“Underdevelopment in the Caribbean is not accidental—it was engineered and it remains structural”:

The Repair Campaign spoke with St. Kitts-based community organiser Elsie Harry about reparatory justice in St Kitts and Nevis.

Could you introduce yourself and your work?

My name is Elsie Harry, and I am a Community Organiser with the Repair Campaign.

I come to this work with over a decade worth of experience in grassroots mobilisation, advocacy and development planning. I have also been a Reparations Advocate for the past twelve years.

I was born in Guyana, however, in 1999, when I was six years old, my parents migrated with my sister and I, to the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis. This was during a period of political instability in Guyana, and in response to a regional recruitment call for able bodied men, like my father, to work within the Sugar Industry of St. Kitts & Nevis.

As a result my passion for reparations is rooted not in a career in the field of Reparatory Justice, but rather, in a very practical and lived understanding of development and underdevelopment, shaped by movement, labour, and survival across Caribbean spaces.

My work focuses on public education, community consciousness-building, and movement infrastructure to make reparations more legible and local. My immediate goals are threefold:

•⁠ ⁠Firstly to strengthen community-level understanding of reparations and our cultural identities;

•⁠ ⁠Secondly, to build relationships across civil society and public office

•⁠ ⁠Finally, to support the development of local leadership, especially among young people, who can sustain this work beyond individual reparations campaigns.

Why does working in reparations matter to you?

I completed a Bachelor of Social Science Degree in International Relations along with a Master of Engineering Degree in Urban and Rural Planning, and throughout my career I have worked with Governments, Regional Organisations, NGO’s and Grassroots Organisations, at the intersection of policy, community engagement, and social justice. What this has taught me, is that underdevelopment in the Caribbean is not accidental—it was engineered and it remains structural.

I have seen how historical extraction continues to shape land access, wealth distribution, and institutional capacity across our region. Reparations, for me, is therefore not about symbolism; it is about deliberately addressing those structural deficits and restoring agency to communities that have been systematically denied it.

I cannot therefore call myself a development-minded individual without being deeply committed to the quintessential development work- Reparations.

How are the histories of St Kitts and Nevis crucial in the movement for reparatory justice?

The Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis occupies a critical place in the history of British colonialism in the Caribbean, particularly because these islands were not marginal colonies, but two of the most profitable and brutal centers of British plantation enslavement.

St. Kitts, historically referred to as, “The Mother Colony of the West Indies,” was among the earliest and wealthiest British colonies per capita by the 1700s. While Nevis, was also nicknamed, “The Queen of the Caribees”, for the immense wealth its sugar plantations generated for Britain. This wealth, built almost entirely on enslaved African labour, following the near-total destruction of the Indigenous inhabitants of the territory, flowed directly to Britain, financing banks, country estates, industrial development, and insurance companies. The Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis is therefore a clear example of how Caribbean enslavement underwrote European development.

Moreover, the scale of exploitation on both islands, especially Nevis, was extreme. Enslaved Africans vastly outnumbered Europeans, and by the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Africans formed the overwhelming majority of the population, making Nevis one of the most intensely enslaved societies per capita in the region. These demographics demonstrate the systematic, large-scale nature of African exploitation and the creation of long-term racial and economic inequalities that continue to shape society today.

Emancipation in 1834 did not bring justice. Enslavers were compensated, while formerly enslaved people received nothing and were forced into apprenticeship systems that functioned as continued unpaid labor. Britain’s decision to pay enslavers while leaving the formerly enslaved landless and economically marginalized is a central historical grievance in the reparatory justice movement.

St. Kitts and Nevis also has a long legacy of resistance and ongoing reparations advocacy. These include sugar worker rebellions and labor movements, including, the 1935 Buckley’s Uprising, where 3 leaders were killed by colonial forces. This demonstrates that emancipation did not bring true economic freedom and that plantation structures continued well into the twentieth century.

Even the later decline of the inherited sugar industry and the transition to tourism as a productive sector, did not dismantle these colonial structures—it largely repackaged them. Control over land, capital, and development decisions within the Federation continue to reflect in many ways, colonial patterns still linked to British legal, economic, and institutional frameworks.

The complex histories of St. Kitts and Nevis strengthen the case that the harms of enslavement and colonialism were not only historical, but intergenerational and structural.

What are you looking forward to in the ongoing movement for reparatory justice in the Caribbean?

I am looking forward to the deepening of collective clarity and a unification of purpose. Across the region, and especially in St Kitts and Nevis, I’d like our people to become more informed about our history, more confident in naming the harm that was done, and more united in asserting that reparations is not charity; it is justice.

I look forward to Caribbean nations advancing a shared strategy, grounded in the CARICOM Ten-Point Plan, to push for reparatory justice that is tangible and people-centred, visible in education, health, land access, cultural renewal, and economic empowerment.

It is critical that Caribbean–UK engagement becomes more explicit about material repair and I trust that there will be more honest conversations about Britain’s continuing role in shaping Caribbean constraints.

It is my firm belief, that Reparations is not about revisiting history for its own sake. It is about addressing present-day inequalities that were historically orchestrated, and creating futures defined by dignity, equity, and self-determination.

Harambe – Let us all pull together.

Tutashinda- We will win!