Dear Editor,
When Everald Warmington rose in the House on 22 September, he said what many Jamaicans say at the bus stop but rarely in a lecture hall: “No one speaks for me in reparations.” He asked why we speak endlessly of the buyers of slaves and never of the sellers.
The response was swift. He was corrected in the chamber, called uninformed, told to consult the right UWI historians, much as one might be referred to a priest, and asked to apologise. Underneath ran an unstated diagnosis: a black man who doubts reparations must be suffering from self-hatred. Vice-Chancellor Sir Hilary Beckles proudly calls UWI an “activist university” (The CEO Magazine, 2026). The late Wilmot “Mutty” Perkins called it “the intellectual ghetto” (Thwaites, 2023). He was mocked for it. The charge has aged better than his critics expected.
Pan-Africanism is one view among many, not Jamaica’s settled creed. Its holders may argue for it. They may not treat dissent as a symptom. Mr Warmington is in good company: in 2019 the American writer Coleman Hughes was booed in Congress for arguing that reparations would make him “a victim without my consent” (Hughes, 2019).
The History we’d rather not teach
There was no unified “African” identity in the 1700s; Pan-Africanism is a modern idea, born largely in the diaspora (Adi, 2018). The people marched to the coast were Akan, Fon, Igbo or Kongo, and their captors did not regard them as brothers. No one expects the Irish to claim a pan-European kinship with the Vikings who sold them through Dublin’s slave market (Holm, 1986), or to insist that their European “brothers” would never have done it. They were not brothers, and they did. In my opinion, skin colour is a poor foundation for identity.
Nor were most of our ancestors kings and queens; elites are always a minority. Most were the losers of wars and raids by stronger states such as the Kingdom of Dahomey, in today’s Benin (Law, 1985). Historians John Thornton and Paul Lovejoy show that African rulers largely controlled the supply (Lovejoy, 2012; Thornton, 1998). Europeans did raid in places, so Mr Warmington overstated, but his central point is mainstream scholarship. Hollywood’s The Woman King recasts Dahomey’s King Ghezo as a reluctant trader; in fact he kept selling captives after promising Britain to stop (Law, 1986). Say so aloud and the verdict arrives before the argument: colonial propaganda, self-hatred. But a label is not a rebuttal. Our past is ugly, and we lose nothing of our worth by facing it.
The Atlantic trade was also a latecomer. The trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean trades began some eight centuries earlier and carried roughly as many people (Austen, 1979, 1988). Many men were castrated, and huge numbers died crossing the desert (N’Diaye, 2008; Segal, 2001). That is why there is no black Jamaica in Arabia. Even the idea of the black slave appeared first among medieval Arabic writers, and Iberians learned it from the Muslim world before carrying it to the Americas (Lewis, 1990; Sweet, 1997). In those trades, too, Mali, Songhay and the Swahili city-states sold captives (Lovejoy, 2012). Were they hoodwinked victims as well? Only if Africans had no will of their own. That is the racism of low expectations.
Accountability for some
If responsibility follows participation, it should apply consistently. Melanin neither absolves nor condemns. A framework in which one group must atone forever is not justice; it is permanent debt (Hughes, 2024). Identity politics makes citizens creditors or debtors by birth. I would rather we be judged by what we do.
Nor is anti-black racism a European monopoly. The Arabic word for slave, abd, became a slur for black people (Lewis, 1990), one Afro-Palestinians in Jerusalem still hear (Arab News, n.d.). Mauritania criminalised slavery only in 2007 (Anti-Slavery International, n.d.), and black migrants were auctioned in Libya in 2017 (United Nations Security Council, 2017).
Africa has its own versions. Many Jamaicans descend from Igbo captives shipped from the Bight of Biafra (SlaveVoyages, n.d.). In independent Nigeria, thousands of Igbo were massacred in 1966, and the Biafran war that followed killed about a million people, possibly as many as three million (Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d.; World Peace Foundation, n.d.). Igbophobia, scholars argue, remains a form of racism in Nigeria today (Onyemechalu & Ejiofor, 2026). Sudan, long raided by Arab slavers, later saw government-backed militias enslave southern Dinka (Jok, 2001). Victim and perpetrator are not racial categories. They are roles, and they shift.
Yet in March 2026 the UN General Assembly declared the transatlantic trade “the gravest crime against humanity,” co-sponsored by all 54 African states, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania and Sudan among them (UN News, 2026; United Nations General Assembly, 2026). Ghana’s foreign minister named Europe and America as the perpetrators (Gulf News, 2026). That is politics, not history. No one asks the Arab world, or Turkey, which still denies the Armenian genocide (Al Jazeera, 2011), for reparations. Victors rarely apologise unless their creed demands it. Losers pay.
Our ancestors survived, and their descendants built a nation of our own, one perhaps even Garvey could not have imagined. Out of many, one people: African, Indian, Irish, Jewish, German, Chinese and more, all belonging equally, all Jamaican. I do not wish to go back to the land from which my ancestors were captured and sold, or be talked by emotion into investing in an African nation that is not mine. Why build a nation elsewhere when there is one to build here? I am not a Pan-Africanist, nor a regionalist at the expense of my nation’s sovereignty. I man bawn yah, I nah leave yah. And, praise God, I have a mind of my own, unpurchased by foreign influence.
It is not unbecoming to refuse to grovel. Mr Warmington spoke for a likely majority that the learned elite would rather not hear. Sir, I salute you.
I am,
Shanice Barrett
