Could you give a brief overview of the state of history education in schools in Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean? Do you feel it is fit for purpose and adequately reflects the region’s history?

As far as I know, in all the countries of the Caribbean, high school students are required to learn about the history of their country up to grade nine. Beyond that, I understand that history is not a mandatory subject.

Students may choose to continue with history when they choose their CSEC subjects, but not many choose history. The effect of that is the reduction of numbers that apply to do history at the tertiary/university level; because if there is no adequate feeder, then you’re not going to have the applicants.

In terms of the kind of history which will help students to understand the struggle for human rights and the struggle for reparation, I’m not sure they get that explicitly until the fourth and fifth forms if they choose to continue doing history. That kind of history must be decolonial in how it teaches students why we’re in a decolonisation struggle so long after emancipation and independence.

It’s very important to stress that there should be a purpose for education. If we’re going to advance and magnify the reparations struggle, then we must have an objective in terms of education for human rights.

I think Malcolm X put it well. He said, “education is an important element in the struggle for human rights. It is the means to help our children and our people rediscover their identity and thereby increase their self-respect.” That is something that we must think about and embrace.

For those who choose to continue with history, what aspects of history are taught? Do you feel it adequately connects to the Caribbean’s present-day context?  

Yes, absolutely. 

Those who choose history at this level get the kind of education that can prepare them for activism should they choose to be advocates. But again, it depends on who the teachers are, how the content is taught, or how a student can interpret the content and act on it for himself or herself. 

I have been involved in helping to construct the CSEC syllabus – the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate – at the fourth and fifth form level, and the CAPE syllabus – Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination – at the sixth form level.

At these levels they learn about the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and the names of the various countries before they got their English names. For example, Dominica got its name because it was invaded by Columbus on a Sunday which is “Domingo” in Spanish. But the Indigenous people, the Kalinago, originally gave it the name Wai’tukubuli, meaning tall is her body.

They also learn about colonisation in terms of conquest, the fight by the indigenous peoples to get rid of colonisers, and how the search for a free labor force that could be exploited was the reason for enslavement of Africans. They learn about what chattel enslavement was like, who the enslavers were and the protest movements to liberate the enslaved.

The revised syllabus would teach them that the struggle for abolition and emancipation did not only come from protesters and activists in the various European countries, but also from the heroes and heroines in the Caribbean’s protest movements, whom we should venerate in the struggle for emancipation. For example, Jamaican National Hero Samuel Sharpe, who was the leader of the final Emancipation War that influenced Emancipation. In Jamaica May 23rd, is Labour Day which also marks the date Samuel Sharpe was hanged in 1832. On Labour Day, which replaced what used to be “Empire Day”, we go to the National Heroes Park and we lay a wreath to Samuel Sharpe.

And then they learn about the post-slavery period, the struggle for economic empowerment, post -slavery protests like the Morant Bay War in the case of Jamaica or the 1876 Confederation riots in Barbados.

And recently now in the CAPE syllabus, there is a module on reparatory justice.

Do you think Caribbean governments are doing enough to encourage children and teenagers to learn their history in order that they will become activists for the reparations movement?

There’s growing lobbying for that to be so. The various Ministers of Education across the Caribbean have been asked to look again at how the education system must support the reparation movement. Although reparation is on the syllabus at the sixth form level, the issue is to get history as a compulsory subject at the lower levels. 

And in fact, some years ago, the CRC took a decision that all reparation committees should lobby their governments for compulsory History education.

How can we reach wider audiences with history education?

There is more than one way to teach the past. For example, recognising key dates in a heritage calendar across the region is another way to teach history even outside the classroom. 

African History Month in February is used as a time to hold events. Africa Day in May is also another occasion to teach and encourage history education. Sometimes children won’t read a book, but they will attend an event where there is music. Art, poetry, reggae music and dance, are powerful ways to speak to history. 

Emancipation Day on August 1 is celebrated right across the region in addition to Independence Day in each country. In Jamaica, we have Heroes’ Day and Heritage Week in October, which see a lot of children and their parents attending relevant events. More and more, across the Caribbean, October 12 (the old Columbus Day), is commemorated as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. And there are Maroon festivals including those at Accompong in Jamaica every 6th of January, attended by an amazing cross-section of people.

The point I’m trying to make is that there are several ways to teach and learn history. And if students won’t take it in school or they’re not learning through the texts, we must ensure that there is what we call symbolic decolonisation reshaping the landscape with monuments of our own people who struggled for independence and for liberty. We must ensure there are these performance events where conscious artistes perform so that there are different ways in which young people are exposed to decolonial history and heritage.

How important is decolonial language in your view?

The language that we use to speak about our history must also change. We must stop using the word “slaves” because we need to put the blame where the blame should go. And so instead we should talk about “enslaved people”. Somebody did that to African people, so we refer to them as enslaved Africans, enslaved men, enslaved women. 

We don’t talk about “slave holders” because if we change slave, then we have to say “enslavers.” 

Instead of the “slave trade” we talk about the “transatlantic trafficking” because if we can talk about modern day trafficking, why can’t we apply that to the historic trafficking, which was far worse in numbers and brutality than what’s going on now? Not that modern-day slavery and trafficking are not to be condemned. 

