COMMENTARY: Antigua And Barbuda Should Be Ashamed To Talk About Reparations

ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA SHOULD BE ASHAMED TO TALK ABOUT REPARATIONS

……….by Yves Ephraim 

As humans, a significant part of our identity is belonging to a country or motherland. 

The land of our birth has always been synonymous to a place where we can always retreat when we are not welcomed anywhere else in the world. We talk about going back to where “me navel ‘tring bury”.

Even if your country is not the most livable, yet you take great pride in wearing your national colours or unapologetically displaying your national flag. 

In international sports, like the Olympics, many of you who would not normally follow sports, would for a moment or two, glue yourselves to a TV, anxiously hoping to witness and join in the celebration if your countryman or woman captures a win. And when there is a win, we can hear the spontaneous and rapturous uproar throughout our neigbourhood. 

For that brief moment we forget our neighbourly quarrels and “rally around the West Indies”, so to speak.

Sometimes our sense of national pride causes us to be antagonistic to those foreigners who would dear criticise our country, even if that criticism may be founded. 

I recall that this country made Guyanese commentator, Colin Croft persona non grata for questioning the readiness of the Antigua Recreation Grounds for an international cricket match. To be fair, some of us quietly shared his concern about our last minute grounds preparation. The issue was not that what he was saying was untrue, but rather he deared to besmirch our national identity.

As Caribbean people, it is not uncommon that in order to give our children the chance of a better life, pregnant women would risk travelling to the US with the hope of having their baby, there. They figure that their child would have a better life being a US citizen. This country would be the land of their child’s birth. And no one can take that away from them. The thinking is that being a US citizen would give their offspring an advantage that they could not get at home. 

It is therefore fair to say that our country of birth means a lot and is fundamentally a part of our own identity. To unjustly take that away or occupy a peoples homeland is devastating for any people and that peoples’ mental health. 

For a country that purports to care about mental health, this is quite ironic. I would hope that those who advocate for mental health will join me in condemning what is being perpetrated against the Barbuda people.

I hear our politicians talk about the atrocities and inhumane treatment of slavery and colonialism. They talk about how our black ancestors were stolen from their motherland and brought to these shores against their will. They talk about how the descendants of those slaves, having been rob of a country, were now being denied land in their new home. They talk about how these freemen were made into the underclass and robbed of all opportunities. These same politicians would attempt to make the case that all this was unfair and even clamour for an apology and reparations from the Europeans!

It is worth noting that the very day that the emancipation declaration was made, the freed slaves became trespassers on “massa’s” land. Even when our descendants were free they had no land they could call their own. Land and freedom are therefore inextricably linked. 

For all of the reasons previously articulated, this is why we all are intrinsically and emotionally connected to where we are born. It is part of our personal identity. 

Your homeland is where you spent your childhood; where you made lasting friendships and relationships. It is where your family home is, regardless of how humble. 

It is not uncommon to see those who made it in the world retreat to their humble beginnings, where they started in life, and do so with much emotion, fond memories and gratitude.

Antigua and Barbuda has been at the forefront of the effort to hold the UK and other European countries accountable for slavery and demanding reparations. We make those claims on the grounds of morality and justice.

It is indeed hard for me to see the broad daylight colonization of the land of the people of Barbuda and not highlight the blatant hypocrisy and immorality. 

Where are the voices of those who would canvass for reparations? Can they not see the hypocrisy with Barbuda situation?

What slavery and the robbery of the lands of the Barbudan people have in common, is that they were both justified in the name of economic development: one for sugar and the other for tourism.

How can Antigua and Barbuda criticise the Europeans for having invaded and taking over African countries and disregarding the aspirations of the native people when Antigua and Barbuda is following the same playbook. 

Like the European conquerors of Africa, the Antigua and Barbuda government sees the Barbudans as uncivilized and uneducated savages who are being mere obstructionists, thereby justifying the use of unbridled force to get these “deracinated imbeciles” out of the way of “progress”. Even to the point of violating the law and natural justice. 

It is ironic that the meaning of “deracinate”, from the Webster dictionary is: “to remove or separate from a native environment or culture”. Indeed the Barbudan people have been forced out of their own land.

Obviously, our government considers all things fair in war and economic development!  

I question your sense of morals, if you justify the alienation of the people of Barbuda from their own lands but play sanctimonious about the atrocities of slavery and colonialism. 

How can Antigua and Barbuda take an official stand for the people of Palestine but deny the people of Barbuda the basic fundamental right to even have a say about their land. I do not follow the logic.

It matters not that a privy council ruled, in the same way that the privy council oversaw over 200 years of slavery.

You are a hypocrite in my opinion, to support what is being perpetrated against the Barbudan people.   

I am ashamed! A case of black on black crime!

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