Dive Deeper

kemba’s work centres around youth advocacy, sensitization, and awareness building and the organisation provides a successful model of youth engagement around the topic of reparations. They hope to inspire other organisations across the Caribbean to someday have a unified reparations youth voice across the Caribbean.

Groups that advocate for reparations almost never seek only money. The social, the political and the economic are bound together and must be addressed together, creating the possibility of a better world.

Quantification and monetary reparation, while necessary, are not in themselves enough. They must be combined with institutional recognition through an education system that acknowledges the role of enslaved African people in both challenging and driving forward the economies, scientific innovations and cultures of European enslavers.

Close to 100 years ago, Marcus Garvey argued the case for reparations for the crimes of slavery and colonialism when he said back in 1919, “They said we were heathens, we were pagans, we were savages and did not know how to take care of ourselves; that we did not have any religion; we did not have any culture; we did not have any civilisation for all those centuries, and that is why they had to be our guardians. But, thank God, we have them all now, and as such we are asking that you hand back to us ‘our own civilisation’. Hand back to us that which you have robbed and exploited us of in the name of God and Christianity for the last 500 years.”

It must be emphasized that Garvey’s work has contributed in no small way to the development of the Reparations Movement of today. Leaders of this movement not only advocated its end but also that proponents of the system and their modern-day beneficiaries should atone for the genocide and heinous human rights violations of the rights of African people.

For Guyana, 2023 is very significant in Guyana’s journey to economic freedom for African Guyanese. It is not only the 185th year of emancipation but, more significantly, it is the Bicentennial of the 1823 Demerara Slave Rebellion. This rebellion, which was led by Christianized Africans, was the largest rebellion in the British colonies.

CARICOM’s 50th Anniversary coincides with a decade of development of decisions that have led to its most-important international diplomatic and political achievement to date: Its decision to pursue Reparations from the United Kingdom (UK) and the European Union (EU) for Reparations for Slavery and Native Genocide.

Reparations describe how an individual, group or society attempts to rectify and remedy wrong-doing, crime or atrocity. In other words, reparations are an attempt to “repair” the harm done. Crucially, reparations “must be understood as a right and not a favour.”