(Hilary Beckles)
Dear Honourable Prime Minister
(David Cameron)
I join with the resolute and
resilient people of Jamaica and their Government in extending to you a warm and
glorious welcome to our homeland. We recognise you, Prime Minister, given your family’s long and significant relationship to our country, as an internal
stakeholder with historically assigned credentials.
To us, therefore, you are more
than a prime minister. You are a grandson of the Jamaican soil who has been
privileged and enriched by your forebears’ sins of the enslavement of our
ancestors.
As we prepare for you a red
carpet befitting your formal status we invite you to cast your eyes upon the
colours of our national flag that symbolise the history we share. You are, Sir,
a prized product of this land and the bonanza benefits reaped by your family
and inherited by you continue to bind us together like birds of a feather.
Be assured, Prime Minister, that
you will find no more generous people on our planet Earth than those who will
greet you with golden hearts and civilised consciousness. I urge that you
embrace the sincerity of our salutations. It is born and bred in the cauldron
of our enslavement by your family and society.
Consider it a golden gift of
friendship and not simply the empty expression of protocols relevant to the
events you will attend. It is furthermore, an overture to an expectation of a
dialogue of reparatory justice that can redefine for us a new intimacy for this
long 21st century on which we are embarked.
Your advisors would have informed
you that beyond the boundary of the affairs of State, civil society welcomes
you without reservation, though with a qualification that bears the burden of our
tortured past within the historically textured present. I speak of outstanding
and unresolved matters that are relevant to our sense of mutual respect as
equal nations dedicated to the cause of furthering humanity's finest imagined
destiny.
I speak, Sir, of the legacies of
slavery that continue to derail, undermine and haunt our best efforts at
sustainable economic development and the psychological and cultural
rehabilitation of our people from the ravishes of the crimes against humanity
committed by your British State and its citizens in the form of chattel slavery
and native genocide.
In this regard, I urge you to be
aware that the issue of reparatory justice for these crimes is now before our
respective nations, and the wider world. It is not an issue that can be further
ignored, remain under the rug, or placed on back burners, as your minister who
recently visited us so aptly described your agenda for Jamaica and the
Caribbean.
It will generate the greatest
global political movement of our time unless respected and resolved by you, the
leader of the State that extracted more wealth from our enslavement than any
other.
The Jamaican economy, more than
any other, at a critical moment in your nation's economic development, fuelled
its sustainable growth. Britain, as a result, became great and Jamaica has
remained the poorer. Jamaica now calls upon Britain to reciprocate, not in the
context of crime and compulsion, but in friendly, mutually respected dialogue.
It is an offer of opportunity
written not in the blood of our enslaved ancestors, but in the imagination of
their offspring and progeny who have survived the holocaust and are looking to
the future for salvation.
As a man, a humane man, with
responsibility for the humanity of your nation, we call upon you to rise to
this moment as you realise and internalise that without the wealth made by your
enslaving ancestors, right here in our Jamaica, we would not be enchained
together, today, called upon to treat with this shared past.
Successive governments in this
land, a place still groaning under the weight of this injustice, have done well
during the 53 years of sovereignty, but the burden of the inherited mess from
slavery and colonialism has overwhelmed many of our best efforts. You owe it to
us as you return here to communicate a commitment to reparatory justice that
will enable your nation to play its part in cleaning up this monumental mess of
Empire.
We ask not for handouts or any
such acts of indecent submission. We merely ask that you acknowledge responsibility
for your share of this situation and move to contribute in a joint programme of
rehabilitation and renewal. The continuing suffering of our people, Sir, is as
much your nation's duty to alleviate as it is ours to resolve in steadfast acts
of self-responsibility.
In the four corners of Kingston
there are already whispers that your strategy will be to seek a way to weaken
Jamaica's commitment to Caribbean reparations in a singular act of
gift-granting designed to divide and rule and to subvert the regional discourse
and movement.
You, Sir, are a Briton, not a
Greek, and we have no reason therefore to fear what you bear. But we do ask
that you recall the Caribbean region was once your nation’s unified field for
taxation, theatre for warfare, and space for the implementation of trade law
and policy. Seeing the region as one is therefore in your diplomatic DNA, and
this we urge that you remember.
Finally, Sir, I write from the
perspective of an academic bred in Britain and reared in the University of the
West Indies, an institution your nation planted in Kingston in 1948 with a
small but significant grant. It would honour us to show you what we the people
have reaped from this single seed.
We have created a flourishing
federal farm that now cultivates the minds of millions, a symbol of our
collective determination to take seriously our self-responsibility and to place
our dignity as an emerging nation before any other consideration. From this
singular seed we have grown one of the finest universities in the world crafted
by our hands and inspired by our dreams.
This story, Sir, can guide your
reflection as to who we are and what we expect of you. We urge you then, in
this light, to indicate your nation's willingness to work towards a reparatory
justice programme for the Caribbean, with a view to allowing us to come
together in order to come to closure, put this terrible past behind us, and to
leave it to us to continue the making of our future.
Kindest regards
Hilary Beckles
Chairman, Caricom Reparations
Commission
Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe
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