Reparatory Justice as the Coming Enlightenment

From Garvey and Rastafari to Indigenous rights, reparatory justice asks who controls our heritage, defines development and decides what meaningful repair should achieve.

By Chaneil C. Imhoff

What does a country owe to people whose labour helped build its wealth, while their descendants were left to negotiate the consequences?

And who gets to decide when that debt has been meaningfully addressed?

These questions sit beneath the language of reparatory justice. They concern the relationship between history and opportunity, between inherited wealth and inherited disadvantage, and between the power to offer assistance and the power to determine its terms.

I carried them into the Third CARICOM Regional Conference on Reparations in Barbados, convened from 17 to 19 September 2026 under the theme “Reparatory Justice as the Coming Enlightenment.” It was my first assignment as Caribbean Ambassador for the Global Organization for Heritage, Environment and Tourism Development, GOHETD. The conference followed the first regional gathering in St. Vincent and the Grenadines in 2013 and the second in Antigua and Barbuda in 2014.

For me, that Antiguan and Barbudan connection matters. Our country has already helped provide a setting for this regional conversation. We should also be asking what responsibility we carry for advancing it.

The opening dialogue was moderated by CARICOM Secretary-General Dr. Carla Barnett, with Prime Minister Mia Mottley, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, Dr. Jane Mufamadi, Ambassador David Comissiong, Bell Ribeiro-Addy and Francia Márquez. It was followed on the programme by Dr. Panashe Chigumadzi’s plenary, “A Crime Does Not Rot,” moderated by Professor Verene Shepherd, with Ulele Burnham as respondent.

The questions raised that morning extended beyond acknowledgement. My notes return repeatedly to development that transforms our circumstances, the contribution of Rastafari, the need for coordinated public action, and the responsibility to become more specific about what we are seeking.

The call for transformation deserves to be taken literally. What would become possible for a child, a family or a community if repair were designed around their future?

A scholarship might change one person’s prospects. Investment in an education system could change the prospects of generations. A restored building could preserve a landmark. Community ownership of the stories, businesses and opportunities surrounding it could change who benefits from that preservation.

These are choices about the depth of repair.

The history of the movement helps explain why that depth matters. CARICOM’s institutional work forms one chapter in a much longer struggle. Its conference history identifies the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban as an important international foundation, followed by the regional conferences of 2013 and 2014. Advocacy continued between those gatherings. The 2026 conference set out to advance a revised Ten-Point Plan and practical arrangements for implementation.

Yet the demand for dignity did not begin when governments established a commission. The ability to place it on an official agenda rests on generations of people who insisted that African life, knowledge and freedom had value, even when the institutions around them denied it.

Marcus Garvey belongs in that history.

Through the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Garvey connected racial pride with organisation, communication and economic ambition. The Negro World newspaper carried ideas across borders. The Black Star Line, incorporated in 1919, sought to connect Black enterprise and travel across the Americas, the Caribbean and Africa. Its commercial failure is part of the record, alongside the scale of the movement it helped inspire.

Garvey’s relevance here lies in the relationship he drew between how people understood themselves and what they believed they could build together. Pride needed institutions through which to act. Solidarity needed ways to travel. Economic ambition required ownership, skills and organisation.

That is a useful challenge for a reparations movement seeking to turn moral agreement into material change.

There is a connection to Rastafari, although the relationship should retain its historical complexity. Liberty Hall, the institution dedicated to Garvey’s legacy, describes his influence on Rastafari through Pan-African unity, repatriation, cultural expression and the re-education of Black people. It also records disagreements within that relationship. Rastafari helped sustain and transmit Garvey’s ideas across generations.

The acknowledgement of Rastafari during the morning’s discussion therefore carried weight. Giving thanks means recognising intellectual labour as well as cultural contribution: the work of keeping questions of Africa, belonging, dignity and return alive.

That recognition should influence who helps shape the next stage. A movement can lose something essential when the people who sustained its ideas are invited to bless an occasion but given little influence over its decisions.

