IT WAS a poignant and necessary reminder from a leading Caribbean historian, Sir Hilary Beckles, and it was directed at Britain’s leader, David Cameron as he was about to land in Jamaica.
“You are the grandson of Jamaican soil who has been privileged and enriched by your forebears’ sins of the enslavement of our ancestors,” said Sir Hilary, University of the West Indies vice chancellor and chairman of the Caricom Reparations Commission, in an open letter to Cameron published in aJamaican paper.
Sir Hilary’s eloquence and reasonable proposal didn’t end there.
“We ask not for handouts or any acts of indecent submission,” the Bajan went on. “We merely ask that you acknowledge responsibility for your share of this situation and move to contribute in a joint program of rehabilitation and renewal.”
Well said! Clearly, that wasn’t too much to ask of Cameron, whose slave-owning family had not only lived lavishly in the Caribbean and Britain from the blood, sweat and tears of slaves but had received reparations when the trade was abolished in the 1830s.
Sadly, the PM continued his stubborn and callous resistance to offering an apology for the abhorrent trade and brushed aside the demand for reparations for slavery to the countries that suffered so much.
Cameron, seemingly motivated by indifference and insensitivity, told the Jamaica parliament that “I acknowledge those wounds run deep, but I do hope that as friends who have gone through so much together since the darkest of times, we can move on from this hateful legacy and continue to build for the future.”
Simply moving on is too much to ask. It’s difficult to imagine he would have made a similar request to “move on” to Jews whose families were wiped out in Nazis gas chambers in Eastern Europe in the 1940s. Millions of Jews perished and survivors received reparations from Germany for the crime against humanity. If it was justifiable for slave owners in Barbados, Jamaica, the UK and elsewhere to receive reparations and for Jewish survivors of Hitler’s murderous scheme to be compensated, then it is only fair for Britain to apologise for slavery and provide reparations.
The oft-repeated lame excuse for denying Britain’s debt to the Caribbean is that it happened centuries ago. What’s routinely ignored is that the bitter legacy of slavery is a fact of life today for descendants of slaves. For instance, Sir Hilary explained in New York the other day that the widespread and debilitating incidence of chronic diseases in the Caribbean such as diabetes and hypertension had their origins in centuries of slavery.
And Jamaica’s Minister of Education Ronald Thwaites pointed out recently that “the lack of effective mothering and fathering among more than half of our school children can in fact be traced to slavery”.
That’s why Cameron should have used his Caribbean visit to open a meaningful dialogue with the region on slavery and reparations, a request made to him by Jamaica’s Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller during their meeting in Kingston.
He missed a golden opportunity to begin that process by sending an appropriate and important message that the issue would be addressed.
In the end, it’s going to be up to the International Court of Justice to settle the matter.