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Legacy of Slavery and Indentured

Labour

Linking the Past with the Future

Conference on Slavery, Indentured Labour, Migration, Diaspora and Identity Formation.

June 18th – 23th, 2018, Paramaribo, Suriname

Org. IGSR & Faculty of Humanities and IMWO, in collaboration with Nat. Arch. Sur.

The Successful Institutionalization of the Jamaican Reparation Movement and its Limits

Ary Gordien

In 2009, Jamaica became, to my knowledge, the first country to have created a national commission entirely dedicated to the topic of reparations for slavery ("Commission on Reparations Holding Public Meetings," 2009). The commission members - all of whom are historians, lawyers and scholars of other disciplines - have since then undertaken several actions but all seem to be particularly concerned with one particular issue: the general opinion shows little interest in their cause when they do not express clear scepticism or opposition.

The commission was created by a Jamaican government about a decade ago and was since then kept by the governments that followed. Chaired by experienced scholars, the commission has benefited from the State's logistic and financial support and worked together with the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM), which has also actively campaigned for reparations for slavery at a transnational scale for over a decade (Primera, 2013). In spite of all the expertise, networking and money involved, the commission seems to struggle to reach and convince the majority of Jamaican citizens. This article seeks to account for this somewhat paradoxical situation.

To provide some answers to this central research question, I use the sources (mostly press articles) and ethnographic data (participant observation and mainly semi-structured interviews) I gathered in the course of a postdoctoral research I undertook in 2016 and 2017. I carried out this study for a research project entitled "Repairs: Reparation, compensation, indemnity for slavery (Europe, the Americas and Africa), nineteenth to twenty-first centuries" funded by the French National Agency of Research. It consists of a multidisciplinary team of jurists and scholars of the political and social scientists and explores the ways in which the idea of reparation for slavery has been historically theorized and politicized from the period of slavery to the present days.

In this article, drawing on Marc Abèlès, I aim to provide a political anthropological analysis of the commission by looking at this institution from both a macro-sociological and micro-sociological perspective (Abélès, 1995, 65-67 and Dulon, 2012, 7). The first section traces the genealogy of the Jamaican reparation movement by showing the international circulations that led to its emergence. It also focuses on the Jamaican reparation commission and its close ties with the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM)'s, transnational commission. The second section explores the trajectories of three commission members and their analyses of the gap that separates them from the bulk of Jamaicans and appreciation of the reception of their actions by the general public.

I - The international Genealogy of the Reparation Movement and its Institutionalization in Jamaica

1) Reparation and Circulation in the Black Atlantic: The International Roots of the Reparation Movement

In the Americas, Africa and the Indian Ocean, there seems to be no trace of organized movements that emerged during or in the immediate aftermath of the abolition of slavery whose goal was to seek redress for the treatment they had received through legal actions. Although the enslaved populations resisted and sometimes rebelled in myriad ways, given the conditions in which they lived, it is unlikely that they should have been able to organize these kinds of actions. However, as the famous narrative of Solomon Northup shows (Northup, 1853), some free people of African descent, who were illegally (even on the basis of the colonial or, in the case of the United States, postcolonial laws) kidnapped and put into servitude, did lodge formal complaints and seek forms of reparations, whether they were successful or not in obtaining it. These cases might serve as a precedent to the contemporary reparations movements. However, African-American, African and Afro-Caribbean activist movements resort increasingly to a reparation framework starting in the second half of the twentieth century, following World War II.

In 1955, Audley Moore, a former African American communist and member of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association created the reparations Committee of Descendants of United States Slaves in New York City (Rolland-Diamond, 2016, 278-279; Williams, 2014, 65 and 87; Jennings, 2000, 67). She launched a petition, which she presented to the United Nations. Beside self-determination for African-Americans, the other major claim of the petition was financial compensation for the four hundred years of enslavement the community had endured (Rolland-Diamond, 2016). With the support of the Nation of Islam, the Committee of Descendants of United States Slaves presented another petition, which was signed by millions, to president Kennedy in 1963, asking for the compensation to be paid for the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation (Rolland-Diamond, 2016).

