The Caribbean definitely paid full attention to every word by Ghana’s President John Mahama and CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC) Chairman and University of the West Indies (UWI) Vice Chancellor Sir. Hilary Beckles, during their special joint August 3, 2026 presentations in Jamaica, following the historic ‘Next Steps’ conference Ghana hosted last June 18, where CARICOM and African Union (AU) jointly-adopt the revised CARICOM 10-point Plan (TPP) for Reparatory Justice.
Now called ‘The Manifesto for Coming Enlightenment’, the upgraded 13-year-old document speaks for the two largest regional groupings of developing nations within the (British-led) Commonwealth of Nations.
The President and the UWI Vice Chancellor recalled history, joining past to present and future in most-welcome ways that spelt very good news for the future of the global reparations thrust following the United Nations (UN) adoption, last March 25, of that important resolution supported by 123 nations declaring Chattel Trans-Atlantic Slavery as ‘The Gravest Crime Against Humanity’.
The two speakers also shared common understanding of the history of enslavement of Africans and their shipment to the Caribbean, from Ghana’s two major slave-trading ports at Elmina and the Cape Coast.
This all happens 534 years after Christopher Columbus opened the way for Native Genocide against the region’s First People; and 192 years after the 1834 legislative passage of Britain’s Abolition and Emancipation schemes, legislated when Slavery was no-longer sustainable and slave-owners demanded reparations for loss of their human ‘property’.
Jamaica and Ghana were first to be ‘granted’ independence in the Caribbean and Africa and are both party to the new deal for the two regions to join hands to upend the so-called ‘Great Triangle’ (that built European Empires off enslavement) and to reverse the ‘Middle Passage’ (that saw at-least 30% of the 12 million Africans shipped across the Atlantic dying and being dumped at sea).
The speakers both acknowledged Marcus Garvey’s influence on Ghana’s first President Kwame Nkrumah — seen in the national steamship company being re-christened after Garvey’s ‘Black Star Line’ – also associated with advice from W. Arthur Lewis, the West Indian economist appointed by UNESCO as President Nkrumah’s first Economic Advisor.
That pre-independence Caribbean-Ghana connection also saw West Indians there initiate the nation’s now-thriving cocoa industry.
There were also West Indians in top positions in the then new Ghana army, who were assassinated during the coup that overthrew Nkrumah — for simply refusing to join the traitors; and those to, who fled with Nkrumah to Guinea after he was forced into exile.
The two presenters traced the influence of Ghana’s Ashanti tribes in early Caribbean anti-slavery and colonial revolts — including the 1763 revolution in then British Guiana led by Cuffy.
Ashanti leadership also counted in Saint Lucia’s June 19, 1795 Revolution that abolished Slavery and beheaded planters around-the-island by mobile guillotine (on their plantations and in the presence of freed men and women) — until the British and French sank their differences over the prized island and combined in 1796 to force the African revolutionaries in the leadership to surrender and then be deported to Britain on a ship named ‘London’.
Similar revolutions also took place before Haiti’s 1804 Declaration of Independence through countless national anti-Slavery and Emancipation Heroes whose statues stand today in Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Curacao, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Surinam and St. Vincent & The Grenadines and the Virgin Islands.
It was those revolutions that also influenced the European empires to end Chattel Slavery — and replace it with a six-year ‘Apprenticeship’ period while they created induced Indian Indentureship to keep their Wheels of Fortune turning on their West Indian estates.
The message from Jamaica was clear: The ‘Doors of No Return’ at Elmina and Cape Coast are now ‘Doors of Return’ — ready to welcome Caribbean citizens wanting to return to the ‘Motherland and Fatherland’, as demanded by the Rastafari Movement almost a century ago (1930s).
But before that ‘Door of Return’ fully opens, there’s still much work to be done…
The June 18 ‘Next Steps’ Ghana conference adopted several measures that included appointment of Caribbean leaders – Barbados’ Chair of CARICOM’s Prime Ministerial Subcommittee (PMSC) on Reparations, Prime Minister Mia Mottley, Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness, former Vincentian Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves and Sir Hilary Beckles — to a powerful Advisory Committee to help the AU-CARICOM alliance move the movement (according to Professor Beckles) ‘from Sentiments to the Reality of Governance’.
The AU had also earlier appointed Saint Lucia’s Ambassador Dr. June Soomer and Barbados’ Ambassador David Comissiong to advisory committees on the legal and implementation aspects of the new Manifesto.
The visiting President and the UWI Vice Chancellor both agreed that there’s (at-least) a striking visual similarity in how the ships lined-up today at the Strait of Hormuz resemble the ‘slave ships’ (in early paintings) lined-up by the hundreds outside the two major Ghana ports for their ‘cargoes’ of humans – and who, in the contexts of today and yesteryear, equate the then-enslaved Africans as the ‘energy’ of their time, just as the oil-and-gas waiting to be transported by today’s oil tankers in Persian Gulf.
Like the Native Genocide and violently-imposed colonial oppression that preceded Abolition, Emancipation, Apprenticeship and Indentureship, the current CARICOM-AU compact is yet-another vital stage in the continuing struggle to move the global reparations movement ‘from Aspiration to Achievement’.
The big difference today is that this generation is the first to see Reparations on the horizon, at a time when European monarchies and inventing expressions of royal sorrow for Slavery (instead of apologizing), while their citizens increasingly-agree this is time for what King Charles III says is ‘a necessary conversation on reparations’.
That conversation is already loud on the triangular sides of The Atlantic and it’ll surely be heard – even louder – at the November 1-4, 2026 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) to be hosted in and by the Caribbean, in Antigua and Barbuda.
Until then, the CARICOM-AU reparations pepper pot simply keeps boiling…