There is an irony in history that Caribbean people know particularly well.

The institutions through which we now seek recognition were often built in a world in which our ancestors were denied recognition; the legal traditions through which we make claims for justice once gave legal form to their subordination; and the Commonwealth, today a voluntary association of independent states, cannot be understood entirely apart from the empire whose dissolution made it necessary.

It is against that complicated history that Jamaicans should consider the election of Juliet Holness, Speaker of the House of Representatives, as vice-chairperson of the Executive Committee of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA).

Holness’s well-deserved election on September 17 is significant in its own right.

She was elected by fellow Commonwealth parliamentarians at the conclusion of the 69th Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference in Cape Town, South Africa, and will serve for one year while also sitting on the CPA Co-ordinating Committee.

But perhaps its greater significance lies in the moment in which it has occurred.

Jamaica is simultaneously deepening its engagement with the international reparation movement.

Only recently, Jamaica filed a petition to King Charles III asking that questions concerning the legality of the trafficking and chattel enslavement of Africans be referred to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

Earlier this year, the Government reaffirmed Jamaica’s commitment to a conception of reparatory justice extending beyond monetary compensation to apology, restitution, rehabilitation, cessation of continuing harm, and guarantees of non-repetition.

Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness himself has argued that reparation should not be reduced to the idea of a cheque placed into the hands of individual Jamaicans.

This observation deserves more consideration than it sometimes receives.

For if reparation is concerned not merely with what Britain might someday pay, but with the institutional consequences of centuries of slavery, colonial extraction, and unequal development, then reparatory justice must necessarily concern itself with institutions.

And that brings us back to the Commonwealth.

For Caribbean societies, the Commonwealth occupies an unusual historical space.

It would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that it descended upon us without history.

Its existence is inseparable from the transformation of the British empire and the emergence of formerly colonised territories as independent states.

Yet it would be equally simplistic to conclude that every institution with imperial ancestry must, therefore, be abandoned.

Postcolonial sovereignty has always involved something more complicated.

We inherited parliamentary government and transformed it.

We inherited common law and developed Caribbean jurisprudence within and sometimes against it.

We inherited institutions designed elsewhere and have spent generations asking whether they can be made to serve societies they were never originally designed to serve.

The relevant question, therefore, is not merely whether an institution has colonial origins.

The more difficult question is: Who has the power to shape what that institution becomes? That is why Holness’s election deserves attention beyond politics.

There is a temptation within reparation discourse to regard participation in Commonwealth institutions as somehow inconsistent with demands for reparatory justice.

I am not persuaded that the contradiction is so simple.

There is a difference between accepting inherited institutional arrangements uncritically and entering those institutions with sufficient confidence to challenge the assumptions upon which they were built.

Indeed, one of the recurring problems of the postcolonial condition has been that Caribbean states possess juridical sovereignty while continuing to operate within international economic, legal, and diplomatic structures largely constructed before they possessed meaningful power over their design.

Reparatory justice, therefore, cannot concern itself only with retrospective compensation.

It must also ask questions about voice, institutional power, and the distribution of authority in the present international order.

The CPA itself is undergoing an interesting transformation.

Its current strategic plan describes its transition towards international status as an opportunity to amplify parliamentary voices and deepen engagement with regional and international institutions.

That creates an intriguing opportunity.

A Jamaican parliamentarian now occupies senior leadership in that institution at precisely the moment when Jamaica, Caricom, and African states are attempting to move reparation from historical argument towards international diplomacy, law, and institutional action.

Those developments need not inhabit separate worlds.

Holness should, of course, be allowed to define the priorities she brings to her new office.

While her election does not transform the CPA into a reparation institution, Jamaica should understand the wider significance of having one of its highest parliamentary leaders at that table.

The Caribbean’s reparation movement increasingly confronts a problem not of historical evidence but of institutional translation.

We know that slavery occurred; we know that enormous wealth was extracted from enslaved African labour; we know that Emancipation compensated slaveholders rather than the enslaved; and an increasingly sophisticated body of scholarship examines the relationship between these historical processes and subsequent structures of racial and economic inequality.

The harder question is how historical knowledge becomes contemporary institutional action.

This requires lawyers, historians, and economists.

But it also requires diplomats and parliamentarians capable of carrying those arguments into spaces where international norms are debated and relationships between states are cultivated.

Jamaica should, therefore, regard Holness’s election neither as a substitute for reparation advocacy nor merely another ceremonial Commonwealth achievement.

It is, in my view, an opportunity for representation.

There is another reason this moment matters.

For too long, Caribbean engagement with former colonial powers has sometimes been framed through a vocabulary of gratitude.

We are reminded of institutions Britain left behind, of parliamentary government, of roads, railways, schools, and administrative systems.

Occasionally, this argument goes further: Perhaps, it is suggested, colonialism ultimately gave as much as it took.

But a road constructed to facilitate a colonial economy does not extinguish the claim arising from the economy it facilitated.

A courthouse does not cancel the injustice of the laws once administered within it, and the inheritance of parliamentary institutions does not require formerly colonised peoples to surrender their right to interrogate the historical circumstances in which those institutions developed.

In my mind, the mature response to colonial history is neither ingratitude nor gratitude, it is accounting.

It asks what was taken, what was built, for whose benefit, at whose expense, and what consequences survived the lowering of the Union Jack.

That is the intellectual terrain upon which serious reparation scholarship must proceed.

There is also something important about the posture Jamaica can adopt.

Reparatory justice does not require permanent hostility towards Britain, neither should diplomatic friendship require historical silence.

Mature nations should be capable of holding two propositions simultaneously: Britain and Jamaica can cooperate in the present, and Britain can still be asked to confront obligations arising from the past.

Indeed, reconciliation worthy of the name cannot require one party to forget the history that made reconciliation necessary.

The Jamaican Government’s recent actions suggest that it is attempting to navigate precisely this terrain — maintaining diplomatic relationships while advancing reparation through Caricom, African partnerships, international institutions, and now a legal petition concerning slavery’s historical legality.

There is a photograph somewhere in our collective historical imagination of Caribbean people standing outside the rooms in which decisions about them were made.

Plantation rules were written without them.

Colonial laws were enacted over them.

Their labour entered imperial accounts while their voices rarely entered imperial deliberations.

History has not completely repaired that imbalance.

However, something has changed.

Today, a well-esteemed Jamaican woman sits among those entrusted with helping to govern an association of Commonwealth parliaments.

That fact does not erase empire, it does not settle the reparation claim, and it does not dismantle the structural inequalities inherited from colonialism, but it is not meaningless.

Perhaps the challenge of this postcolonial generation is not simply to reject every table constructed before we arrived.

Perhaps it is to arrive at those tables carrying our history with us and possessing enough intellectual confidence to insist that the conversation changes because we are there.

Holness now has such a seat, and the achievement is hers.

What Jamaica and the Caribbean ultimately make of the spaces now opening before us is a question for all of us.

Congratulations, Speaker Holness, and I am confident you will bring to this role the grace and dignity you already carry so well.

andrea.mckenziehowell@gmail.com