Reparation for slavery has historically been a transnational cause because its scope is explicitly defined as international. Reparation activists and theoreticians seldom solely refer to the case of one particular country or community but to several peoples of African descent thought of as united by a common history of racial oppression (Garvey, 2014). Ideas concerning the struggle against colonialism and racial oppression circulated throughout the English-speaking world, namely between the Anglophone Caribbean and the economically dominant and culturally hegemonic United States, and beyond (Quinn, 2014). Marcus Garvey's black nationalism had a strong impact in the United States where he was based while the Black Power movement had a strong influence throughout the Caribbean in the 1960s (Quinn, 2014). In Jamaica, Rastafarian ideas concerning "repatriation" to Africa, redefined as the "homeland" of all black people, embodied a radical celebration of blackness (Chevannes, 1995). Prior to and after the independence of Jamaica in 1962, in order to appeal to the masses, Jamaican politicians of colour, such as the first prime Minister Michael Manley, politicized a racially conscious sense of Jamaican identity, drawing on Garveyism, the Black Power movement, anti-colonialism and Rastafarian thinking (Kuper, 1977, 133-148).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, other initiatives emerged in Jamaica, in the United States and in Africa (Lewis, 2016). In 1987 the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America was founded in the United States and has started to campaign overtly for reparations for slavery. In the early 1990s, a group African scholars, businessmen and politicians created the Organization of African Unity which objective was to campaign for reparation to Africa for the slave trade, slavery, colonization and its aftermath (Jewsiewicki, 2004, 10 and Howard-Hassmann, 2004, 83). The project was founded by the late billionaire former Nigerian president elect Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola (Jewsiewicki, 2004, 10-11; "Whites Urged to Repay Africa," 1992 and Howard-Hassman, 2004). The Panamanian born Jamaican Pan-African politician Dudley Thompson, who used to be the foreign minister in the Manley government in the 1970s and then became the ambassador to high commission to Nigeria, took part in the Group of Eminent Persons the Organization of African Unity created in order to campaign efficiently for reparations. In the course of my semi-structured interview with Rupert Lewis, he informed me that he had collaborated closely with Abiola and confirmed Howard-Hassmann analysis according to which Abiola's killing took a definite toll to the African reparation movement (Howard-Hassman, 2004 and Lewis, 2016).

At the same period, the international institutions also addressed the memory of slavery and its contemporary legacies. In 1994, the Unesco Slave Route project increased the awareness about these issues at an international scale. It is nonetheless the 2001 Durban World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance that had a definite impact (Howard-Hassmann, 2004, 81-82). The slave trade and slavery were then recognized as crimes against humanity. ("World Conference against Racism," 2001) Contemporary racism and racial inequalities are defined as the direct legacies of these crimes ("World Conference against Racism," 2001). The document that was written after the conference also states that the victims of the present consequences of slavery and the slave trade, that is to say racism, have the right to seek redress ("World Conference against Racism," 2001). A nongovernmental Jamaican delegation took part in the conference (Shepherd, 2017), and a mostly Rastafarian based Jamaican Reparation Movement was created a year later under the leadership of Barbara Blake Hannah.

According to the international website of the Spanish newspaper el Paìs, between 2004 and 2011, Barbados, Guyana, Antigua and Jamaica tried in vain to obtain some form of compensations from European countries involved in the slave trade. (Primera, 2013) In 2003 former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide demanded that France paid back the indemnity Haiti had to pay to former slave owners in the 1820s, a sum that was argued to be worth billions of dollars (Hall, Draper, and McClelland, 2015, 241-242). While some believed this claim was just a way for Aristide to avoid addressing the growing discontent in the Haitian population and Diaspora (Dalembert, 2004), others analyzed Aristide's move as a key moment that gave a new impetus to the global reparations movement (Shepherd, 2017). The coup that led to Aristide's forced exile shortly after he made that claim is referred to as further proof of Western countries refusal to address reparations for slavery (Hall, Draper and McClelland, 2015, 241-242)

At the end of the year 2006, when the UK was to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, Caribbean countries gathered to ask for a UN resolution that not only commemorated the end of the slave trade but also aimed to address the long lasting effect of slavery ("Europe must offer moral, financial recompense," 2006 and "Jamaica-led slavery resolution", 2006.). In Jamaica, a Bicentenary National Commission was created in order to challenge the official discourse on the abolition of the slaver trade (Shepherd, 2017). The former Prime Minister Tony Blair's refusal to present a clear official apology, the focus that was put abolitionists rather than on enslaved rebels was deemed to be a Euro-centric and hypocritical approach to the memory of slavery. These national and regional collaborations were probably one of the first steps towards regional cooperation in the Caribbean leading to the creation of a reparation commission both in Jamaica and at the CARICOM level.

