Next week, leaders in the regional slavery reparation movement will be heading to Europe for a series of political engagements organised by The Repair Campaign, a movement carrying forward the Caricom Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice.

The delegation, which will attempt to inject a new burst of energy into the calls for compensation for the ills of chattel slavery and colonialism, will meet with European parliamentarians in Brussels on Tuesday and British Members of Parliament in London the next day.

The inevitable question will be what can realistically be the expected outcome of this trip? Will it be worth the plane fares, hotel rooms, ground transportation, meals, time away from work, and per diem for seven people?

The reparation issue has always been a controversial one, with no shortage of cynics who believe it’s a grand waste of time, effort, and money, because the descendants of slave owners do not hold themselves accountable and cannot be compelled to do so.

Still, there are the optimists who are convinced that the descendants of slaves will never take their rightful place in the human family until they are enabled to overcome the lingering effects of slavery and colonialism.

Believers argue — and they have the considerable backing of the Caribbean Community and The University of the West Indies (The UWI) — that more than 10 million Africans were stolen from their homes and forcefully transported to the Caribbean as the enslaved chattel and property of Europeans.

“The transatlantic slave trade is the largest forced migration in human history and has no parallel in terms of man’s inhumanity to man. This trade in enchained bodies was a highly successful commercial business for the nations of Europe. The lives of millions of men, women and children were destroyed in search of profit… The descendants of these stolen people have a legal right to compensation,” they insist.

As evidence, they often point to the underdevelopment of the black-dominated countries, mainly in Africa and the Caribbean, with little if any breakthroughs over the centuries, despite no lack of effort.

Some also posit that the world would be a better and more prosperous place if African descendants were able to lift up themselves through improved financial, health, and educational arrangements, and so contribute more.

In its 10-point plan, Caricom, which has established an active Reparation Commission (CRC), put the burden squarely on Europe, saying that they were the owners and traders of enslaved Africans and created the legal, financial, and fiscal policies necessary for their enslavement.

Caricom also lashed slave-owning European nations for refusing to compensate the enslaved with the ending of their enslavement, while compensating the slave owners at Emancipation “for the loss of legal property rights in enslaved Africans”.

“[They then] imposed a further 100 years of racial apartheid upon the emancipated; imposed for another 100 years policies designed to perpetuate suffering upon the emancipated;… and have refused to acknowledge such crimes or to compensate victims and their descendants.”

The delegation to Europe will press home the argument that their “call for justice is the basis of the closure they seek to the terrible tragedies that engulfed humanity during modernity”.

We wish them every success.