Thanks so much for agreeing to be interviewed by The Repair Campaign. We’re looking forward to getting to know you.  

Can you tell us about yourself, your background and what you’re passionate about? 

Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be in this conversation.  

I’m Sonjah. At the heart of it – a simple country girl who came to Kingston for University. In my movement from Montego Bay, where I grew up, to Kingston for university, I was studying geography and geology in my undergraduate days. I really got in touch with how much I did not know about Jamaican culture. My entry-point into anything historical comes from my grounding in geography and my grounding in culture.  

I ended up doing a PhD in cultural studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona campus, where I decided to focus on the dance of the dancehall, and the history of performance practice from the plantation days. In fact, my book, “Dancehall from Slave Ship to Ghetto”, really captures the essence of that conversation, and that trajectory of performance practice and its suppression – the ways in which no space was made for entertainment for those who were forcibly transported in the transatlantic slave trade to this part of the world. 

I’ve spent mostly all of my academic career in the University of the West Indies where I have invested time teaching, researching, publishing, and also contributing to the administrative evolution of the university in my role, most recently as Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Education and currently the Director of the Centre for Reparation Research, which I really cherish in terms of an opportunity to contribute to that agenda regionally and internationally. 

This new role feels like it was a perfect role for you. Can you tell us what is one of your biggest objectives in this new capacity as director of the CRR? 

I assumed the role of Director of the CRR in August 2024. In a sense, it was serendipitous.  

Strategically, I see that work before me as following in the footsteps of those persons who have spent their lives fighting for reparation. I go all the way back to the Rastafari from the 1930s and before them, Marcus Garvey, who invested time, effort, and a lot of personal sacrifice, all the way to Bob Marley through his message music and the reggae musicians who have kept repatriation and reparations alive.  

I want to really single out the Rastafari movement in the way that Barry Chevannes talks about the Rastafari as the memory of the Jamaican people. They have not only been the memory of the Jamaican people, but the memory of the entire world, bringing attention to so many of the issues that confront us – whether it’s peace, unity, racism – there are so many things that the Rastas have held in front of our eyes so that we can be accountable in this time.  

Taking Reparation to the Streets 

The Center for Reparation Research is the arm of the University that supports the research agenda for reparation in the CARICOM Reparations Commission. 

I really see the work that I must do as one which takes reparation to the streets.  

And I mean the streets that were being pounded by the Rastafari brethren, by Marcus Garvey and the UNIA participants and followers, by those street preachers in Bedwardian times. I don’t know how many of you may know Alexander Bedward as one who led a liberation theology movement in the Caribbean, in Jamaica in particular, where his participants in that church were very clear about a focus on Africa. And so there’s a trajectory in Jamaica, and in the Caribbean region, that has always been interested in repair.  

Because my focus on reparation has come out of a grounding in culture, I believe that repair, in the way that the CARICOM 10-Point Plan iterates, has to be seen in multiple dimensions of life – whether it is celebration, dance, music, public health, economics, the structures of government. Whatever it is, these spheres of life have to be impacted by this whole concept of repair and reparation in particular. 

The entire human experience must be accounted for in the ways that we talk about reparation. As it relates to psychological reparation and wellness in particular, which is something I’m completely passionate about, we have never been the people in the region to have a conversation about wellness for ourselves. 

This is something that disturbs me and ignites me at the same time. The Caribbean serves now as a primary tourism destination for people of the global north – they come here for wellness, but the people who serve them, who help them to get into a mindset about wellness are never the people who have had conversations for themselves about wellness. These are not the people who can go on vacations and have rest and relaxation to recuperate, to reset their own lives in meaningful ways. So I am very clear that those are the people I want to reach.  

A New Research Agenda 

The Center for Reparation Research must also, in the context of the University of the West Indies, be able to chart a research agenda with stakeholders who have not necessarily seen reparation in their own work. But by virtue of the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary terrain that reparation must cover, their work becomes important in building out a reparatory justice research agenda.  

And one of things I’m extremely proud of in the context of the educational agenda is that the University of West Indies, recently with the University of Glasgow and through the Glasgow Caribbean Centre for Development Research, have now instituted a Master’s Programme in Reparatory Justice. And it’s a programme in which I teach. I teach a course on Psychohistoriography, Health and Reparatory Justice, which I developed along with other colleagues at the University who are developing courses to build out the offerings from the Caribbean.  

