Address by Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre to the Reparations Forum on 'Financing Justice, Advancing Caribbean Development'

Distinguished Guests, 

It’s a distinct honour and pleasure to address you today on the topic of ‘Financing Justice, Advancing Caribbean Development’. 

Financing Justice to Advance Caribbean Development is a timely topic at this point, when Justice and Development continue to be the critical issues driving CARICOM’s quest for Reparations from Europe for Slavery and Native Genocide. 

It’s the big question that’s occupied our minds over the past 12 years that we have been pursuing what CRC Chair Sir Hilary Beckles has aptly described as ‘Britain’s Black Debt’. 

This debt, as we know, is huge, costly and priceless.  

But, how do we go about assessing and concluding just how much debt is owed to us across the Caribbean by those from Europe who invented, nurtured and nourished the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade?  

Some 86 years go (1939 to be exact) W. Arthur Lewis offered a template that was adopted by CARICOM 81 years later (on Emancipation Day 2020) and announced to the world by Prime Minister Mia Mottley, in Barbados, as the Chair of CARICOM’s Prime Ministerial Subcommittee on Reparations (PMSC). 

That formula, regarded by many as an everlasting template for calculation of Britain’s black debt to its then West Indian colonies, was painfully calculated by the then 24-year-old first Black professor on the London university circuit. 

As 23, he’d taken a sabbatical from the London School of Economics to return to the Caribbean to personally observe the 1938 working class revolutions started by the region’s stevedores and other dock workers. 

Lewis returned to London and penned his first book ‘Labour in the West Indies’ just as the Second World War started.  

But the war didn’t in any way change the formulae and calculations in the template produced by the young man who, 47 years later, become the first person of African Descent to win a Nobel Prize for Economics. 

Some 84 years after the Lewis formula was penned, another calculation was made by the Brattle Group, which, unlike Lewis who limited his to the British West Indies, examined the case for The Caribbean and The Americas, based on the wealth gap of 2020. 

The Brattle Group’s formula concludes that the ‘estimate of the total harm from transatlantic chattel slavery for the period of post-enslavement is US $22.9 trillion is based on summing up the harms calculated for each country…’ 

These are two formulae for our consideration of Britain’s Black Debt and it’s important that while governments are still grappling with the issue of how we get paid, the CRC and NPCs also acquaint themselves with the facts and figures of both findings – one with a round figure, the other with a well-rounded formula. 

There have been several other successful demands for reparatory justice in the 20th Century: by Kenya’s Mau-Mau against the British, by the Jews against Hitler’s Germany, by the Japanese Americans detained during World War II, by the Korean women against the Japanese for violation of their humanity, etc. 

The United Nations in 2021 declared Trans-Atlantic Chattel Slavery as ‘The worst crime against humanity’. 

But from 2013 – eight years before — CARICOM had decided to launch the movement for Reparations, which has since become the world’s Number One Human Rights issue.  

CARICOM’s initiative to establish the CRC and produce a 10-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice from Europe has quickly turned from a pebble in a pail, to a tsunami washing waves on shores in the USA and The Americas, Africa, India – and everywhere Slavery and Native Genocide helped reshape a people’s history. 

In our case, however, we’re a region of 14 sovereign and independent nations making a single and united claim for reparations owed for centuries of slavery’s unpaid labour – and telling the world, through our 10-point plan, how we intend to do it. 

Today, thanks to the successful work of the CRC and the NRCs, Reparations is an annual feature on the agenda of CARICOM Summits — including this very day at this very historic 50th Anniversary Summit in Basseterre. 

Our conference ends today, but our work will continue beyond tomorrow. 

We are the only region worldwide that’s linked our demand for Reparatory Justice to our development as one Caribbean community. 

Reparations for Caribbean Development is, therefore, the central theme belying all our efforts and it’s the role and duty of our governments to ensure – first and foremost – that our NRCs can finance the cost of effectively sharing the Reparations Message with our people. 

We also have to see our 10-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice as a Caribbean Development Plan of its own, as each point relates to an aspect of our region’s development. 

But as recent history has reaffirmed, there are always also those from the other side whose human hearts are truly torn by the historical atrocities committed by their families and are willing to join in our various historical quests for genuine liberation. 

Others wrote our history, but no one can steal our narrative today, leaving it to us – Governments, the CRC and all NRCs — to take our reparations struggle today to the next stages. 

As such, it’s our solemn duty to our ancestors that we ensure we take this struggle to its logical conclusions – including the need to start writing Our Story.   

Sir Hilary and others like Walter Rodney spent lifetimes painfully researching our true story to help us build the new Caribbean development plans to guide us through another seemingly permanent season of global economic and geopolitical turbulence that continues to side-line people who look and live like us across the world. 

The duty therefore falls squarely on us – this generation of Caribbean governments and people – to find and execute the plans and ways to take our region’s development to the next necessary stage: of a community and people, united in a common struggle for all. 

I thank you and wish the forum well. 

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