2) Jamaica and CARICOM: A Historic Institutional Collaboration for Reparation

In May 2009, the Jamaican ministry of youth, sport and culture created the Jamaican national reparation commission, which was chaired by the late Jamaican anthropologist and director of the Centre for Public Safety and Justice at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Professor Barry Chevannes ("Commission on Reparations", 2009).

The commission was "charged with the task of receiving submissions, hearing testimonies, evaluating research and studies and engaging in dialogue with relevant interest groups and legal and academic experts" ("Commission on Reparations", 2009); Because Rastafarians tended to be the most vocal community to address the topic, another objective the commission had was to bring the conversation on reparation to a broader audience. To that end, the commission sought to organize several public meetings namely targeted at Jamaican youths. Chevannes insisted that the commission did not intend to convince a broader audience to support reparation but to make them aware of the issues at stake and to have a public conversation on the subject in order to exchange points of views ("Commission on Reparations", 2009). Chevannes really seemed to be concerned with getting to know what the general opinion was on the subject and insisted his role or that of the commission was not to "spread the word" on reparations. "Should there be reparation made for slavery? Is it too far gone to worry about that? Are there legacies that we are still suffering from? And if reparation should be made, what form would you like to see it ?", Chevannes asked ("Commission on Reparations", 2009). This seems to imply he had no intention to promote a pro-reparation policy or at least that it was not the commission's official goal at the outset.

In 2011, although the Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding, who is affiliated to the Jamaican Labor Party, lost the election to Portia Simpson, representing the opposition, the People's National Party, the commission was maintained (Hartman Reckord, 2013). That is when Verene Shepherd became the chair of the governmental institution while many of its members were replaced (Hartman Reckord, 2013). The commission started to collaborate more closely with the CARICOM, which hired the British law firm Leigh Day in July 2013, which lodge a complaint at the international court of justice (Primera, 2013). Leigh Day had won 20 millions pounds for the Kenyans killed by the British during the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s (Primera, 2013). Based on the UN International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the goal of this action was to file a complaint against the European countries involved in slavery. Each CARICOM Member State created a national reparation commission (Primera, 2013). On the same year in Britain, a research project of the University College London entitled Legacies of British Slave Ownership resulted in the creation of a massive online database that identifies the slave owners who received financial compensations following the abolition of slavery in 1833 for the loss of the slaves they had purchased (Jones, 2013) .

The second version of the Jamaican commission was very much involved in this process (Hartman Reckord, 2013). Despite the fact that the commission's mission officially remained the same, Shepherd, stated that the ultimate objective of the commission was to "guid[e] a national response to reparation [and to] recommend the diplomatic initiatives, security considerations, education and public information required, and the form or forms that reparation may take, taking into account social, moral, cultural, economic and international factors" (Hartman Reckord, 2013). She estimated that the budget for carrying out this project was 26 million JMD (Hartman Reckord, 2013). Shepherd's seemed to be in favour of implementing a reparation policy domestically. Nonetheless the fact that she mentions the international dimension of the project was further indication that the Jamaican commission was to work in even closer collaboration with the CARICOM. A reparation commission was created at the CARICOM level and each Member State was to create a national branch (Shepherd, 2017).

In March 2014, the CARICOM released a 10-point plan for reparations, which included among other claims: 1. A "full and formal apology" from European States that were involved in the slave trade and slavery; 2. facilitating "repatriation" to Africa for Caribbean, namely Rastafarians, who wish to settle in Africa; 3. Implementing a "indigenous peoples development program; 4. Creating cultural institutions; 5. Addressing the "public health crisis" in the Caribbean by tackling, for instance, the long terms effects of the unhealthy diet that have been forced upon the enslaved population; 6. Eradicating illiteracy, a symbol of the unequal access to knowledge that is due to slavery and its aftermath; 7. Creating a African knowledge program to help Afro-Caribbean people to reconnect with what is perceived as their lost cultural heritage; 8. Psychological rehabilitation to address the toll slavery and its aftermath has taken on the self esteem and well-being of people of African descent; 9. "Technology transfer" to enable Caribbean countries to reach a level of economic development slavery, colonialism and post-colonialism prevented them from reaching; and finally 10. The cancellation of the debt of all these countries to help their economies thrive. The former British Prime Minister David Cameron's explicit rejection of reparations during an official visit to Jamaica In June 2015, was used to further publicize and justify the cause ("PM rules out slavery," 2015). In the course of the semi-structured interview I conducted with Shepherd she stated:

