The Big Talk session at Carifesta XV brought powerful voices together to address one of the Caribbean’s most pressing unfinished missions: reparations for slavery and colonialism. Under the theme “Righting the Wrongs: CARICOM’s Call for Reparations, Justice and Healing,” panelists and participants engaged in a candid and uncompromising dialogue on why centuries of crimes against people of African descent remain unacknowledged by the international community.
From the outset, the discussion highlighted the stark contrast between how the world has responded to different atrocities. One speaker drew attention to the ongoing reparations paid annually by Germany to the World Jewish Congress for the Holocaust, which lasted six years, compared to the centuries-long system of transatlantic slavery.
“The concept of reparatory justice is globally accepted. The Jews continue to receive compensation. The Japanese-Americans interned during World War II were compensated. Why then is it so hard for the world to recognize the case for Caribbean and African people?”
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Renita, from the Center for Research, insisted that the Caribbean must move beyond academic and political debate toward global mobilization:
“We have to take this to the streets, to our capitals, to regional organizations, to the United Nations and the International Court of Justice. The Caribbean is uniquely positioned to lead a movement under Article 109 of the UN Charter to convene a new international process for reparations.”
Audience contributions deepened the debate. Lawyer and former Ombudsman of St. Martin, Nilda Ardaun, raised the issue of erased history on the African continent, where the transatlantic slave trade is scarcely taught. She argued that sanitized language like “slave trade” diminishes the scale of atrocity:
“It wasn’t trade—it was trafficking, terrorism, and genocide. We must call it by its true name.”
Panelists agreed that the denial of reparations is rooted in racist ideology and the legacy of white supremacy. At emancipation, formerly enslaved Africans were turned off plantations without land or resources, forced to build free villages from nothing. This, one speaker explained, reflected the ideology that Black people were “undeserving”—an ideology that still places people of African descent at the bottom of global social hierarchies.
A Barbados-based panelist dismantled the oft-repeated claim by European nations that slavery was “legal” at the time. Citing the 1661 Barbados Slave Code, which dehumanized Africans as “barbarous and savage,” he argued that this legal fiction was a fraudulent attempt to justify a system that was illegal under both English and international law.
“No legislature has the power to transform a human being into anything other than a human being. Slavery was always illegal. Where there is a crime, there must be a remedy—and that remedy is reparations.”
The session concluded with a call for unity between Africa, the Caribbean, and global allies to dismantle entrenched systems of racial injustice and demand reparatory justice. The message was clear: the Caribbean cannot heal, nor can freedom be complete, until the crimes of slavery and colonialism are acknowledged and repaired.
Source: ameyawdebrah.com/
