The Tribune

By KEILE CAMPBELL

Tribune Staff Reporter

kcampbell@tribunemedia.net

THE Bahamas’ reparations committee has expanded its campaign at home and abroad, stepping up public education and joining regional and international efforts to build support for reparatory justice.

Bahamas National Reparations Committee chair Dr Niambi Hall Campbell-Dean said its work over the past year included community outreach in The Bahamas, engagement in the United Kingdom and participation in conferences in Ghana and Togo.

The campaign remains at the advocacy stage, however, with no agreement or timetable for Britain or other former colonial powers to provide reparations.

CARICOM approved a revised reparations manifesto last month, while its reparations commission returned to Britain in July for public education, civil-society engagement and efforts to strengthen international partnerships.

The regional campaign also received a boost in March when the United Nations General Assembly declared the trafficking and racialised enslavement of Africans the gravest crime against humanity. The resolution did not require countries to provide compensation.

Following this year’s Emancipation Day observances, Dr Campbell-Dean said the Bahamian committee had intensified its education, awareness and advocacy efforts.

Its activities included co-hosting a Bahamas at Sunrise programme examining reparations through health, climate change and youth engagement.

The committee also organised a free heritage tour of the Pompey Museum, the 66 Steps, Bethlehem Cemetery and Bethel Baptist Church, highlighting the sites’ connections to emancipation in The Bahamas.

Dr Campbell-Dean said public awareness had increased, although considerably more work was needed before reparations became a regular subject of national discussion.

“I think definitely that the public is more aware of the reparations movement,” she said. “Granted, there is still a lot of work to be done into really making reparations a topic - a household topic - but I think that there are more and more people that don’t just kind of laugh it away as a silly begging notion.”

She said more Bahamians, particularly younger people, were beginning to regard reparations as “a real movement, a real possibility, and a real act of justice that could benefit our community”.

Dr Campbell-Dean represented The Bahamas as a member of the CARICOM Reparations Commission during a visit to the United Kingdom last November.

She said commission members later returned to Britain, where activities included an event at the House of Commons involving UK MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy and engagement with Anglican clergy.

The Church Commissioners for England has committed £100m between 2023 and 2031 in response to the historic links between one of its predecessor funds and African chattel enslavement.

However, the Church Commissioners has said the initiative is intended to promote healing, justice and repair and is not reparations payable to descendants of enslaved people.

Dr Campbell-Dean also attended the Next Steps Conference in Ghana in June, where she served on a technical expert committee drafting a reparations resolution. She also gave a presentation at the ninth Pan-African Congress in Togo.

She highlighted CARICOM’s revised Ten-Point Plan, approved at last month’s Heads of Government meeting in St Lucia after review by the Prime Ministerial Subcommittee on Reparations.

The revised manifesto expands the regional framework to include gender and climate justice.

Dr Campbell-Dean said one of the new points recognises the additional labour borne by women during the trafficking and enslavement of Africans and considers how the legacy of slavery contributes to present-day social problems.

She rejected as ahistorical remarks by former UK home secretary and MP Suella Braverman suggesting Britain’s former colonies should pay reparations to the UK because of British investment in infrastructure and governance.

“We understand how ahistorical those statements are, but also recognise that those statements are being made because they’re feeling the pressure of the reparations movement, not just in the Caribbean but globally,” Dr Campbell-Dean said.

Despite maintaining that reparations were a matter of when rather than if, she acknowledged it remained impossible to predict when governments such as the United Kingdom would formally agree to them.

“The work of the reparations committee is to plant the seed,” she said. “We might not sit under the shade of the tree of reparations or eat from the fruit, but we’re definitely putting in the work so that those trees do bear fruit one day.”