"I think we won converts to our cause out of that […] and also because at the time, the new database coming out of the University College London had been made public and we knew that ancestors of PM Cameron owned Greenwich plantation in Hanover and benefited to compensations." (Shepherd, 2017)

Following the 2016 general elections, the Jamaican Labor Party came back into power and once again the commission was maintained; some members of the former commission were called upon while some others were not retained and new members were brought in ("Govt will pursue reparation", 2016). Olivia Grange, the minister of culture, gender, art and entertainment stated that the commission "w[ould] be working closely with the Caricom Reparations Commission" ("Govt will pursue reparation", 2016). Now co-chaired by Shepherd and the lawyer Laleta Mattis-Davis, the commission is now referred to as a council divided into seven working groups focusing on specific fields: legal, research, communication and education, internal reparation, financial, media and finally international engagement (Shepherd, 2017).

Many of the council's reflections are based on the extensive work undertaken under the chairmanship of Chevannes. Although council members meet every month, many informants could not clearly say what they had been concretely doing. Some bluntly admitted that virtually nothing had been done and that some of the commission members were hardly committing to their task. However Shepherd gave another political explanation: while she recognizes that there's been a decrease in intensity in terms of activity, according to her it is mostly due to the fact that decisions are now taken at the CARICOM level (Shepherd, 2017). Now that the 10-point reparation plan and the complaint have been announced, the Jamaican commission, she argues, needs to wait to know what the following action is going to be (Shepherd, 2017).

Although those were not strictly speaking direct emanations of the collective work of the council, the members I interviewed referred to a musical and a play as two major initiatives that are the direct result of the council's action. Written and directed by the playwright, choreographer, scholar and council member Michael Holgate, Garvey: the Musical, was also very successful and acclaimed by most of the commission members and other informants I interviewed or conversed with (Lewis, 2017). Recounting the life of the Pan-African leader and exposing his ideas through acting, dancing and singing was perceived as a practical way of spreading ideas aimed to empower black people (Holgate, 2017).

The second show which was often talked about is the The Trial of Governor Eyre, written by the lawyer Bert Samuels, who is also a council member (Holgate, 2017 and Samuels, 2017), and directed by Holgate. The show is a staged tribunal hearing of the infamous English colonial governor of Jamaica Edward John Eyre, responsible for the cruel repression of the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 (Hutton, 2015: 8-11). Led by Paul Bogle, the Afro-Jamaican peasantry of the parish of St Thomas-in-the-East were protesting against their terrible working conditions (Hutton, 2015: 8-11). Although this event took place twenty-seven years after the abolition of slavery, the stark racial inequalities that remained in colonial Jamaica in that period and the violence of the repression of the rebellion show the clear continuities with the unequal racial stratification that existed during the slavery regime (Hutton, 2015: 11). At least since the independence and post independence era, the memory of the Morant Bay Rebellion, has become a central episode of Jamaican national narrative that is closely linked with slavery. According to council members, the acknowledgement of that episode of Jamaican history and the moral and legal condemnation of colonial violence is related with the reparations (Shepherd, 2015: 32). In the course of the semi-structured interviews I conducted with Samuels and Holgate as well as with other commission members, they never distinguished the period of slavery with that of the Morant Bay Rebellion (Holgate, 2017 and Shepherd, 2017).

II - Theoretical Postulates, Activists' Trajectories and the Political Limits of the Reparation Paradigm

1) Repairing the Past in the Present: The Paradoxical Theoretical Postulates of the Reparation Movement

The institutionalization of the Jamaican and Caribbean reparation movements capitalizes on a long theoretical and political transnational tradition that includes Rastafarianism, Black Power, anti-colonialism, Pan-Africanism and Afro-centrism. However, the focus on human rights and reparation/compensation per se is also due to the influence of a global trend in recent history. According to Bogumil Jewsiewicki, the global reparation for slavery movement reflects a new paradigm of political action based on the notion of reparation, which succeeded to that of development (Jewsiewicki, 2004, 7-8). Nevertheless, the two notions have a lot in common, for the objective of both reparation and development aid is "to put things back in the state in which they should have normally been, in the absence of the factors that justify reparation or development aid" (Jewsiewicki, 2004, 7-8). There has been a shift from a focus on economic considerations to growing interest in ethical ones (Jewsiewicki, 2004, 7-8). Jewsiewicki considers that this dominant and increasingly popular conception of politics in the global West and beyond draws both on an anti-fascist and secularized Christian tradition, which defines repentance and confession as a means to return to the previous state of affairs (Jewsiewicki, 2004, 8).