The decolonisation and deconstruction of language is an important part of what we’re doing.

What work has been done by the University of the West Indies to advance decolonial history? 

I want to applaud the University of the West Indies, because since 1948 when it was established, it has embraced the project of decolonisation in so many ways. The history department has had scholars like Walter Rodney, Kamau Brathwaite, Elsa Goveia, Douglas Hall, Hillary Beckles, who have lit up the imagination of our students with decolonial history. 

Since 2007 or even before, the University has embarked on a renaming exercise involving the roads on the Mona campus; and Halls of Residence have mostly been localised. The Heritage Committee has influenced the construction of some monuments to remember the enslaved people and indentured Indians who used to work on this Mona campus; so history is on the landscape of the campus.     

Many of us at The University of the West Indies, from the days of Walter Rodney, have embraced the philosophy that education prepares us for advocacy. That students and staff must not imprison themselves within the walls of academia but must take the message out to the communities and the schools. The History Department, for example, has long had a school history outreach program, in which staff members help students prepare for CSEC and conduct seminars at their schools or at The UWI. The Centre for Reparation Research has held workshops with fifth and sixth formers in Trinidad and Tobago and The Bahamas and distributed the book we produced, which is “An Introduction to Reparation for Secondary Schools.” And many of us at the University of the West Indies have hosted radio shows, written books, or have been interviewed so that we can pass on the knowledge and the interpretation of history. 

If you had the ability to change the syllabus and teach one thing to people who go right up to high school, what would that one thing be? 

Because I started with Malcolm X’s quote which says, “education is an important element in the struggle for human rights”, I would have to teach about conquest and colonisation, because that is so fundamental in helping everyone to understand the present, and as Peter Tosh urges us to do, “recruit soldiers for Jah Army.”

History is not something that is just in the past. It continues to affect how we live our lives today; how we understand the present; what our children learn today. 

How would teaching that history impact the development of black consciousness?

The thing is, once you teach students history, they will, hopefully, naturally develop that black consciousness. It’s the absence of that history that makes them not have that consciousness. 

When I led a country visit to the UK speaking to educators as the Chair of the Working Group of Experts on African Descent at the UN, I was told that one of the reasons children there were not turned on to history was that black children were taught their history began with slavery. They, therefore, felt ashamed of the past. We should not do that to children. 

If you’re going to teach about Africa, there’s so much more. You can’t talk only about enslavement, critical as that is; you also have to talk about the chiefs, queens and the kings and the leaders and the great empires of Africa, so they know that they came from great civilisations, and that it was conquest and colonisation which created the present legacy of negative association.

It is important to teach that in the past anyone could be trafficked. Those who were forcibly trafficked in the Middle Passage were kings and queens, chiefs and chieftainesses, leaders, politicians, poets, artists, philosophers.

Teaching history is not only an academic exercise – it’s a consciousness raising exercise.

It is an exercise in empowering our people to feel good about themselves and therefore to hold their heads high and resist the discrimination. 

When you just bow your head and fall into that rhetoric of our past that others would want to impose on us, you don’t raise up proud people. And I think that’s why changing the landscape so that children are not walking past colonisers every single day and feeling the pain of that is so important.

How does this kind of historical education fit into and strengthen the reparations movement? 

Education is not just one thing – it’s a multiplicity of thoughts, of ideas, of practices which you want to change. 

It was Marcus Garvey who said “history is the landmark by which we are directed into the true course of life.” And the history that we have had to unlearn is a history of oppression. It is precisely because of that history and the fact that our people still suffer the legacies of enslavement, that forms the rationale for the reparation movement. But if you don’t have that knowledge, you’re not going to join the fight. Therefore, that decolonial history is critical for understanding why we are in the reparation movement. 

In the CARICOM Ten-Point Plan, we’re asking for African reconnection – that’s part of the education too. Part of the reparation demand is money for Caribbean school children to go to Africa so that they can make that connection and see for themselves where they’re from. They must be taken to the pyramids in Egypt, for example, and see the great civilisations.

The reparation movement should not just be a movement of intellectuals, or the conscious universities or conscious churches. It has to be mass-based. And one way to do that is to develop a history curriculum that is fit for purpose. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies talks about the Triple-A strategy: one of the reasons for education at the tertiary level is to make the university an activist university, where all the things that we are doing lead to something. Yes, a degree is to, “step up inna life” as we say in Jamaica. But it must have a purpose. And our purpose right now is to have an educated population that will understand why reparation.

How do you see the reparations movement taking shape today?

I don’t think some people would have imagined that we would have reached where we are in the reparation struggle today. There are so many requests for interviews about reparation, locally, regionally, internationally. There are so many statements now, even from the UN at the highest level. There are so many organisations. And now we have people stepping forward, giving apologies, doing studies, offering scholarships to students, offering to invest in communities. This is a manifestation of what we have been trying to do. And it is becoming global.

A strong success is that Africa wants to join the Caribbean in ensuring that it’s a joined-up approach and that the major powers understand that aid and grants are not reparations. Even if I don’t see it in my lifetime, it will happen.

I end with this: