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the United Kingdom’s left-wing Labour Party lost a whopping 1,498 seats.
As for the history of slavery in the United Kingdom, the slave trade was outlawed by the Abolition of Slave Trade Act 1807 in the entirety of the British Empire. However, it did not emancipate those already enslaved. Enslaved people across the Empire were emancipated by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. The act also compensated slave owners for their ‘lost property’, which cost the UK government over £10 billion in today’s value.
In March 2026, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution which calls on former colonial powers, such as the UK, to pay reparations to the descendants of slaves. The UK’s Green Party has voiced its support for the resolution.
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