Both at the Jamaican and at the CARICOM levels, reparation is defined as (and conflated with) development. Moreover the history of slavery is indeed analyzed in retrospective terms using the notions of human rights and the legal category of crime against humanity. It is worth noting that, as a former chair of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights , Shepherd is well acquainted both with international institutions and the political, philosophical and legal paradigm they use. Furthermore, the 10 points of the CARICOM reparation plan lists contemporary forms of damage, both material and symbolic, that are analyzed as direct legacies of slavery. Repairing the long-term negative effects of slavery is construed as a form of redress in and of itself, which can and has to take place in the present time.

It was established following the Durban conference in 2001, that the slave trade and slavery were crimes against humanity and that they always should have been. As a consequence, theoretically, as a crime against humanity, slavery should not be subject to a statute of limitation. Between the early 1990s and early 2000s, African reparation activists, Jewsiewicki argues, used that argument in order to demand that slavery be treated like other victims of crime against humanity, namely the Jewish Holocaust, and are prone to consider that any objection to this equation is motivated by racism (Jewsiewicki, 2004, 11). In Jamaica as well as in the other French Caribbean activist circles I explored in Guadeloupe and mainland France. Slavery is indeed often compared with other crime against humanities, and the Jewish holocaust is usually considered as the paradigmatic crime. It is either to referred to as a model follow or as the symbol of a historical and racial injustice. As one commission member put it: "The Jews went through a holocaust for 6 years and they got reparations, the Africans went through a holocaust for over 300 years and reparations were given to the persons who…subjugated them, who put them through the holocaust".

My informant describes the Jewish Holocaust, on the one hand, and the slave trade and slavery, on the other, as crimes against humanity of the same nature. That person uses the same word, "holocaust", to show how these two historical events are deemed to be essentially similar. Having established that, this informant points out a difference of treatment that is depicted as glaringly unfair: the victims of the former crime received reparations whereas the second did not. Finally, for this council member, the crime that was not compensated lasted for a longer period than the other one. What is presented as a paradox actually entails a hierarchy between these two crimes based on the criterion of duration. In other words, the argument is that the slave trade and slavery lasted longer than the Jewish holocaust and yet the victims of the former crime ("the Africans" writ large) received no compensation whereas Jewish people did.

Another historical injustice this commission member and others denounce is the indemnity the United Kingdom paid former slave owners after the abolition of slavery. France implemented the same policy and anti-colonial and I realized in the course of my research that reparation activists based both in mainland France and its dependencies also use this argument (Tin, 2013). This decision is interpreted as the epitome of the absolute criminal and cruel nature of colonialism and an utter injustice both in legal and moral terms. Since lawmakers were able to conceive the idea of reparations in that case and implement a compensation policy, a reverse rationale is elaborated to support the idea that reparations should have instead been paid to the enslaved. In that sense, advocating reparations today is clearly a way to correct what was not done then. Temporal limits are somehow blurred, as many of the problems Jamaicans face today are analyzed as direct legacies of the past: the slave trade, slavery and colonization.

Commission members also seek to make up for what some of them deem to be the mistakes of the past (Samuels, 2017). Using the human right and reparation paradigm, Shepherd, for instance, explicitly criticizes the founding fathers of the Jamaican nation for not having addressed the issue of reparation for slavery in the 1960s. She explicitly states that the commission's role is to somehow make up for the lack of political awareness or wit (Shepherd, 2017).

2) The Equation of Cultural Capital and Race Consciousness: The Main Limit of the Reparation movement

All the current and former commission members I met or interviewed shared similar sociological characteristics. Very critical of the commission and of the theoretical postulates of its actions, the consultant Franklin Johnston took issue with the fact that all commission members were all scholars from the University of the West Indies, hinting that the claim emerged from a close circle of link-minded individuals (Johnston, 2016). In the course of my field study, I realized that, regardless of Johnston personal views and his personal motivations for sharing them, his criticism reflects a sociological reality. More generally speaking, what is striking is that the historians, lawyers and other scholars who are part of this governmental institution come from the middle class or lower middle class and have had access to higher education. They were all mostly raised by parents who appreciated the importance of education and had enough cultural capital to follow and advice their children on their curriculum. For many, access to university also coincided with an exposure to race conscious ideas such as Rastafarianism, pan-Africanism and Afro-centrism. They also adhered to postcolonial critical ideas, which sought to rehabilitate and celebrate a sense of Afro-Caribbeannes, blackness or Africaness.

