Speaking at the Next Steps Ghana Conference June 17th-19th, Bajan Prime Minister Mia Mottley announced the CARICOM’s new manifesto, yet to be validated by CARICOM governments.  

First presented in 2014, the CARICOM 10 Point Plan [TPP] was first revised in 2018. The Plan itself is motivated by the urgent need for repair  to redress deliberately underdeveloped realities defined by systemic traumas of colonisation. Crucially, the infrastructure and violence of these systems inflicted differential harms on Caribbean peoples that connect across all 10 points of the CARICOM plan. These layered traumas require both an intersectional and systemic approach to justice.  

The revision to this plan [as provisionally shared with participants/attendees of the Next Steps conference] adds particular emphasis on correcting the trauma of gender injustices, as well as strengthening repair for the devastation of our ecosystems and the genocide suffered by First People indigenous communities in the Caribbean.  

• The Caribbean region would not exist as it does today without the mass ethnic cleansing of its First Peoples, crimes foundational to colonisation. The juridical decisions that made up a subhuman status for First Peoples was determining for making up an inhuman status for African peoples that defined their enslavement and classification as commodity for centuries. 

Genocide was the beginning of European colonisation. This was the violence used, for complete annihilation as a strategy for dispossession and control of land and resources. It is on these mass graveyards that the Caribbean was built. The survivors of this attempted mass ethnic cleansing are forced to contend with stripped rights, crippled culture, on land  stolen from them and illegally settled by European invaders. This devastation is a traumatic history written in every part of our environments in the archipelago and confronted by all Caribbean communities.  

European invading colonial powers made declarations, policies, court decisions devising a juridical structure around genocide as foundational to colonisation. The wealth extracted that stems from these  crimes against humanity funded Europe’s development. The administration of the chattel enslavement of African peoples and plantation colonies was founded on this loss and only accounted for First Peoples as far as to legislate their continued isolation and marginalisation from plantation society. These are crimes against humanity for which the perpetrating institution must be held accountable. 

The revised 10 point plan emphasises the long work required to invest into the preservation of First People indigenous histories, languages, cultures. As well as committing to the rehabilitation of basic education, care, ownership and self-determination of First People indigenous communities.  

• Gender-based violence is a reality systematically entrenched into the structure and ideologies of societies in any way shaped by colonisation. The revised CARICOM TPP highlights the historical violence that shapes specific gendered inequalities today as a starting point to redressing how these traumas violently show today. 

The harms enslaved women suffered during chattel enslavement intersected across racial and gendered forms of abuse and assault. The dehumanisation that determined the trafficking and enslavement of captive Africans starts with the violence of women and menstruators as ‘creating property from the womb.  

The menstrual cycle spans an average of 28-30 days, 365 days a year for decades. A menstruator’s health must therefore always consider the individual’s cycle. No human life could exist without menstruators, and no enslaved ‘commodity’ born in the Caribbean could exist without enslaved women. The reproductive health of enslaved women was subjected to the policing of colonial powers, designing systems denying women and menstruators the rights, agency of their own bodies and care. The conditions of enslavement of a captive African woman and menstruator were determined by their fertility. European scientific ‘discoveries’ and investigations were experimented on or reaped from the bodies of enslaved women.  

Directly as part of the everyday of chattel enslavement, the realities survived by enslaved women and menstruators were far different in every aspect from nutrition and hydration through weather, injury inflicted from the bodies of enslavers. Extreme forms of gender-based violence such as sexual assault, rape, femicide, were endemic to colonisation. Through the processes of colonisation, they have become endemic to society. GBV was systematically inflicted on women and menstruators, folded into systemic GBV against women and menstruators in the form of physical, emotional, economic, psychic traumas. These traumas are also intergenerational, with patterns emerging today in our bodies showing the legacies of this specific violence. 

These traumas are foundational to the system of chattel enslavement. Reparatory justice for the legacies of the harms of chattel enslavement and colonisation must be understood starting from the intersecting harms descendent women and menstruators face today from the histories of these intersecting forms of GBV. The revised CARICOM 10 Point Plan addresses these specific harms and identifies the need for reparations that truly confront the dehumanisation of GBV during chattel enslavement, and the systems developed from that trauma that thrive today. The harms enacted against First People indigenous, African enslaved women and menstruators was the premise for the differential harms enacted against women and menstruators inclusive of colonial-assigned race. Variable systemic gender-based violence against women and menstruators is everybody’s problem, and correcting these systemic traumas must start with intentional actions through reparatory justice. 

Following Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s presentation of the revised plan, approval is pending from CARICOM governments. It is the aim that this revised 10-Point-Plan will open up to more transformative work across the reparatory justice movement.