I write in response to a column written by St Aubyn Morgan titled ‘Focus on nation-building, forget reparation’ published in the Jamaica Observer on April 12.

In this author’s opinion there are many justifications for reparation for the transatlantic slave trade, but I will just touch on a few with a particular focus on Jamaica, which is, by all accounts, a significant nation in the British Caribbean.

For one thing, the institution of African chattel slavery, which was part and parcel of the transatlantic slave trade, was a most terrible and heinous crime that was perpetuated against the ancestors of many of us domiciled in the island of Jamaica. The horrors and indignities that many of our ancestors were subjected to are just too terrible for most of us to conceive.

The notion that the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and the forced labour that those who survived the ungodly passage were ultimately subjected to was a crime against humanity is something that cannot be denied by anybody who has a spark of decency in their souls.

Furthermore, this particular type of slavery was not the same or comparable to the other types of slavery that had existed in the world previously, such as that on the continent of Africa, in ancient Rome, or even ancient Egypt as the chattel enslavement and trading of Africans, otherwise known as the transatlantic slave trade, incorporated the automatic lifetime enslavement of consecutive generations for centuries until it was abolished.

The enslaved Africans were deemed property as opposed to human beings, and were thus subject to the harshest of treatment on this basis. This was undoubtably the most brutal, the most savage, and the most inhumane form of slavery ever to be enacted in the history of humanity and should be considered in this light.

For the island of Jamaica alone, some 1.5 million Africans were imported by the British during the period of their involvement in the African slave trade.

However, at the time of Emancipation in 1834, the population of Africans and African descendants was only 300,000 — one fifth of the total imported — which should give us an idea of the level of mortality that occurred in this particularly horrendous type of slavery. This reason alone justifies the call for reparation from our former colonial master.

Another reason is that our ancestors were never compensated for the near two centuries that they toiled on the sugar plantations under the British regime, whilst, contrastingly, the slave owners not only derived an immense amount of wealth from the odious institution of chattel slavery by not having to pay wages to their captives during slavery, but were also compensated to the tune of £20 million by the British Government during the Emancipation period for losing the benefit of the free labour that had once been provided to them.

Notably, the once-enslaved population suffered the indignity of leaving the plantations landless and penniless.

And, to add insult to injury, after the Emancipation Act was passed in 1833 our ancestors had to toil for a further four years without any pay from 1834-1838 in what was called the apprenticeship system. Surely our ancestors must have gained a sufficient degree of expertise from working on the sugar plantations for nearly 200 years. How on Earth could they be conceivably considered apprentices?

The apprenticeship system that was masterminded by the British can be seen as one of the biggest ruses ever in history.

This was a cleverly devised scheme to provide the slave masters of the British Caribbean with the equivalent of an additional £25 million extracted via four years of additional free labour from our ancestors. Thus, in real terms, the slave masters received a total of £45 million in compensation when the apprenticeship years are factored in.

But the formerly enslaved never received any compensation — neither for the centuries of unpaid labour nor for the immense brutality and suffering that they endured during the process. Where is the justice in that?

To add further insult to injury, the debt that the British Government incurred in borrowing the £20 million to pay the slave owners back in 1834 was only paid off in 2015, and it was not only English taxpayers who had been contributing to paying off that debt, but all those of the Windrush Generation that were domiciled in England over the last few decades, whose ancestors, I must add, never received compensation.

Now, if something isn’t wrong with this state of affairs, tell me what is?

Who really deserved to be compensated in the first place? Wouldn’t it be the enslaved, who never received a penny for their labour over the course of 200 years, rather than the slave owners who enriched themselves from the institution of slavery?

If the owners were compensated, isn’t it morally unjust that the unpaid enslaved workers were never compensated?

Those folks in England who argue that they are against the whole concept of paying reparation for slavery should realise that, paradoxically, through payment of their taxes, they had already been paying reparation, albeit to the wrong people.

Fundamentally, paying reparation for arguably the most historically nefarious and odious act ever committed, African Chattel slavery, is the right and moral thing to do. And no nation can claim to occupy the moral high ground if they refuse to do so, especially when they have ended up paying the wrong people in the first place.

On top of all this, England has extracted a great amount of wealth from Jamaica, which was once the crown jewel among its territories in the Caribbean.

In his book Reformation to Industrial Revolution (1967), Christopher Hill claims that, at the height of the British Industrial Revolution, in the mid-1700s, Jamaica was the largest single exporter to Britain, was the main base for the British-based slave trade, and accounted for 11 per cent of all imports into Britain from the Western hemisphere.

Eric Williams, the father of the nation of Trinidad and Tobago, in his much-vaunted historical masterpiece Capitalism and Slavery, also spoke to the contribution of Jamaica, as well as the other nations of the British Caribbean, to Britain’s wealth.

While this wealth was extracted by the so-called mother country, for hundreds of years little of it (if any at all) has been ploughed back. Now would be as good a time as any to reinvest some of that extracted wealth in Jamaica as part of a reparation package so that we too can improve our own infrastructure, such as our roads, bridges, and railways, as well as build more schools and hospitals.

As a point of interest, the 10-point reparation plan that has been proposed by the Caricom Reparations Commission, founded in 2013, includes recommendations for a Public Health Programme, an Illiteracy Eradication Programme, an African Knowledge Programme, and repatriation, among others, as some of the ways that the lingering effects of slavery and colonialism on our society could be ameliorated. All that is required is the requisite investment of resources by our former colonial ruler.

The complicity of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade cannot be denied.

However, it should be emphasised that they were the puppets and not the puppet masters in the whole scheme of things. Additionally, in trading their African brothers and sisters for trinkets and muskets from the Europeans, they were never in jeopardy of accumulating the scale of wealth that the former European colonial powers were able to generate from the slave trade.

They were not the drivers of the odious institution of African chattel slavery, which, I must reiterate was the most brutal and inhumane form of slavery ever known in the history of humanity, it was the European powers. And it is for this reason that reparation demands should ultimately be primarily directed at the former colonial European powers, which were, in fact, the primary culprits.

I must also emphasise that reparation for slavery is not just about our ancestors being unpaid, but also about taking into consideration the pain and suffering that they endured. A suffering, torment, and mental anguish that, in fact, was so terrible that it left an indelible stain on all subsequent generations of Africans here in Jamaica.

I, and I know many reparation advocates would agree, feel that we owe it to the memory of our ancestors to not only remember their suffering, but also recognise their resilience and sacrifice as the black survivors of one of the most brutal regimes ever to be inflicted on humankind by agitating for reparation.

For those who agree with the view that we should simply forget about slavery — essentially the African Holocaust — and move on because it happened in the past, I would say that this is tantamount to telling the Ashkenazi Jews to simply move on and forget their past. In other words, it is simply unthinkable and unconscionable.

Ultimately, I contend we occupy the moral high ground on the matter of calling for reparation by not engaging in agitation just for ourselves, but also for our ancestors who sacrificed so much for us to be here today.

Nation-building while agitating for reparation does not have to be mutually exclusive. We are a nation blessed with talented, innovative, and creative people, and are more than capable of attending to both tasks simultaneously.

As we double our efforts to further develop our nation, we can also continue to make the clarion call for reparation.

Dr Michael Barnett is a senior lecturer in sociological theory and critical race theory at The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or barnett37@hotmail.com.