Reparations and reparations
WRECKAGE, RUIN AND REPAIR
I classify Caribbean reparation according to how they analyze the wreckage and the damage from the massacre of our peoples and the rapacity of colonial slavery. Because the transformative repair, or the reform agenda they put forward will spring from the assessment that they make. Modelling the three types of damage and the three types of reparations demands, gives us this outline:
- Â Slavery still handicaps our development, therefore we call for more development assistance, negotiated at a special conference;
- Â Slavery massacred our Amerindians and African people by the millions, therefore we call for compensation in cash and kind through a legal settlement and political leadership;
- Â Invasion and colonial slavery slaughtered millions, denied our humanity, stole and degraded the land, exploded our history, culture and sexualities, blocked our resurrections, encircled us in underdevelopment … therefore we call for this 20-year long regional transformation agenda under our multi-sector governance to be empowered and capitalized.
Our earlier anti-colonial and anti-slavery scholars like Eric Williams, C.L.R James, Arthur Lewis, Walter Rodney and latterly Hillary Beckles have made it that the political economy effects of colonialism and slavery are also a human cost. Not just slaughter, but also production relations and production capacity. It is essential that we numerate and commemorate the human holocaust as Verene Shepherd helped us do, but our reparation programme must ensure that never again must e.g. the loss of a market for banana or other crop, mean impoverishment and destitution. We must lift ourselves above that and I put it out to your consideration that reparations with big R must not be a CARICOM project, but a Caribbean process.
(Round table postponed part 2 of LOVE and UNLOVE in order to comment on Reparation)