Holgate has a clear memory of the period during which he first heard about this kind of discourse in high school (Holgate, 2017). Through one of his teachers he discovered the controversial African-American Afro-centrist leader and thinker Yosef Ben-Jochannan (Kestembaum, 2015). Following this, Holgate gradually read and learned more and more about Jamaican, Caribbean and Black history and became integrated in a group of people who shared similar ideas and who met in public spaces and improvised debates aimed to confront passers-by about their Euro-centric visions of the world. They sought to make them aware of the history of enslavement and colonialism and of its psychological impact while popularizing Afro-centric ideas.

With hindsight, Holgate interprets this moment of his history as a form of enlightenment and recalls the time when he had himself not been exposed to similar ideas. He argued that he had somehow integrated negative stereotypes on darker-skinned Jamaicans like himself. Through his multidisciplinary training, Holgate had an opportunity to further explore Afro-Caribbean cultures namely through dance and cultural studies. His research and occupation as a playwright and choreographer reflect his interest in these issues as well as his political willingness to make a difference. As he started to lecture, he identified with some of his students, who, he thought, were as ignorant of and prejudiced about issues related with race and class as he believes he used to be at their age. Consequently he chose to systematically address these issues and, just like his latest play Garvey the musical and his contribution to the Trial of the Governor Eyre show, he uses his art to promote positive racial consciousness.

Shepherd's trajectory shares some similarities with Holgate's (Shepherd, 2017). One of the main differences is that, according to her, she was confronted with an illuminating experience at quite a young age and was given information about it by her mother. Shepherd comes from a town referred to as Africa, a derogatory nickname that reflected the negative prejudice many in this part of rural Jamaica had about the town, its inhabitants and the continent of Africa as under-developed and somewhat savage. Shepherd recalls questioning her mother about this and considers this questioning and her mother's explanations as the starting point of her interest not only in history but also in reparation. The awareness that blackness and Africa were associated with negativity raised her interest. As she was encouraged to study by her parents, she became more and more interested in history, namely the history of slavery and of the Caribbean, and studied that subject at the University of the West Indies and obtained a scholarship to go to Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Shepherd mentions the Labor politician Mike Henry and the Rasfarian author and music journalist Barbara Blake Hannah, whom she refers to as her mentors, as two of her main inspirations. Shepherd defines herself as a public historian, an occupation, which is strongly connected with her political views. She argues that investigating the Caribbean and the period of slavery logically involves establishing a link between the past and the present. It is clear and obvious to her that her empirical and intellectual work also implies critical thinking and political action. Investigating the slave trade and chattel slavery is a means to account for the past and to show how it informs contemporary racial and postcolonial inequalities. In conformity with a somewhat post-modernist conception of science, Shepherd uses the knowledge she produces as a useful tool to elaborate alternative discourses aimed at empowering Afro-Jamaicans and other people of African descent. As the co-chair of the Jamaican Reparation council and vice-chair of the CARICOM reparation commission, Shepherd's position as a historian and activist also enables her to conceive and undertake political actions at the international, regional and national level.

The experience of the council co-chair Laleta Mattis-Davis differs in some regards from that of some of her fellow council members (Mattis-Davis, 2017). Neither her parents nor her peers at university seem to have played a decisive role in familiarizing her with Rastafarian, Afro-centric or other race conscious discourses. When she described the environment in which she grew up she portrayed her lower middle class parents as quite dignified and her father as a "proud black man" (Mattis-Davis, 2017). Because she specified "black man", I immediately assumed she would subsequently explain that her father adhered to Garveyite or Afro-Centric views but even when I enquired more clearly about how she became politically aware of the issues of reparation and black consciousness and how she had embraced them, she referred to no such thing. Instead, she spoke of the sense of entitlement, pride and confidence the education she receive imbued her with. When Mattis-Davis was growing up, her father worked several jobs at the same time to support his wife and his children. He made sure his family had anything they needed and that his children got the best education.

