The Reparations Summit in New York during 9th through 11th April 2015 was sponsored by the Institute of the Black world 21st Century with the support of the CARICOM Reparations Commission. The Summit was, by all measures, a tremendous success.

The Bahamas delegation to the Summit included Philip P. Smith, Co-Chair of the Bahamas National Reparations Committee (BNRC); Keisha L. Ellis, Member of the Committee; and, Clifford Williams, Foreign Services Officer with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Immigration.

Two centuries ago, a great war for freedom achieved success in Saint-Dominque, fought against the major European powers including France, Britain and Spain, by an army of self freed enslaved persons who were led by Dutty Boukman, a Jamaican born Vodou Priest, and first generation West Africans kidnapped and sold into slavery in Saint-Dominque to French plantation owners along with second generation enslaved persons. The latter included

Toussaint Loverture, first General of the Revolutionary Army, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe. January 1804 saw the declaration of the Free and Independent Republic of Haiti- the first independent Black State in the Americas named in honour of the pre-colonial indigenous name for the island.

One century ago, the Great Emancipator of the Black Man in the Americas, Jamaican born liberator, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, having been partly influenced in his youth by a Bahamian émigré to Jamaica, Dr. Joseph Robert Love, an Anglican Priest, medical doctor, teacher, author and politician, declared in an article in the ‘African Times and Orient Review’ during October 1913 that:

“…..there will soon be a turning point in the history of the West Indies, and that the people who inhabit that portion of the Western Hemisphere will be the instruments of uniting a scattered Race, who before the close of many centuries will found an Empire….”

During July 2013, at the midyear meeting the CARICOM Heads of Government, Caribbean political leaders took the first step to bring Garvey’s vision to fruition by deciding to create a CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC) made up of national committees focused to achieve Reparations from former European colonial powers for the enslavement of Africans and the Genocide of Native Peoples during the Atlantic Slave Trade and the ensuing colonial period.

A first meeting of the Commission was held in St. Vincent during the following September and included a first Reparations Conference as well. A second meeting of the CRC was held in Barbados in January 2014 and was attended by a delegation from The Bahamas. A third Commission meeting as well as the Second Reparations Conference were held during October 2014 in Antigua & Barbuda. A Bahamian delegation participated in both.

During 2014 the CRC Chairman, Sir Hilary Beckles, now Vice Chancellor of the University of the

West Indies and a noted historian and prolific author of well received studies on the Atlantic

Slave trade and its related aspects, addressed the United Nations General Assembly, the British House of Commons and the Black Caucus of the American Congress. Following on his interaction with the Black Caucus a decision was taken by them to foster the creation of an American Reparations Commission and to host a Reparations Summit. The Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW) took up both challenges.

It is against this cumulative background that the April 2015 Summit took place in New York.

As it is, the Summit cemented, in the minds of participant activists in the Movement, a perception of a universal leadership role for CARICOM Heads of Government and the Chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC) Sir Hilary Beckles. This does place a great burden on the shoulders of CARICOM leaders going forward.

National committees will be required to produce meaningful and involved discussions in their respective territories as well as to regularly provide regional activities and events so as to showcase progress in order to provide ongoing inspiration for the American and European Diaspora.

Except for Brazil, where Africans are just more than 50% of the population, outside of Africa we are the only countries where Africans are the majority. The United States has an African population of some 45 million, but this is less than 15% of the total. The Caribbean community accounts for some 25 million, including those who are described as 'mixed'. Many are dissuaded from acknowledging their African identity, though. Columbia includes 5 million African and 'mixed' in her population of 48 million. Canada has one million or 3% of the population. France has an African population of in the vicinity of 3 million or just under 5% of the total.

Those of us Africans who live in the Americas are primarily the descendants of the forced movement of millions of people kidnapped in West Africa and brought across the ocean as cargo in conditions unsuitable for the transport of livestock in the infamous and horrific Atlantic Slave Trade. For hundreds of years those who survived the ocean transport were sold into chattel slavery; and, for generations following, were made to live in the most horrible of concentration camps, euphemistically referred to as plantations; or, set to mining in the bowels of the earth- in both cases harvesting wealth for their European enslavers. This wealth, coupled with that stolen from the African Continent, was in large part transferred back to the colonizing slave states and invested in creating the basis for the present wealthy economies of most of Europe.

While Europe's economies grew by leaps and bounds transforming them from agrarian populations eking out a living on the land as peasant farmers for a landowning nobility and as abused cheap labour for a growing class of capitalists in their industrial revolution, to the modern urban states that they now are, their counterpart fellow human beings in the Caribbean and America, north and south, generally remained as chattel property well into the nineteenth century finally being 'emancipated' in the last states, Brazil and Cuba, in the late 1880's.

In Europe, the campaign for improved rights and conditions for European labourers benefitted from a growing social justice movement including the expansion of trade union activism; but, the conditions for the former enslaved peoples in the Americas hardly changed from the slave conditions during the period following 'emancipation' well into the mid-twentieth century.

In the independent states of the Americas, south and north, Africans suffered from restricting laws (similar throughout the continents to the 'Jim Crow' laws of the United States of America) designed to restrict Africans enjoying the 'fruits of freedom' promised by the 'emancipators'. In the colonies of the Caribbean, colonial administrations were required to frustrate local efforts to diversify economies so as to maintain the colonies as resource production for the European industrial economies.