What would it mean to include Rastafari communities as partners in research, public education, heritage preservation and the design of repair? Who would determine that participation, and how would their knowledge be respected?

The programme’s first round table gave these questions a further setting. Scheduled for the afternoon of 18 September, “Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous Cultures: Rights, Recognition and Resettlement” listed Dr. Damien Dublin as moderator, with Chief Richard Currie, Steve Reid, Danelle James and Nelcia Robinson as speakers. Reid’s role as chairperson of the Caribbean Rastafari Organisation’s Reparations and Resettlement Committee, and its representative on the CARICOM Reparations Commission, demonstrates Rastafari’s continuing involvement in the organised pursuit of repair.

That involvement brings the earlier discussion of Garvey into the present. Repatriation, belonging and the relationship with Africa remain questions around which people organise. Honouring Rastafari’s contribution should mean listening to what its communities seek, including how they understand return, restitution and the freedom to practise and sustain their culture.

The round table’s focus also asks us to widen the historical frame. A Caribbean account of repair must address the conquest, dispossession and violence experienced by Indigenous peoples. CARICOM’s revised manifesto includes Indigenous genocide within its reparatory framework.

We must also recognise living peoples with contemporary priorities and the authority to speak for themselves. A schoolbook reference or a ceremonial acknowledgement cannot carry the whole responsibility of recognition. What influence do Indigenous communities have over decisions concerning their lands, cultural knowledge and future? Who listens when their understanding of development differs from the plans presented to them?

There is solidarity to be built among Indigenous peoples, Maroon communities and Rastafari, while respecting their distinct histories, identities and claims. A shared experience of resistance does not make every remedy interchangeable. For one community, repair may centre on ancestral land and the protection of sacred places; for another, on repatriation, religious freedom or the restoration of relationships severed by forced displacement. Communities must be able to define those priorities themselves.

The language of resettlement deserves particular care. Who chooses whether to move, return or remain? What happens to livelihoods, family ties and cultural practices when a community is relocated? A proposal cannot be judged only by the provision of housing or land if the people concerned have little say in the life that follows.

For me, this deepens the connection to GOHETD’s mission. Heritage work should support communities in preserving and transmitting knowledge on their own terms. Responsible tourism should respect their decisions about what may be shared, interpreted or commercialised, and how they benefit. Environmental development should make room for their knowledge and priorities from the beginning. Recognition becomes meaningful through the authority people can exercise over these choices.

These questions lead directly to how we understand heritage.

Heritage includes the stories a society chooses to tell about itself, the people it treats as authorities, and the memories it considers worthy of preservation. Decisions about archives, schoolbooks, monuments and cultural funding help determine what future generations will know.

If the records of an estate carefully preserve its owners’ names and fortunes, we should be equally determined to recover the lives of the people whose labour sustained it. If a historic site becomes a visitor attraction, its interpretation should make room for the knowledge of the communities connected to it.

Preservation carries an obligation to tell the truth.

This is where I see a direct connection to GOHETD’s work in heritage and cultural preservation, responsible tourism, environmental development, youth participation and regional cooperation. My role places these concerns in the same conversation. In my view, development becomes more credible when the people whose culture and environment give a place its value have meaningful influence over its future.

For tourism, that raises practical questions. Who owns the businesses? Who writes the interpretation? Are local researchers, artists and guides paid fairly for their knowledge? Can residents still access the places around which their lives and memories were formed? How much of the value created remains in the community?

A country can become more visible to visitors while its people gain very little control over the opportunities that visibility creates. We need measures of progress that can detect that difference.

The morning’s discussion also challenged a familiar dismissal: that slavery existed in many societies, and therefore the Caribbean’s claim somehow loses its force.

The existence of other wrongs does not answer a particular claim. The work is to examine what happened, who participated, what benefit was extracted and what consequences remain. In the Caribbean case, racialised chattel enslavement made human beings into property and extended that status across generations. CARICOM’s revised manifesto places that dehumanisation and its continuing effects at the centre of its argument.

We should be able to discuss that history without being diverted into a competition over whose ancestors suffered most. Recognition of one people’s injuries should deepen our capacity to recognise another’s.

