Chairman of the CARICOM Reparations Commission and Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies (UWI), Sir Hilary Beckles, has once again called on Britain to come back to the table to discuss reparatory justice for the Caribbean. He was giving the feature address at a recently held Symposium to honor the life and work of St. Lucian Nobel Laureate Sir Arthur Lewis, held virtually this week.
According to Sir Hilary, Britain should come back to the table to discuss what Arthur Lewis had asked for in 1939: a reparations package for the Caribbean based upon the 200 years of unpaid labor that has enriched Britain. He said Caribbean governments had exerted heroic efforts in the last 50 to 60 years to clean up Britain’s colonial mess as a precondition for economic development and transformation.
“That colonial mess has largely overwhelmed the Caribbean. Poverty has been increasing. Slum habitation has now revealed the extent of it and the immorality of Britain exiting the Caribbean on the cheap and within the context of punishing the Caribbean” stated Beckles.
“We are asking for a return to the Lewis model where a Marshall plan must be rolled out for the Caribbean that includes the cancellation of all debt, investment in education, investment in public health, cleaning up the mess of ghettoization of the people of the Caribbean” he said.
Speaking more about Arthur Lewis’ work, Sir Hilary explained that in 1939 when Lewis wrote the development model for the region, he already understood that the worker’s movement had matured intellectually. He noted that Lewis suggested that what was needed was drastic action to increase economic development activity, the distribution of the wealth and fundamental economic reform.
According to Beckles, Lewis maintained that Britain has a duty to fund economic reform because the Caribbean contributed millions to the wealth of Great Britain, a debt which Britain has yet to repay. That, he said, was the core of the Lewis model.
Dr. Patricia Northover, Senior Fellow at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies at The UWI, Mona Campus, who also made a presentation at the symposium, spoke to the issue of reparations through what she referred to as the lens of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Northover posits that Lewis established and demonstrated his critical interest in black lives and aligned himself to the revolutionary tides of Caribbean labor movements. According to her, in discussing the situation of labor in the British West Indies, Lewis first acted as a witness for objective black lives, then as an active voice for their labor movement, and finally he positions himself to ask the question, “what is to be done?”.
Further, she noted that slavery is an evil for which there can be no adequate monetary compensation.
“Reparatory justice claims are rooted in a structure of irredeemable damage. The response in seeking it cannot rest only on a backwards looking sense of repair but rather has to be a forward-looking concept of transformation and restorative justice. Indeed I wish to suggest here that the debts owing for the injuries suffered in an irreversible process of cumulative causation to the present, are not principally for Lewis economic or financial” she states.
She maintains that reparatory justice was not framed in terms of a monetary calculus of accounting but rather Lewis framed it as a recognition of a wrong and the moral and political imperative to make amends.
The symposium was hosted by the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC) in collaboration with the Saint Lucia National Reparations Committee and the Nobel Laureates Festival Committee, Saint Lucia, on 15 June. The event included numerous prominent scholars, economists and public officials who paid tribute to Saint Lucian-born economist and Nobel prize winner, Sir William Arthur Lewis.
The symposium was one of the CRC’s outreach activities for 2020 to raise awareness of the regional reparations agenda and to focus on the 200 years of unpaid labour referenced by Lewis as the basis for reparatory justice and as a foundation for independent, sustainable development across the Caribbean
I believe that the issue of reparation to the people of the Caribbean and the diaspora is very relevant from a historical standpoint. The records and recorded testaments are there for all to see the injustices and the atrocities that was in fact committed against a people. The Haitians Revolution sparked something that has spread across the world. Certainly these people have gotten a name and an identity that will last for ever, but their reality today is still very sad. And the world knows about it, we can heal the world.
Whereas I am not against reparations, we must be careful with the one sided narrative that is often spoken about, which is reparations from Europe. Can we not ask for reparations from Africa? We cannot deny that Black people (Africans) sold their own people to the Europeans. And, let us not forget, it was often the blacks in the islands who led the Europeans and sold out the escaped slaves in their marons camps. Si i pani soutiweh, i pan i voleh. Both Europeans and Africans are guilty of the atrocities committed against us Caribbean people, we were betrayed by our own African people who sold us for 30 pieces of silver, SAD!
40 acres and a mule buddy. 40 acres and a mule.
