The protests were timely and appropriate

FROM ALL ACCOUNTS, last Saturday’s visit of the Earl and Countess of Wessex to St Vincent and the Grenadines was smoothly executed, much to the credit of the organising committee. The visit of the Royal Couple was part of a Caribbean tour to mark the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.

The Wessexes were welcomed with true Vincentian hospitality and while we ensured that they enjoyed their visit to our homeland, it was also of vital importance that we conveyed through them, to Britain and the world, that Vincentians consider it unacceptable that Britain has never apologised for the atrocities committed in the pursuit of their empire and that they continue to ignore legitimate demands from the Caribbean and elsewhere for meaningful compensation for the enslavement of our African forebears. Also totally abhorrent is that they have never acknowledged their genocidal crime against humanity, or consequentially offered compensation to St Vincent and the Grenadines for substantially obliterating the Garifuna nation.

We therefore welcome and fully support the protests staged during the royal visit, during which calls were made for an apology and reparations. The protests were timely and appropriate. In fact, had the protests not taken place, we would have let ourselves down. Ideally, the calls for an apology and reparations should have come from our head of Government; St Vincent and the Grenadines being one of the first countries in the Caribbean to begin the call for reparatory justice.

British knowledge of British history is incomplete without a full appreciation of the atrocities committed by that nation. ‘Britain’s Black Debt’, a phrase coined by Professor Hilary Beckles, is not simply the lives stolen and brutalities inflicted on African and indigenous peoples. It is also the prolonged case of historical amnesia where British children across generations genuflected to the gospel of racial privilege as their leaders allowed them to wallow
in the ignorance of the extraordinary violence Britain committed in its drive for imperial wealth and power.

Hence the royal visit to SVG and other Caribbean islands offers a moment of instruction as we, the former subjects, could provide that much needed illumination to all of Britain. The claims of Chatoyer and his descendants are not the products of fantasy. They are the product of a world broken and remade by the colonisers for whom genocide was a means to an end: British enrichment.

This is surely a lesson worth telling to the British people and the world. But above all, if the British heed this instruction from Vincentians, it might compel the collective catharsis for Britain’s realisation that in responding to the just claims of reparations they are not only compensating us for wrongs done to our ancestors, they are healing themselves. It is a healing that is long overdue.