Though very subjective and class related in appearance, I would argue that the used of the phrase "proud black man" indicate that Mattis-Davis's sense of confidence and self-esteem is indirectly linked with a form of racial consciousness. Through her narrative, it appears that her father's aspiration to upward social mobility through his children's education also implied racial valorisation. Aiming to be dignified lower middle class Afro-Jamaicans involves an awareness of achieving things as black people and not only as individuals and as a family. This experience reflects a racial consciousness that does not resort to any sophisticated philosophical current or movement. In postcolonial Jamaican society, David-Mattis's trajectory shows that social position, race and colour are often associated. This is not simply true of the "white bias" analyzed by Fernando Henriques in the 1940s (Henriques, 1953). Henriques showed how blackness and African-derived cultural expressions were associated with negativity in contrast with anything that had to do with white European bourgeois or aristocratic customs (Henriques, 1953). Mattis-Davis's family history illustrates how upward social mobility in a black family becomes a source of personal empowerment that is also read in racial terms, as though the entire racial group was somehow concerned with and influenced by examples of individual success.

While Mattis-Davis shows how her personal self-confidence has helped her deal with any situation concerning racism, sexism and colourism both in Jamaica and in international circles, she also seems to link it with a political consciousness that does not seem to draw on any precise political tradition but on her own subjective construction. However, without being part of a clearly identified circle, being a Jamaican woman, she must have necessarily come across theories and ideas linked with racial empowerment. The experience of the other commission members I interviewed clearly indicates access to higher education and exposure to political, race conscious ideas go hand in hand. According to Shepherd, for instance, as a result of years of debates and political struggles, the history of Jamaica, especially that of slavery, resistance to slavery and independence is very well publicized in Jamaica through series of event that are happening all year long (Shepherd, 2017). It is therefore unlikely that this should have had no influence whatsoever on any Jamaican person, especially a learned one.

The apparent coherence of each of these life narratives will automatically at least be the result of a retrospective (auto)biographical illusion that turn events that may have well been totally haphazard into consistent chronological and logical sequences (Pollak, Hahn and Bourdieu, 1986). However, from a sociological perspectives, these personal experiences do reflect the general setting in which these commission members have evolved, the way in which certain movements and ideas influenced them, leading them, through different channels, to the position they occupy now. However, these trajectories contrast sharply with the way in which the commission members describe the bulk of Jamaicans. While they consider themselves to have somehow been enlightened through their upbringing and scholarly and/or militant training, having accepted the worldview they were transmitted as a an irrefutable reality, they realize most Jamaicans have not gone through the same path and think that they somehow need to be similarly instructed.

Commission members themselves are very aware of the fact that the general public shows little interest in reparation. Based on the reactions they have witnessed during the events they have organized or the spontaneous comments they have heard on the radio, they have established that many Jamaicans think it is unlikely European countries will ever agree to pay compensations to CARICOM member states. Commission members argue many of their fellow citizens usually urge activists and reparation advocates to "get over slavery" (Shepherd, 2017; Mattis-Davis, 2017 and Holgate, 2017). Based on these reactions, Holgate for instance believes it proves most Jamaicans believe they do not deserve reparations and that before the technicalities of the actual payment of compensations should be discussed, the commission should find a way to convince Jamaicans that they deserve reparation and that the cause is worth fighting for (Holgate, 2017). Shepherd mentions another argument; she believes Jamaican citizens rightfully do not trust the government with the money (Shepherd, 2017). Although all of the commission members I interviewed insist reparation has an external and internal dimension, their appreciation of the general public's understanding of reparations for slavery is often limited to the financial aspect.

The general public also associates the topic reparation with Rastafarians. During an informal conversation I had with two people close to Chevannes, the late chair of the first commission, my informants argued most people in Jamaica had no exact idea what the notion of reparation referred to and linked it with the notion of repatriation "back to Africa". Following their advice I once tried to mention the subject of reparation with a taxi driver. During this short informal conversation, Barry, the taxi driver, told me the issue of reparations was an old one that has been discussed for a very long time. However, like my two contacts had predicted, he did seem to use the words "reparation" and "repatriation" interchangeably.

Most commission members analyze this confusion and the lack of popular support for the reparation movement as the result of mental slavery. Based on an analysis of polls results, Shepherd establishes a direct link between the lack of popular support of the reparation for slavery, on the one hand, and Jamaicans attachment to the monarchy, on the other (Shepherd, 2017). She also states that a majority of Jamaicans believe they would have been better off if they were still colonized by the British, all of which, she argues translates a lack of self-esteem and collective pride (Shepherd, 2017). Holgate provides a similar analysis using a rhetoric that is reminiscent of Malcolm X's famous speech on House Negroes and Field Negroes. He suggests that the lack of education, Western cultural hegemony and a disconnection with Afro-Jamaican culture and identity account for this situation.