The purpose, as the session emphasised, is to achieve transformative development. Negotiations should be judged by whether they can deliver meaningful repair. The suggestion that the ambition is to bankrupt European nations distracts from the work of identifying obligations, establishing remedies and agreeing credible terms.

There is a responsibility here for churches and other institutions that claim moral authority. Where an institution’s history involves participation in or benefit from enslavement, an honest response should include opening its records, examining its assets and accepting scrutiny. CARICOM’s manifesto explicitly addresses the historical involvement of European churches.

The question for such institutions is what their professed values require them to do once that history is acknowledged. An expression of sorrow needs a relationship to action.

Governments face a similar test. Moral agreement can coexist with political delay for a very long time. A parliament can recognise an injustice and still fail to provide the machinery through which it will be addressed.

This is why the call for specificity stayed with me.

A shared Caribbean position needs detailed national work behind it. Historians, economists, legal researchers and communities should be able to connect the record of harm to proposals for repair. Barbados must examine its experience; Antigua and Barbuda and other Caribbean countries must do the same.

Which records are missing or held overseas? What forms of dispossession can be documented? Which institutions can be identified? What changes would respond to those injuries, and how would their effects be measured?

This work should have funding, public access and continuity. It should survive changes of government. Communities should be able to contribute oral histories and local knowledge, and understand how their evidence is being used.

The proposal raised during the session for a global petition, organised over six or twelve months, belongs within that broader effort. Its potential would depend on the public education and organising behind it. Every signatory should understand the demands, the intended recipients and the action expected in response.

A signature count can make support visible. Sustained organisation gives that support political force. Partnerships across the Caribbean, Africa and the diaspora should provide ways for people to remain involved after signing.

Garvey’s example returns here: communication and organisation have to reinforce each other.

The warning in my notes about technology as a new armada invites a related question. What happens when we become increasingly connected while surrendering more control over our attention, information and economic activity?

Technology can help us recover archives, teach history and organise across borders. It can also encourage the feeling of participation without the responsibilities of collective work. Sharing a clip is a beginning. Building an informed constituency takes repetition, conversation and opportunities to act.

For young people especially, a movement should offer useful work: research, storytelling, translation, community documentation, cultural production and public education. Participation becomes meaningful when people can see how their contribution changes the outcome.

The connection between reparatory justice and climate justice also deserves more than a passing reference. CARICOM’s revised manifesto links historical extraction and environmental harm with present vulnerability.

That connection asks us to consider what repair must protect. A coastal community needs the means to sustain its homes, livelihoods and cultural places. Support that arrives on terms that deepen dependency deserves scrutiny, however generous its announcement may sound.

For GOHETD’s areas of work, heritage, environment and tourism meet in these everyday realities. Protecting a coastline can protect livelihoods and places of memory. Preserving traditional knowledge can support education and environmental care. Development should allow these benefits to reinforce one another.

There is also work we must undertake ourselves.

Self-repair involves how we teach our history, value our culture, support one another and build institutions worthy of public trust. It involves questioning the hierarchies we may reproduce in our own communities. It requires room for healing without describing Caribbean people only through injury.

We inherit creativity, knowledge and resistance as well.

Our responsibility to strengthen ourselves can proceed alongside the pursuit of repair from those whose obligations remain unresolved. Neither task should become an excuse to abandon the other.

And accountability must come home. If governments negotiate reparatory resources, the public should know the terms. Communities should influence priorities. Spending should be traceable, decisions open to challenge, and outcomes independently assessed.

People should not have to surrender their voice in order to benefit from a settlement made in their name.

That is my position: reparatory justice must expand our ability to shape our own futures. Its success should be visible in the institutions we can sustain, the knowledge we can protect, the opportunities our children can pursue and the authority our communities can exercise.

The gratitude we owe those who carried this movement, including Rastafari, should be expressed in the seriousness with which we take its next steps.

The fine print is in the terms of repair: who defines it, who directs it, and how much power ordinary Caribbean people gain over the lives that follow.