Recalcitrant colonial mentality

The irony could not have been more pronounced when, announcing that his country would assist in constructing a prison for Jamaicans who had committed crimes in Britain and were to be deported to the island, British Prime Minister David Cameron bluntly informed a joint sitting of the Jamaican Parliament that his government rejected reparations for slavery. Caricom, as a group, has made a commitment to securing reparations for the crimes against humanity that constituted the pernicious institution of slavery.

The Jamaicans being deported, were convicted of crimes in a society, similar to the United States, where the police are not representative of the population – especially when it came to “coloured” minorities such as people from the Caribbean.

As in the US also, the prison population in Britain is disproportionately stocked by these minorities, which is not a matter of coincidence. These individuals would be returned across the Atlantic into a regimented, overt prison system in which they will have very little autonomy as human beings.

And the irony is that when millions of Africans were shipped across the Atlantic between the 17th and early 19th century, they were placed into an institution where they were not even recognised as human beings. They were defined as “chattel” – being property that the owner – among whom were some ancestors of Cameron, could do whatever they wanted to – including talking their lives. The genocide that the British inflicted on these slaves was even more cruel than that of any other group.

Those that died during the crossing of the Atlantic were the lucky ones: the others died on the plantations after labour and punishment so severe that new slaves had to be shipped in continuously to pick up their fallen cutlasses. At the end of slavery, there was one-hundredth of the number of slaves that there should have been if they had been treated even as badly as the British poorer classes of the time. Yet it was the slave owners who received “compensation” for their human “investment” that they had “lost”.

Cameron said that the descendants of the slaves and Britain were now “friends”, who should now look to the “future”. But that is the whole point of the demand for reparations. What kind of future can there be for the descendants of slaves when their culture was stripped from them, an education was imparted that still insists that they are still not on par with other races, and their countries were, in the words of Walter Rodney, so severely “underdeveloped” that not all the aid with strings can make them whole.

As is usual with the British, Cameron tried to drag a red herring across their sordid history on slavery, about them “abolishing” slavery as if it was a “humanitarian” gesture for which the Caribbean should sing hosannas. Our own Eric Williams, who copped a first at Oxford and went on to a PhD unlike Cameron, showed in his “Capitalism and Slavery” that Britain’s motives for ending slavery were to have its cake and eat it too. They could now trumpet the kingdom of “free trade” that would allow them to ship the manufactured goods to other countries and even import cheaper sugar from countries that still had slave labour. The mercantilist triangular trade system undergirding slavery had been outgrown.

By asking for the Caribbean to “look to the future”, Cameron evoked the old riposte to those who insist that “we are all equal nowadays”: it is akin to breaking the legs of a person and then telling them they have an equal chance of winning the race. We all know that such a problem is a cruel hoax at best because it shifts the burden to the personal level and ignores the structural conditions that have the present generations of peoples of African Origin in the Caribbean still shackled, to a large extent.