US actress Whoopi Goldberg has demanded the British royal family apologise for slavery and colonialism — as the heir to the throne tours the West Indies.
Speaking on ABC's panel show The View, Goldberg said: "Let us not forget when we talk about what needs to happen, all the folks that need to apologize."
Goldberg also said the royal family could not "ignore the fact that Britain ran roughshod over India for years."
Goldberg had just recently returned to the current affairs show following a two-week suspension, imposed after she said live on air that the Nazi holocaust of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and others was not driven by racism but by "man’s inhumanity to man."
Prince William and his wife Kate Middleton, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, were greeted on the Jamaican leg of their tour of the Caribbean colonies earlier this week by protesters demanding the UK pay reparations for slavery.
In a speech, William said the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans was "abhorrent" and a "stain on our history."
The UK outlawed the slave trade in 1807, and used its powerful Royal Navy to suppress the human traffic from Africa. In 1833 slave labour was abolished in the British empire, although slave-holders were paid compensation.
But in the US, slavery was not abolished countrywide until 1863, and only ended with the defeat of the Confederate States in 1865 after four years of civil war that cost the lives of more than 600,000 men — two per cent of the population at the time. Washington has never offered to pay reparations for the trade.
In 2010 Former US president Barack Obama ratified a Congressional act — after the Senate twice voted for it in 2008 and 2009 — apologising "on behalf of the people of the United States" for the genocide of up to 20 million Native American people over three centuries. But Obama did not make a statement conveying that apology in person.