West Indians share many things. Cuisine, music, an impenetrable resilience and national pride. But we also collectively share a history of colonialism that set the majority of Europe up for generations of fiscal success built on the slave trade and years of colonial rule.

Despite the furrowed brows and hushed voices that accompany conversations about reparations, there is a global precedent for this, especially when it comes to the former British Empire. By definition, reparations are simply “making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged.”

In 2013, Britain apologized to the members of the Mau Mau Uprising, Kenya’s struggle for independence. Britain set up colonial detention camps and physically and mentally abused Kenyans who opposed their colonial government. The settlement was around 20 million pounds, paid out to approximately 5,228 of the victims and their families. William Hague, who was serving as the secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs at the time, went on record:

“The British government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place and that they marred Kenya’s progress to independence. Torture and ill-treatment are abhorrent violations of human dignity which we unreservedly condemn.”

Mr. Hague also made sure to qualify this ruling as not a matter of justice, but a simple court preceding with absolutely no relevance to anything else:

“We do not believe that this settlement establishes a precedent in relation to any other former British colonial administration…”

You’ll never be successful telling a Jamaican to be quiet, especially when they have something to say. You’ll be even more unsuccessful suggesting that an entire nation simply “move forward” as a means to avoid a difficult and uncomfortable conversation. That’s not progress. It’s benevolent subjugation under the guise of shared prosperity. If aid looks like a new prison to extradite offenders back to Jamaica, I’d hate to see what advancement looks like. Most developing nations have had their progress delayed or impeded at one time or another because someone else tried determine their destiny for them.

Popcaan was right: the system is designed to set we up.

For a living definition of black excellence, you don’t have to look much further than the Caribbean. Ravaged for its natural resources, delegated as the property of its colonial overseers, politically disenfranchised via countless policy restrictions and legal adaptations and denied access to self-determine their economic identity, except for under the control and watchful eye of the same European nations who unjustly benefited, prospered and created a sustainable world on the backs and broken necks of black bodies. Still, we rise. 

As Ta-Nehisi Coates points out in The Case for Reparations:

“Plunder in the past makes plunder in the present efficient.”

This dialogue is part of a global sentiment that rings true from South London to Portmore; that contrition is only one of many outputs for reconciliation to become tangible, not the sole outcome. That policies with historical ties to slavery are, in fact, not to be passed off as ancestral burdens, but are even more salient today because their legacy keeps people bound by their situations and their mind state. That the economic condition of Jamaica and other nations in the region is neither a random turn of fate or a cosmic act of happenstance. That if you seek to come here, build relationships and promote shared peace and prosperity, you are also bound to share in not just the feeling of development, but the actual work.   

David Cameron doesn’t have to talk about slavery.  But that doesn’t make its legacy any less salient. He doesn’t have the power to change history, even if his comments belittle it. But like any leader, his positioning represents the feelings and sentiments of a nation, past and present. Black people are not afforded the ability to disassociate from their individual pasts, and are judged every single day by them in a myriad of situations that can often cost our lives. We must know our history well enough to not let anyone else dictate it, and to make them aware every time they try to co-opt the narrative.

That truth is a violently inconvenient one, that former Jamaican prime minister P.J. Patterson eloquently articulated:

“Those 180 years were followed by another 100 years of imposed racial apartheid in which these families were racially oppressed by British armies and colonial machinery. The scars of this oppression are still alive in the minds and hearts of million of Jamaicans.”

I am not naive enough to assume that reparations can fix or permanently mend the economic binds or conditions that many Caribbean countries find themselves in. But, as someone who is a product of Trinidadian sun and Mississippi mud, I am keenly aware that there is blood in this water, no matter how clear or warm it is. 

But it doesn’t define us. Instead, Jamaica and her many cousins have found ways to survive and persist, regardless of the circumstances. We wave our flags. We create micro-communities where our food, traditions, and communal history is protected and nurtured. We show up to the Olympics and leave the world breathless. Your favorite artist’s favorite artist probably has roots near the equator. We throw the best functions on the planet, and the entire world scrambles to get on the guest list. Our defiance takes many forms and a variety of mediums, but there is an enduring loudness in how we engage with a world that loves what we make, but despises who we are. 

Dem nuh worry we. They never have. 


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