I’m very proud of the fact that we now have a program so persons from around the world can also see that reparatory justice is something that you can study and ground yourself in this context of justice.  

In the context of the Sustainable Development Goals, which are quite aligned with the Reparatory Justice agenda, the University recently launched a global school of development justice. It is a very important highlight of the work we must do from this part of the world, the global South, that serves the people of the street, the ordinary people of the Caribbean, the people who may not know what reparations can mean for them or even the concept as it is used in the academy. But they must be able to relate at the end of this decade.  

I’m hoping that the United Nations, in conjunction with all the stakeholders that have been advocating for a new Decade for People of African Descent, does announce another decade in which to finalise and really get a handle on some of these questions for the people who matter. 

What plans can you share with us about how you will accomplish these goals over the next 5 years? 

The strategic plan that I have charted so far has very much to do with three major plans. The Center for Reparation Research is interested in terms of its mandate in three major things: advocacy, education, and research. Those are very basic to our mandate. And so the strategic plan has those same three planks inside of it.  

Education 

I am interested in making sure that reparatory justice something that can be routinised in the academy, not just at the master’s level, but at the undergraduate level.  

There are no courses at the undergraduate level in reparation in the region. So where education is concerned, it will be vital to routinise reparation at the undergraduate university level, but also in the curriculum at the CSEC level (Caribbean Secondary Education Curriculum). We must be able to have those students move through the system with an understanding of reparatory justice at various levels in the education system.  

I’m going to relate this to the context in which we routinise gender studies, for example. At the university level, there are courses on gender and development, for example – that’s another interdisciplinary agenda. I’m wanting persons to be able to relate to reparatory justice at that granular level, that it impacts you in whatever sphere, whatever discipline you can imagine. 

Research 

One thing to support curriculum development and the teaching of reparation must be in terms of the research materials that are going to be published and disseminated. What are students going to be using in the classroom?  

I am interested in making sure that under research, the University of the West Indies’ colleagues are co-opted very seriously and deliberately into a research agenda for reparations. We have several formidable contributions – I speak now of my predecessor, Verene Shepherd. I speak of the Vice-Chancellor of the University of West Indies, Sir Hilary Beckles. There are a number of persons in the international sphere who have books like Ana Lucia Araujo.  

But I’m suggesting that in the Caribbean, one part of that repair must also be the ways in which we allow ourselves the reflection to write, to process, to research, and to contribute that to the students who come into the classroom. 

We are moving to establish a research cluster on reparatory justice in the University of the West Indies. So the very first thing I have sought to do is to collect data from the academics inside of the university who are doing research already on anything related to reparatory justice and to ask some questions to those who may be interested in aligning their work with a reparatory justice agenda.  

Advocacy 

Advocacy is the third dimension. And in the context of my own work, it must be that we are aligning with stakeholders in a way that reaches the generations to come. And this is where reaching them in the streets that they occupy, the social media streets, for example, becomes really very important.  

Advocacy is also going to be at the level of the United Nations and the levels of intergovernmental organisations and non-governmental organisations in the way that we’ve been doing. We have also started to revolutionise the ways in which we use the social media platforms that we’ve been accustomed to using, to highlight the CARICOM 10-Point Plan.  

We’re going to be partnering with institutions like The Repair Campaign, to do so much more in reaching every single citizen of the region – and that’s my focus, the Caribbean region, and of course the large Caribbean diaspora as well, reaching everyone about reparations.  

And I’m including indigenous peoples in that context. It’s not just those who have been transported in the context of a transatlantic trade in Africans into chattel slavery. I’m also including those persons who have experienced, in near genocidal proportions, the decimation of communities in the Caribbean and in the Americas more largely of Indigenous or First Nation Peoples. 

Could you comment on the growing acceptance by some entities on the need for repair particularly within the UK? 

I think the CARICOM 10-Point Plan has really been a fabulous articulation of where we must go in terms of the advocacy around reparation. I start there because many of the colonising countries to which letters have been sent, including The Netherlands, Spain, Britain, and so on, have not responded to these letters that have been sent to them from the CARICOM Reparations Commission and the Prime Ministerial Subcommittee in particular. They have not responded and we’ve not received apologies formally from Britain.  

Let me zone in on Britain and the Commonwealth in particular that has been very much bringing the attention to reparatory justice in multiple ways, whether it is the return of artifacts stolen from former colonies, or it is at the level of economic repair to impact the development that has been stymied in countries in the region at whichever level.  

