Reparation and diversity: Building an inclusive movement in the Caribbean

This week’s Reparation Conversations, a collaborative initiative between The Gleaner and the Centre for Reparation Research at The University of the West Indies, presents a summary of a Lecture “Reparation and Diversity: Building an Inclusive Movement in the Caribbean” delivered by the CRR’s Director, Verene Shepherd, at a Conference hosted by Jesus College, University of Cambridge, during the UK’s observance of Black History Month in October.

OVER THE past 20 or so years, there has been an intensification in the calls from the Global South for a resolution to the ongoing demand for compensation for the injustices and crimes against humanity inflicted on people who were enslaved and who suffered under the hardships and mistreatments created by the barbaric colonial system. Around the world, the descendants of enslaved Africans, in particular, have demanded that the governments and institutions that benefited from slavery and colonialism acknowledge the role they played in these oppressive systems and make proper restitution. The key demand is for them to recognise that the wealth they currently enjoy was created from the destruction of ethnic communities, cultures, and societies; that such wealth extraction continues to have farreaching impact on the ability of colonised or once-colonised communities to thrive.

The response of the Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community [ CARICOM] to this North-South tension was to establish the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC), which then drew up its “blueprint” for demanding reparation, The Ten-Point Plan. However, the establishment of the CRC and various National Committees thereafter, and the articulation of the Ten-Point Plan for Restorative and Reparatory Justice led to early complaints of a top-down approach – a lack of diversity – in a movement that was started by Indigenous Peoples and enslaved Africans who objected to the obscenity of colonialism and carried on by freed people in the racist post-slavery era. In modern times, it was continued by civil society/grass-roots people, including Rastafari, with key roles also played by individual politicians and academics in the region and in the diaspora.

KEY HUB THAT CREATED LONG-TERM DAMAGE

The reality on the ground in the Caribbean, though, is that the composition of National Committees is inclusive, diverse, and defined by a multiplicity of voices. In the decisions about membership, most National Committees pay attention to age, gender, ethnicity, disciplinary training, and beliefs and include representatives of Indigenous Peoples, Rastafari, media houses, the legal fraternity, the Church, educational institutions, and civil society. During the colonial period, the Caribbean became the key hub of systems that destroyed a wide range of communities and created long-term vulnerability and instability throughout this multiethnic region and the campaign for reparative justice reflects this.

The forced migration of enslaved Africans, the establishment of Maroon communities, and the use of indentured workers in t he post-slavery Caribbean means that there have been many communities directly and indirectly affected by colonialism and who must be acknowledged in this movement. Above all, by insisting on a development plan rather than individual cash payouts, the movement has tried to avoid the controversies that have the potential of dividing and derailing the movement. The rationale is that the entire region remains under-developed, with huge inequities and inequalities in the social infrastructure, the result of centuries of extraction of resources by some European States and/or their citizens. Eric Williams reflected this last point in his 1944 Capitalism and Slavery and in his response to Britain’s refusal to give Caribbean leaders from Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago a respectable golden handshake ahead of independence in 1962. Britain did offer one, but it was as unacceptable as the terms imposed for its allocation: the money should be used to buy British goods, not for the development of local industries. Williams said in response: “The West Indies are in the position of an orange. The British have sucked it dry and their sole concern today is that they should not slip and get damaged on the peel.”

Nevertheless, controversies continue on several levels: 1] a development plan will benefit those who are descendants of exploiters; 2] white people should not be members of the national reparation committees; 3] reparation should be confined to the descendants of those who suffered in the maangamizi (African holocaust); 4) there is insufficient attention to the descendants of 19th-century deceptive indentureship in the justificatory narrative. This is more strident in countries with large populations of the descendants of indentured Indians even though the CRC consistently includes deceptive indentureship in its public advocacy.

SCHOLARS CRITIQUING SCHOOL’S HISTORY TEXTS

In Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Suriname, in particular, scholars, mostly Asian, have been critiquing the schools’ history texts and the examination boards and insisting on more obvious inclusion of their experiences. For those who argue that Asian indentured workers signed contracts before emigration; that the system was voluntary; that they received wages; that repatriation was an integral part of their contract and that their personal information was captured on documents that made family connections in India traceable; that they received benefits like land or cash in lieu of repatriation that gave them a better economic post-indentureship life; that they were protected by laws that outlawed discrimination and that it is intellectual dishonesty to describe indentureship as a new form of slavery, scholars of Asian indentureship have sought to bring greater balance and clarity to the discourse.

They have argued that the recruitment system in India, for example, especially for women, was fraudulent; the pre-departure depot conditions poor; the shipboard conditions, despite protective treatment guidelines issued to the captain and crew, horrible; the journey via sailing ships treacherous; the threat of rape of women real; and t he plantation conditions unreflective of contractual agreements. Furthermore, the post-indentureship years for those who did not repatriate was characterised by racial discrimination.

At the same time, it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend, even at the risk of the accusation of creating a hierarchy of oppression, that the Indigenous holocaust and the African holocaust were not the greatest crimes against humanity; that Africans and people of African descent were not historically and are not now among the most discriminated against and marginalised group; that anti-black racism is not alive and well, even among those for whom we press for inclusion for reparative justice.

Still, what is undeniable, is that collectively, there was marginalisation of various peoples in the Caribbean during the colonial period, which contributed to generational social and economic inequality that still permeates the region today. The reparations movement must, therefore, embrace their stories and seek forms of restorative and reparative justice that will help to elevate their positionality in the Caribbean and make amends for the structures of abuse that they endured.

Reparative justice encapsulates three key objectives designed to bring some amount of resolve to the victims: a) a moral restoration of relationships in the form of an apology and acknowledgement of past wrongs; b) compensatory restitution to financially alleviate and correct the inequalities created as a result of the historical abuse; and c) the establishment of rehabilitating practices, policies, or systems to ensure that victims are given the right tools to move forward out of the problematic vestiges of the abuse that incapacitated their prosperity.