Prince William, second in line to the British throne, and his wife Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, have now wound up their visit to the Caribbean in celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee, the longest serving British monarch and titular head of the Jamaican State.

I cannot understand those who bleat that they should not have visited or that the Government should not have accommodated their visit here. For one, we are tethered to protocol and are in that sense bound to offer the hospitality to the couple as the situation demands. After all, to repeat, The Queen, by our constitutional arrangements, is still the head of the Jamaican State.

With respect to protocol and our legendary hospitality as a people, we treated them well and I am sure they left comforted by the fact that our hospitality was without question.

Until we end our relationship with the British monarchy, we will be bound to show members of the royal family and their representatives the respect that is due, pretty much as we do the governor general, The Queen’s representative in Jamaica. That is the hard truth which many cannot swallow, but this is what it is until we determine otherwise.

Having said that, I find it insulting whenever any member of British royalty or the British Government visits with us and speaks in a manner that suggests we should forget the past behaviour of the colonisers and move on. If one has not walked in the moccasins of pain of other people, it is very easy to advise them to move on without even realising that you may very well be insulting them.

Former Prime Minister David Cameron did not understand this.

In his most recent visit to Jamaica he made that fatal mistake of lecturing us about moving on from thinking about our slave past. He and those who speak like him believe that the veracity of the lived experience of a people, especially when the deep wounds of that experience are so obvious in our life and culture in the present, can be easily forgotten or denied.

That is the ultimate insult.

But Cameron in his insensitivity made it worse by offering a penal institution to us as a way of a healing balm in Gilead.

It is, therefore, not surprising to me that Prince William expressed sorrow and regret at the slave trade, but did not go on to offer even an apology for this industry and what the British are prepared to do practically to address the wrongs of the past. He was reading from a prepared script, which, obviously, was cleared with Buckingham Palace.

To be fair to him, I do not believe it was his mission or remit to offer such an apology. To have done so would have been a statement of policy, which is not for the monarchy to do, but the British Government in Parliament.

But his speech was nonetheless egregious in its expression of regret for the slave trade. You can express regret or apologise for any past “abhorrent” behaviour, but it does not mean that you are necessarily sincere. The sincerity of an apology must be backed up by action that indicates that one is truly sorry and is prepared to practically demonstrate that one wants to remedy the wrong that was actually done.

A cheating spouse will find it difficult to get back into a relationship with his or her significant other if he or she does not practically demonstrate, with humility, sorrow for the offensive action. Even to sleep in the barn or the doghouse is in itself a demonstration of humility.

Just offering an apology and thinking that your spouse will simply walk back into your arms and forget what happened is tantamount to thinking that a block of ice will not melt in the Sahara Desert. Occasional paroxysms of guilt are hardly a healing formula either. You have to make reparation for the wrong done.

In the case of slavery, the insistence on reparation for the evil perpetrated against our forebears ring with unerring accuracy. It is the right thing to do.

Those among us who seem to agree with the British that we should forget the past and simply move on need to educate themselves on the suffering that our ancestors went through.

New scholarship has evolved in recent times which tells the sad and tragic story of how our ancestors were treated. It is not just about the indignity of slavery, but the theft of our patrimony, our health, and so much more. It is about honouring the memory of our forebears. For them to have suffered as they did and for their offspring to simply forget what happened is the ultimate insult we could mete out to them.

Retaining the monarchy is a further insult to them.

I cannot agree with those who parade the view that we should not address this insult because there are other urgent matters in our midst to address, such as crime and lifting people out of poverty. One cannot deny the nobility of these goals, but even those who believe this will concede that these will not be settled anytime soon. There will always be urgent things to be done. If we should keep delaying real constitutional reform on the basis of these urgent things, we will have The Queen with us for a long time to come. The very thought of this should be embarrassing to any well-thinking Jamaican.

And it is not mere symbolism to remove The Queen. I grit my teeth whenever I hear talk of The Queen being a symbolic or ceremonial figure or just a mere figurehead in Jamaican life. To begin with, she is deeply embedded in our constitution, which two of our national heroes signed off on.

The process of removing The Queen from her cemented perch is not going to be as easy as we think. Our colonialist overlords in Westminster made sure about this. Yet every August 6 we celebrate with pomp and ceremony how ‘independent’ we are. We should be deeply ashamed of ourselves.

If The Queen is a mere ceremonial figure in our life and culture, why is it that every year when Parliament opens The Queen’s representative, the governor general, has to give the throne speech, pretty much as his boss does in Britain. Why are we a slave to this tradition?

Additionally, no Bill passed by both Houses of Parliament can become law and thus functional unless it is signed by The Queen’s aforementioned representative. How symbolic is that?

The laws of a nation are essential and pervasive and affect the life and culture of a people in the promotion of order in their society, and yet, as a people, we have no sovereignty over such laws. If The Queen’s representative does not sign them, they cannot become law.

What if we should ever have a governor general who, for whatever demented reason, refuses to sign a law. Yes, I hear the pushback that it has never happened. But does this say it cannot happen? This would throw the country into a constitutional crisis, which may ultimately have to find resolution in the “mother” country. I will not even comment on the Privy Council as our last appellate jurisdiction.

It is time that we end this charade and the sooner the better. 

Dr Raulston Nembhard is a priest, social commentator, and author of the books Finding Peace in the Midst of Life’s Storm and Your Self-esteem Guide to a Better Life. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or stead6655@aol.com