"Systematic […] miseducation has made it [reparation for slavery] irrelevant in the minds of us, as black people, we have been schooled, like, anytime we talk about the black issue we say: "that again?! Aren't we over slavery now?!" […] But in my mind that's the attitude of the house slave, where you are not longer a field slave you're a house slave, you still don't have all the right of humanity of being a human being, but you are a house slave so we have moved passed that. […] We don't want to hear about issues of reparations because it reminds us that we are not where we want to be […]. A lot of us want to fit into a Eurocentric mould without knowing that it is a Eurocentric mould they want to fit into. They think that: "we just want to be first world developmental and all of that". But those concepts and the concepts of what makes it first world are about Eurocentric ideals and so if you want to eventually grow in a way that is natural to you, then, you won't be focused on trying to fit in Eurocentric ideals you will try to reclaim your own sense of culture, your own sense of pride, your own sense of identity from wherever it is." (Holgate, 2017)

Since the council members are aware of this gap between them and the bulk of Jamaican citizens they believe one of their tasks consists in popularizing ideas and messages that empowering the black masses while, in the meantime, they reflect on ways of better communicating their ideas. Many of them consider public education to be one of their main objectives in that regard. During our semi-structured interview, Rupert Lewis, stated that the primary objective for him was internal reparations, which consists, in his opinion, in inspiring a sense of strong and proud identity in the majority of the population (Lewis, 2017). Holgate and Mattis-Davis believe that the commission members need to communicate more and better with the general public. Mattis-Davis believes there should be safe places where people would be allowed to disagree, express their opinions and challenge the commission's position so that eventually, even though they do not get actively involved in the process, they do not oppose the very notion (Mattis-David, 2017). Holgate suggests using a simpler language and favouring entertainment rather than public lectures as a means to communicate more easily and popularize the commission's position (Holgate, 2017). In his opinion, another, more accessible vocabulary should also be used to better explain what reparation is about.

The average man understands back pay, meaning if I have worked for you for a certain amount of time and you haven't paid me, then I can get my back pay now. So my suggestions has always been, let's call it "reparation", subtitle, "back pay and damages". "Damages", people understand "damages" as "you have done me harm and you are required by law to pay for the harm, I mean make amends".(Lewis, 2016)

Conclusion

Although most council members seem to be aware of their privileged status, it seems that the gap that separates them from their fellow citizens makes it unlikely that public education alone should suffice to make the bulk of Jamaicans support the commission's actions. Moreover, the general public might be quite realistic when they say that no European country will ever pay compensations to Jamaica or any other CARICOM Member State. Ten years after the latest global economic crisis, in the midst of the current migrant crisis, the political future of both Europe and the United States is quite uncertain. What is more, Islamic terrorism and the effects of climate change in the next years and decades should make the geopolitical situation quite unstable worldwide. From an economic point of view, financial austerity is imposed both on First World and developing countries. Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the progress far-right movement make in most European countries reveal there is a global shift towards conservative ideas and a genuine anxiety over European identity and future. In this context, Jamaica and CARICOM countries seem to have little, if any, political leverage to impose anything to European countries, which were involved in the slave trade, slavery and colonialism. It does appear quite unlikely that any of the European countries, will voluntarily consider implementing a reparatory policy.

From a geopolitical vantage point, it is hard to imagine why Spain, the United Kingdom or the Netherlands would agree to pay financial compensation to their former colonies simply based on ethical considerations and without getting anything out of it. While some commission members readily admit the failures of the successive Jamaican government, the focus on reparation (whether it is mostly understood as compensation, the rehabilitation of Black Caribbean identities or a combination of both) seem to imply that any form of development depends on reparation. Whether it is out of realism or jadedness, none of the commission members I talked conversed with talked about reforming Caribbean institutions or economies to reduce socio-economic inequalities. In a very unequal Jamaican society, the advocates of reparations are obviously in more comfortable economic positions than the general public they wish to reach, regardless of their social background and intentions. The quest for racial and cultural empowerment that the reparation movement represents might therefore lack representativeness and pragmatism, which might explain the scepticism, suspicion and disinterest expressed by the majority of the population.

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