You are off topic. And if you are black maybe a waste of African sp*rm too, If not, please disregard. I’m quite sure you are a good Christian. Europeans didn’t go to Africa on site seeing trips, they came complete with massive armies and conquered, guided by edicts from the Vatican. It is Christian missionary propaganda that begun to push that narrative you are repeating back in the 70’s when they were losing ground in the Caribbean; to keep Black people like you in your place, and it has worked. Here you are regurgitating their propaganda word for word. And that’s not even the sad part. You ran with it, didn’t research nor pay good attention and left out the part where they claimed Europeans were just standing idly by. That is why missionaries used those caricatures, and literature depicting an African, gun in hand leading others with shackles around necks but deliberately never show the European taking the picture or doing the drawing but one standing on the side. Sad!
http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/news/20170801/arnold-bertram-jamaicas-black-and-coloured-slave-owners
Please, have a read.
In quite sure bad stuff happened, lots of it. They’ve been at it for hundreds of years using their historians to spin this thing to look victim, don’t just buy it. You have this media platform to do something for your people. We must develop an undying Love for Our People. Everyone else does.
Some people stayed home and read books, sturdy dictionaries, trying to find ways to earn easy money. You had Briton, you kick them out and now you are asking them to come back to pay debts.Are you regret taking independence. The people who did the work are all dead so, who is going to sign for the cheque and how are they going to spend the money. We are doing ok without Briton thank you. Briton will never issue cheques and turn their backs. Let sleeping dogs lie.
It is NOT only power to outside entity but also corruption within our systems It is NOT one OR the other it is all of the above
Lookie here, just hurry up and give me my retro-active shekels, every one of them that is owed to me and my ancestors.
Those who are not on board the reparation train can kindly give your ticket to me so that I can duly collect some additional compensation!
Every man on the street knows that, once you give in to a blackmailer they always come back ,and the only way to get rib of a blackmailer is by killing them off. Briton would say ,for all I have done for you in the past amount to this, much substract it from what I OWE YOU and I will meet the balance,this might work out to be ZERO
The Catholic Church was one of the biggest beneficiaries of slavery and the proceeds and wealth of slavery. Treasurer, king maker and deal broker! The Catholic Church provided the moral and biblical context for our enslavement, claiming to be saving heathens! Hello?
the protestant churches also.
Truth, though what you state is plainly factual, you failed to mention the other great sins of the Mother of All Harlots. For starters, how about the great deception of the blonde blue eye Cesar Borgia as the Messiah. Don’t forget the attempt to do away with the true Sabbath day, the slick introduction of pagan holidays, the abolition of adherence to the The Most High’s Laws, Commandments and Statutes as an uncompromising way of life, the invalidation of Torah and Old Testament, the promotion of necromancy, and missionary colonialism. Need I say more?
Remember the words of Our Creator which state “ My people perish for a lack of knowlege”. I encouage everyone to read and research to avoid permanent extinction.
Hilary Beckles, you are so concerned with reparations, anti-colonial, pro-black consciousness, etc. Yet you accept a Knighthood from the Queen to become “Sir” Hilary. You are the same one who has the Chinese (the neo-colonizers) constructing buildings at Cave Hill. Oh the hypocrisy.
Not only that, maybe he went to catholic school too. Some of us still go to church, don’t know why, but that’s what you colonized had to offer in order to “educate” us, and miseducate your own people. You have a lot of mepuis but don’t kill the messenger, the heat is on. Reparations or bust!
Britain, France, spain, Portugal and the dutch The darn Portuguese where the largest traders of slaves. They all should pay.
I read with heavy ambivalence concerning the issue of again transferring our own power for self determination to an outside entity.
We look to Jesus to save us from our sins, we look the Europeans to save us from economic ruin but what about our own intellectual ability and creativity? What about our propensity to foster corruption and strife among our political divides?
To be clear, I support reparations but do we simply just sit and wait? We have serious structural issues that need reform in the Caribbean and we can identify them, let’s start doing some work ourselves. Corruption is Rife in the Caribbean. Politicians like modern day pirates and where is CARICOM and OECS when the poor ppl cry out for reprieve from these Political pirates?
If we are to move forward, we have to first identify our flaws and recognize our own ability to correct them. Blaming others and giving them the burden of carrying our own destiny is a failing strategy.
Don’t tell that to us, tell that to the Japanese, Jews and Germany. How many Jews or Japanese questioned reparations for wrongs done to them? None of them said “well first we must fix all our wrongs, we are bad people” otherwise a selected few of us will stop your efforts to repair the wrongs. Duh