Do Caribbean Countries Still Need Reparations?
Do Caribbean Countries Still Need Reparations?
Reparations are bigger than economics, they are a sign of justice.
REPARATIONS TALK IS BACK, thanks in part to an article published by The Telegraph at the end of 2022. Reporting that Barbados may seek reparations from actor and descendant of slaveowners, Benedict Cumberbatch, the news outlet shone a light on the island nation’s renewed efforts to seek accountability from Europeans for the devastating impacts of the transatlantic slave trade.
The article has drummed up the usual questions around reparations. Slavery was abolished almost 200 years ago, can’t Caribbean nations just “move on”, as suggested by former UK Prime Minister David Cameron? Will all descendants of slaveowners be expected to pay millions for the sins of their forefathers? Isn’t it enough that these countries receive foreign aid?
In short: no, not necessarily and absolutely not.
Although the transatlantic slave trade was developed to serve early capitalism, the case for reparations does not lie in the economics of slavery alone. It also lies in the policies designed to dehumanize and disenfranchise the 15 million people who were stolen from Africa and their hundreds of millions of descendants.
England’s Slave Code of 1661 deemed Africans to be non-human, reducing people to property and providing the blueprint for institutionalized white supremacy across the Americas. Yet, even after Britain abolished slavery in 1834, Caribbean colonies were still subjected to laws that maintained and promoted racial divisions in society by criminalizing African religions and cementing the role of white Europeans in positions of power.
By the time that Caribbean nations declared independence in the 1960s, they were left with economies ravaged by centuries of extractive models of development and societies marked by deep social and economic inequalities. To this day, the Latin America and Caribbean region is considered the second-most unequal in the world on account of extreme wealth dispersion, and racism and colourism continue to divide communities and hinder social mobility.
This is the legacy of slavery and colonialism.
While emphasis has rested on the role of slaveowners in this system and the need for their descendants to pay up, Benedict Cumberbatch and other individual beneficiaries of the proceeds of slavery aren’t likely to have to cut a cheque any time soon. Barbados is not on the hunt for the inherited wealth of people like the “12 Years A Slave” actor. Rather, it has joined efforts with other Caribbean nations as part of the CARICOM Reparations Commission to seek reparations primarily from former colonial powers of the region.
Decades of advocacy for reparations have been accompanied with skepticism. In a recent International Press Standards Organisation survey, only 24 percent of white Britons supported reparations to descendants of slaves from businesses or institutions who benefited from slavery. In 2019, the UK’s former Secretary of State of International Development dismissed the idea of reparations, stating, “I want to target [Britain’s international development funds to] the poorest people in the world. Not somehow spend the 14 billion pounds that I have a year in some weird belief that we’re going to somehow undo 300, 400 years of colonial history by writing checks to people.” In 2021, the outgoing High Commissioner of the UK to Jamaica stated plainly that reparation payments were “simply not happening” and suggested that the UK would be more willing to fund specific development initiatives.
Aside from the fact that the UK already has experience paying reparations (in 1833, the UK government took out a loan of £300 million in today’s pounds to compensate slaveowners for abolition), the problem with these perspectives is that they view reparations through a lens of foreign aid.
The call for reparations is not about economic development—it is about justice.
Justice, and transformative justice in particular, calls for healing, resilience and creating justice together. The core difference between this and a foreign aid approach to redressing the impacts of slavery is accountability.
When foreign aid moves from the Global North to the Global South, countries from the latter group are expected to be accountable in their reporting on international development objectives such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Goals for Development or other initiatives that are priorities for the funding country. Reporting on such indicators can have its place in improving certain development outcomes, but it tends to be associated with goals that are imposed on developing countries by their former colonizers rather than the priorities of the developing countries themselves.
Taking a transformative justice approach to reparations shifts accountability to the European countries that were architects and enablers of the transatlantic slave trade. It means that people from countries such as Guyana, Suriname and Belize define what the initiatives look like, and countries like the UK, France and Spain are accountable for achieving these initiatives or providing the resources to make them happen. It is a fallacy to believe that reparations are a simple money transfer to descendants of slavery.
This is the approach that Caribbean countries have collectively promoted for nearly ten years through the CARICOM Reparations Commission. The first point of the Commission’s 10-Point Reparation Plan is a formal apology from the governments of Europe. The rest of the points are initiatives concerning cultural, health and economic restoration of the descendants of slavery. To date, only one nation has taken the first step to apologize: the Netherlands. That apology came last month, almost 160 years after Dutch abolition, with no commitment to supporting the descendants of the harm caused by their state-sanctioned slave trade.
With the rise of global awareness of the continuing impacts of colonialism and especially the global wave of Black Lives Matter movements, it begs the question of whether Caribbean nations have reached their window in pushing for reparations as the world closes in on publicly acceptable solutions to address this deep-rooted challenge.
To return to the original question: do Caribbean countries really still need reparations? The answer is an emphatic yes. So, run them their cheque.
Imani Thomas is a proud Jamaican-Canadian and a Master of Public Policy Candidate at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. She has an interest in public service transformation and applying principles of behavioural economics and user experience design to the policymaking process.