PM’s promise and the reparations predicament

SHABAKA KAMBON

THE CROSS Rhodes Freedom Project applauds Prime Minister Rowley for his public utterances regarding reparatory justice delivered at the PNM’s celebration of Spiritual Baptist Liberation Day on March 28. We are compelled, nevertheless, to point out the absurd contradiction facing a government which seeks to pursue reparations for “genocide, slavery, slave trading and racial apartheid,” while openly glorifying the historical figures who perpetrated and promoted these abominable historical wrongs.

Resolving this contradiction presents our young nation with a great teaching opportunity. We can acknowledge past wrongdoing in a non-vindictive manner, distance ourselves from colonial rationales that justified it, understand the exact measure of the actions we must undertake to transcend its consequences and reaffirm our shared commitment to universal human rights and equality.

In this spirit we strongly urge the Prime Minister to act on the Freedom Project’s petition to Parliament to establish a national committee to “identify, destroy, re-purpose or reconstitute any monuments, memorials, emblems, signs, symbols or the like that celebrate, commemorate and glorify racism and white supremacy.”

The petition was read by a government member and approved by the House of Representatives on July 1, 2020, without a dissenting voice. It is in accord with both established best practice across the world and a 2017 resolution of the Caricom Reparations Commission, which calls for “all statues and memorials dedicated to the public reverence of persons who ushered and directed the genocide against the native people of the Caribbean, and those who defended and practised the crime of enslaving others, denying them their humanity, and all those who aided and abetted them, to be removed from places of public celebration.”

Barbados’s ambassador to Caricom, David Comissiong, actually referenced the resolution when speaking about his country’s removal of the statue of Lord Nelson at a CRFP function on October 12, 2021.

Times are changing and so must we if we are to avoid the embarrassment associated with our heedless celebration of colonial violence. Contrast the indifference of the recalcitrant influential minority here with what is happening in the UK. On July 23, 2020, the BBC reported, “A statue of a ‘brutal’ slave owner [Thomas Picton]…is to be removed from a ‘Welsh heroes’ gallery in Cardiff's City Hall” because "the behaviour of Picton as governor of Trinidad was abhorrent, even in his own era, and not deserving of a place in the Heroes of Wales collection.”

The Cardiff city council concluded rightly that a "heightened awareness about the history of slavery must include a reassessment of the regard in which we hold Picton, and many others who were actors and beneficiaries of slavery,” and finally, “it was an error that he had not been removed sooner.”

Now The Museum of Wales is also removing Picton’s portrait from a room for Welsh icons and they have commissioned young Trinidadian artists to reinterpret it and to present their work at the same time as our anniversary of independence later this year.

Through these actions the Welsh authorities are reaching out to us and sending a clear message to the world that they have the courage to confront their past and to address the systemic racism and inequity that stem from slavery and empire. What message does our inaction send to them and the rest of the world? What does it say about us if we, the descendants of the victims of Picton’s crimes, determine that we should continue to venerate him at the scene of his crimes even while those who benefitted from them recognise that they make him unworthy?

To our prime minister’s credit, he did respond to the overwhelming demands of the public before the covid19 pandemic became the national priority. On July 10, 2020, he assured the nation, “After the election…we are going to get some community conversation going at the national level to determine what we do about this in a very civil, sane and sober way…on the basis of knowledge.”

Today as we reopen our country, we look forward to the Prime Minister acting with the same moral clarity he expressed about reparations to fulfil his promise.

Shabaka Kambon is the founder/director of the Cross Rhodes Feedom Project