This conversation must occur and we have seen quite a bit of traction, for example with the Heirs of Slavery, there’s a movement with apologies coming from individuals, institutions, banks, churches and so on. But not apologies coming so fast from countries.  

There is a perception about the fact that an economy such as Britain’s will become bankrupt with a conversation about economic repairing in relation to the Commonwealth.  

But we must become accountable to the crimes against humanity in the context of slavery. We must become accountable to the kind of devastation wreaked against countries and the peoples of African descent in particular. Certainly to those countries that suffered through chattel slavery, persons made to be inhuman in the context of the treatment, given no land at emancipation and having nothing to forge their way into what is today independence.  

And I feel very strongly about this, not in an aesthetic way, not in a philosophical way. I feel strongly about this in a fundamentally human moral way. And this is important because at a human level, if you have wronged someone, you must be able to make right at some point. And so it is very important that we continue the advocacy, we continue the negotiations, we continue the partnerships.  

One of the things I feel very strongly about as well is the need for a convergence – a coalescing around reparations from the disparate institutions and entities that are also working on reparatory justice. There’s need for a real strategy. And in some cases, a negotiating strategy that reaps the kind of reward we would want in the context of the negotiations, particularly with the colonising nations.  

There is much work to be done. Everyone needs to be having the conversation about reparation, whether it’s in their living rooms, in the classroom, in the workplace. It’s important that we all educate ourselves and be able to join in that conversation in order that a critical mass of us can begin to really make an impact. 

What kind of collaborations would you hope to see in advancing the reparations movement?  

I am an action person. I really believe it’s important to put your money where your mouth is. And while the University of the West Indies is grappling with its own access to resources, we must be able to align our goals and align our strategies with those institutions and entities that also have or share those goals. 

I see cooperation and collaboration with entities such as The Repair Campaign as quite important. It’s important that we find common ground and alignment with the common strategies to reach people.  

I am sure if we were to work together, the resources that we would each be spending would be multiplied by virtue of the common effort. So I’m committed to collaboration in a very real way.  

I see one major project that I’ve been discussing already with The Repair Campaign as one that will see us impacting the region and as well Britain itself. Let me use the example of history education in the UK. I think that it is important in the context of repair that those persons in Britain, in the United Kingdom who are teaching history who are learning history – both the teachers and the students – be given an opportunity to learn about the atrocities committed by Britain in the context of the transatlantic slave trade. I understand that this is not a routine part of their education at all. I think it’s important in the accountability that must be a part of repair, countries such as Britain make it a part of the agenda to include the things that are not so nice, not so pretty, not so sexy in their own education system so that students coming up can also see that Britain was not all that great in terms of all that it did. 

If you’re forcibly transported against your will to territories you don’t know, to forge a life without any resources, in a context where you’re not even able to speak the language of the coloniser. You are not given any space in the usual way to celebrate, live and have your being. This is a fundamental sort of atrocity that should not be entertained as a philosophical or any kind of aesthetic conversation.  

The fundamental rights of humans charted by the United Nations, include the ability to live and have your being in a dignified way. Nothing about slavery was dignified. And in fact, nothing about emancipation from slavery was dignified. Only dignified for those planters who received compensation the ending of slavery, but not those who are working their fingers off, their toes off, their hearts off, their minds to supply the mother country, Britain in particular, with the resources to build a country of formidable proportions.  

This is the real crisis – when you look at Britain and the wealth that was extracted from the Caribbean, you cannot but think of economic reparations. You cannot but think of the ways in which that wealth that was extracted must be returned in some way, shape or form.  

We have a long way to travel. This is not going to happen overnight. And so collaboration becomes even more critical in terms of the ways in which we must work together.  

Thank you so much. Is there anything else you would like to add? 

I really want to reiterate how important it is for everybody to get involved. The Centre for Reparation Research stands ready to support those in communities who want to have this conversation. Invite us, we will give talks.  

We also want to be able to be in conversation with those in the National Reparation Commissions across the region because of course this is the arm of CARICOM that is already in the streets. The CARICOM Reparations Commission is represented in each country by the National Reparation Committees.  

We want to reach out, we want to touch everyone, we want to impact the conversation. The Center for Reparation Research’s email address is [email protected]. 

Find us on social media: our Instagram and X account (formally Twitter) are @CRR_UWI.  

We stand ready to be a part of the conversation with you and also seek your support as we move to increase our own advocacy and drive for education and research.