Dear Editor,

The following is an open letter to Everald Warmington, Member of Parliament (MP) for St Catherine South Western. The Global Afrikan Congress (GAC) writes to you publicly because of the statements you recently made in the House of Representatives concerning Jamaica’s petition to His Majesty King Charles III and its referral to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

I want to point out that this letter is not motivated by a disagreement between two Jamaican politicians of the same party, or the Opposition for that matter. On the contrary, and importantly, this letter is specifically motivated by history, truth, the dignity of millions of African and African-descendant people, and Jamaica’s responsibility to understand and defend its own history and pursue justice.

-77Specifically, this letter is motivated as a response to your own words in Parliament when you stated: “My roots are here in Jamaica and not in Africa.”

Further, you then described your own Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) Government delegation’s visit to London as an embarrassment, saying: “I’m embarrassed at the spectacle of the photo ops in London.” Additionally, and unfortunately, you displayed your disdain by comparing the JLP Government delegation’s visit to the nursery rhyme Pussycat, Pussycat, concluding: “I left a petition on the empty chair.” Sir, you then turned to what should have been the substance of the reparation issue when you stated: “We keep on speaking of the buyers of the slaves, but nobody speaks of the sellers of the slave.”

Respectfully, you continued your uninformed assertions when you stated: “The white man didn’t go to Africa and pick up enslaved people and take them across here. They were caught by black people who sold them to the white man to come here.” Again, you scornfully asked why Jamaicans continue to speak about “the white man who bought the slaves”, while refusing to ask about “the black man in Africa who sold the slave to the white man”, adding: “They didn’t go there and catch slaves.”

We in the GAC challenge your subjective and derisive formulation of history. We respect your right to your own interpretation of history, though it is a colonial formulation and historically falsified to justify their crimes. However, we vigorously assert that you don’t have the right to rewrite history based on your obviously misinformed understanding of it.

The problem is not that you have raised the question of African involvement in the history of the slave trade. The problem is that you have presented an extraordinarily complex historical system of European invasion, military coercion, commercial expansion, warfare, forced transportation, plantation enslavement, colonial law, and racial ideology as though a simple distinction between African sellers and European buyers can adequately explain it. Further, there was no market for buying and selling free Africans.

On the contrary, there was coercion at bayonet point by Europeans to forcibly coerce Africans to round up other Africans not for sale but for European appeasement and forcible capture for the enslaved person awaiting ships. Hence, your depiction of a market in Africans is not only based on misinformation, but it is also an example of how many of us have internationalised racism.

The history of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans cannot properly be understood by asking only who physically captured a particular African and who purchased that person. We must ask much larger and more insightful questions such as the following:

1) Who created the enormous transatlantic demand for enslaved labour?

2) Who organised the Atlantic commercial system for African labour?

3) Who financed and insured the voyages of European ships and their cargoes?

4) Who controlled the ships and shipping networks?

5) Who established and protected the plantation economy?

6) Who developed colonial laws defining Africans and their descendants as property?

7) Who accumulated wealth from the system, and where is the wealth? 8) Who defended the enslavement of Africans through colonial governments and legislatures? 9) Who maintained the system through military and imperial power? Unfortunately, contrary to your simplistic and infantile responses in our country’s Parliament, the cited questions cannot be answered by simply saying that Africans sold Africans.

AFRICAN PARTICIPATION IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Your intervention overlooks an important distinction: Participation is not necessarily consent, and coercion is not the same as voluntary responsibility.

The European invasion and expansion of the Atlantic slave system did not occur in a political vacuum. European powers established fortified trading centres, commercial networks, and military relationships along the African coast and increasingly penetrated established African political and economic systems.

Sadly, the colonial miseducation and misconception that you demonstrated as an MP requires clarification for you and other black folks who may think like you that the existing African communities did not resist the massive European invasion and encroachment on those communities.

Thus, it must be underscored that African societies fought against the capture and enslavement of their peoples. Further, in circumstances in which Africans were compelled, threatened, manipulated, or forced to assist European traders and military forces, such coercion cannot and should not be misconstrued simply as Africans “selling Africans”.

The historical circumstances under which Africans became involved must therefore be carefully examined and understood to avoid colonial-constructed, ignorant proclamations such as your recent historically inaccurate outbursts in the chamber of the Jamaican Parliament.

Historical accuracy and the education of the Jamaican people require not only that Jamaican MPs be informed about topics they are blissfully misinformed about but, importantly, that they verify historical facts rather than fiction.

Had you, MP Warmington, taken some time to inform himself about the vicious history of the European invasion of Africa, you would have learned that Africans resisted that invasion and that limitless numbers of Africans were slaughtered. In contrast, others were coerced at gunpoint to round up fellow Africans in the European onslaught of African resources.

That history must be taught to all Jamaicans. Similarly, where African individuals collaborated in capturing their fellow Africans in exchange for European bribes their conduct can be studied within its specific historical circumstances. However, none of this exonerates the blood-soaked and criminal responsibilities of the European powers that transformed the trafficking of Africans into a massive transatlantic commercial and plantation system. Indeed, the Jamaican Parliament itself made this distinction.

Further, in responding to your intervention, Opposition MP Damion Crawford distinguished between African involvement that was not State-sanctioned and a British slave-trading system that was sanctioned through Parliament, enforced by laws and State strategies.

We in the GAC believe that such a distinction deserves serious consideration. Thus, the issue is the structure of power that created, expanded, institutionalised, and sustained the Atlantic system of racialised chattel enslavement and the barbarism that came with it in the plantation system, and its intergenerational lingering effects and aftermath that still impact socioeconomic inequalities and underdevelopment, our collective psychology, and self-esteem.

READ THE BRITISH PARLIAMENTARY RECORD

Honourable Member, before making further declarations about Britain’s and Africa’s respective responsibilities as it relates to the slave trade in and the enslavement of Africans, we respectfully and strongly encourage you to read the British parliamentary record on the debates concerning the slave trade, the parliamentary