This dependency meant that there was little by way of structural investment in growing the capabilities of the African populations in education and technical knowhow. For all of the Americas it was the same tune with just variations in the melody. Africans in large metropolitan states found themselves arrested for minor or trumped up charges so that they were sentenced to prison systems which then proceeded to 'rent' the convicts out to farming and mining interests with little or no benefit to the convict. Africans were casually lynched for nonsense infractions against white sensibilities. White was right and black had to 'know its place'.

Africans moving into Europe faced much the same treatment, though they were a mix of migrants from former slave colonies as well as economic immigrants directly from African states without the cultural memory of the slave plantation. All European states have Africans in their populations, from the 4% plus in France to 3% in Britain and, yes, even in Sweden 1%, with varying amounts in other states.

Haiti, the first Black Independent State in the Americas, was recognised at the April 2015 Reparations Summit as the true liberator of the African in the Caribbean. It was the success of the Haitian Revolution of 1791 leading to her declaration of Independence in 1804 which destroyed the Atlantic slave trade and, some say, led directly to Britain abandoning the slave trade in 1807 as, prior to the start of the revolution, plantations on Saint Dominique (Haiti’s colonial name) were the only market for new captives from West Africa. After fifteen years of no sales, the British slave traders shut up shop. So much for altruism on the part of the nineteenth century Englishman.

Britain followed up its abandonment of the slave trade with legislation, which became effective in 1833, to abolish slavery in its West Indian colonies and for the British government to require the enslaved population to join with it in purchasing all the human chattel property from British 'slave owners' for some 45 million pounds with the government contributing 20 million pounds in cash payments to ‘owners’ (for subsequent investment in the British economy, a great stimulus package) and for the enslaved population to provide free labour to the previous 'owners' for five years during an 'apprenticeship' period, a labour cost valued at the time at some $20+ million pounds.

Grand words at the time spoke of this period of preparing the formerly enslaved for freedom but no such thing happened. Some were immediately abandoned to their own unprepared selves; some were granted land from the plantation owners to be theirs and their children's children for 'as long as grass grows, water flows and the sun shines'; some, found themselves working on plantations exactly as before emancipation- long hours, horrendous conditions, poor sustenance and brutal treatment before being abandoned after the five year period or continued employment at extremely low wage rates.

Though promised education, few were able to achieve any except by stealth and exceptional native abilities. Proof of this is the fact that with Independence beginning in 1962 in the West Indies fully 80% of the resident African populations were functionally illiterate. There is a continuing challenge to provide quality education but to their great and everlasting credit, successive governments in our region have heavily invested in education and continue to do so.

The poor and heavily salted food rations doled out to plantation populations during the period of enslavement and the century and a half of colonialism, led to massive health challenges which continue to this day. Some of it is physically hereditary, and others, cultural hereditary; but, all resulting in poor diets which have caused much distress to individuals and to governments seeking to provide the necessary health care facilities and personnel from sparse resources.

Our inherited farming crops of cane and bananas have been severely attacked in international trading markets by the former colonial powers now that they are no longer the principal beneficiaries of the profits from the crops.

These explorations and many others were the subject of interventions by speakers while in session or in small discussion groups at the Summit.

Network linkages between personalities from the various African Diaspora delegations will prove to cement the reality of the Diaspora as the Sixth Region of Africa- a designation from the African Union to compliment the five Regions of the African Continent.

The Summit was treated to wonderful presentations from major regional personalities like Sir Hilary Beckles and prominent Americans including Congressman John Conyers, Jr., Rev. Jesse L. Jackson and Mr. Danny Glover as well as an impressive range of academic, spiritual and activist leaders from the African American Community.

Delegations from CARICOM and the USA were complimented by Latin American and European delegations. The difference being that while all the CARICOM delegations represented committees appointed by governments the rest were from Civil Society. All participants were drawn to the cause out of passion and commitment.

Both evening sessions, opening and closing, were held in AME Zion Churches where delegates were received as honoured guests and family. It is in these Churches, in Harlem and Brooklyn, where many of the African American leadership over the past two centuries worshipped and which served as important stops along the ‘Underground Railroad’ for enslaved persons escaping slavery up to its abolition in the United States in 1865. Rev. Jesse Jackson was keynote speaker at the opening session and Sir Hilary Beckles was keynote speaker at the closing session.

During the first working session, held at York College, Sir Hilary Beckles, Chairman, CRC, provided an overview of the historical effort for Reparations and where we stand currently in the effort. This was followed by brief interventions about national efforts from each of the

CARICOM National Committees represented and the ensuing follow up questions and remarks. Following a break, the members of the hosting National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC) provided an overview of their effort.

Care was taken to delineate the distinction between CARICOM Reparations Committees which are all Government sanctioned bodies and the NAARC which is very much from Civil Society but attracting persons who have long been in the fight for reparations.

These two sessions were followed by interventions from delegates from the French Caribbean territories, Cuba, Central and South America, Canada, and various European states, all from civil society and long time warriors in the mission including Mireille Fanon-Mendès France, daughter of Franz Fanon, Martinique born Caribbean author, teacher, psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary.

All delegates to the Summit committed to continue the fight in solidarity and mutual support. Further similar gatherings are anticipated for Africa, Europe and the Caribbean.

The IBW has set up a website with information and photographs from the Summit at http://ibw21.org/summit/

See attached fore more:

Click to download the attached file(s):
• Final_CommuniquA______Reparations_Summit__9-12_April_2015_1.pdf

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