A Pan-African Manifesto for the English-Speaking Caribbean

On Sunday, May 25th, Africans at home and abroad marked with great solemnity and seriousness the African Liberation Day.  This year, I was very pleased to participate, on behalf of the Global Pan-African Movement (GPAM) in association with the leading Pan-Africanists in Barbados, in a grounding to reflect on the state of the African condition in general and on the pan-African movement today. 

One of the critical questions which emerged particularly from the younger participants of the Barbados grounding was: what does a present-day Pan-African agenda look like particularly when English-speaking Caribbean states are outwardly democratic and where the condition of life of present-day citizens is not as outwardly “unfree” as that of our ancestors who endured the ‘barbarity times’ of slavery and the dehumanizing experiences of the post-slavery period prior to the onset of flag independence?  A related concern of the participants was the issue of the historical betrayal of the liberation struggle, and the tendency of potentially progressive leaders to transform themselves into agents of neo-colonialism and co-oppressors of the local population.  The main question was how do we overcome these tendencies?

Most of these concerns emerged out of a lack of clarity of how a radical, pan-African, anti-colonial project might be constructed in the present 2025 English-speaking Caribbean.  It has become necessary therefore to offer the outlines of an anti-colonial, Pan-African Manifesto as a guide to future political action.

Any future program of anti-colonial pan-African liberation in the Caribbean must reconnect with the features which sparked the birth of the Caribbean anti-colonial movements, and which have not been acted upon more than fifty years after independence.  In addition, the program must take into consideration the existing possibilities in the global environment which has opened up new spaces for emancipation and liberation. 

A program of Pan-African liberation for the Caribbean in the Twenty-first century should therefore address the following questions: 

(a)The Local Economic Empowerment and Transformation Question 

Central to this question is the fact that the Caribbean economy continues to be owned, controlled and dominated by persons of European descent both as traditional ruling classes and as foreign investors.  The reorganizing of the economies to allow for the economic empowerment of the majority black populations remains one of the key unfulfilled aspirations of the independence project. 

(b) The Political Institutional Re-organization Question 

Fifty years after independence the Caribbean still has not developed its own political institutions and practices commensurate with the independence and democratization of the Caribbean.  The Caribbean has kept largely intact the political institutions inherited from Britain. The breaking of ties with the British Monarchy and the establishment of republican constitutions remains an important next step in completing Caribbean independence.  The development of institutions and practices of more inclusive, direct and participatory forms of democracy beyond the politricks of two-party democracy remains another.

(c) The Question of the Remaining Colonies in the Caribbean

The continuing control by Britain, France, Holland and the United States of territories in the Caribbean as colonies, continues to frustrate the development of the Caribbean as a liberated, pan-African space pursuing a sovereign and integrated development.  Today, the colonial status of these territories like Anguilla, Martinique and Saint Marteen are treated as “frozen”.  This issue must be resolved as part of a Caribbean development and pan-African agenda.

(d) The Caribbean Unification Question 

Linked to this is also the “freezing” of Caribbean independence as single territories, despite the fact that Caribbean independence began its early genesis as a West Indian Federation.  Just as Kwame Nkrumah had asserted that Ghana could never be free until all of Africa is free, then similarly it can be asserted that Caribbean independence will continue to remain meaningless unless we re-frame our future sovereignty and economic development as a unified Caribbean space. In 2025, the single territory has exhausted all its possibilities, and barring the odd oil discovery here or there, it is clear that there is very little room for further development at a single-territory level. 

Today, following the collapse of tier protected trade in primary commodities, the Caribbean countries continue to exhibit forms of economic policy desperation as seen in the pursuit of “citizenship by investment programs” or the “selling of passports” as a major development pillar.  The option of pursuing single-territory independence remains stale, given the harsh vagaries of the global economy.  Despite this, the Caribbean continues to deny the imperative of looking to Africa as an avenue for post-colonial development.  Any attempt at advancing towards a unified Caribbean polity and economy will rebound to the advancement of Africa and Pan-Africanism. A weak and small single-territory Caribbean sovereignty is simultaneously a weakened Africa.  A strong and powerful unified Caribbean multi-territory sovereign space is simultaneously a stronger Africa.

(e) The Africa-Caribbean Pan-African Economic and Political Relations Question

Finally, a program and project of Caribbean liberation in the 21^st Century must become Pan-African.  With all but one of the territories of Africa now fully independent, the possibilities of the sovereign English-Caribbean countries building economic and political relations with Africa are far richer than the period of the pre-independence stage of Africa and Caribbean relations.  Despite the limits to small-island Caribbean development, the Caribbean continues to ignore the Pan-African option of deepening economic and political relations with the African continent.  When it is remembered that Caribbean and African personalities worked side by side in the earliest pan-African organizations and in the International African Service Bureau (IASB) in London to organize for African independence, it is a shocking fact that the first Africa-CARICOM Summit took place as late as 2021.  It is clear that prioritizing African relations has not been high on the English-Caribbean agenda much to the detriment of these countries. 

A program for Pan-African development in the English-speaking Caribbean must include a foreign policy dimension in which the international relations of the Caribbean moves away from the traditional colonially determined imposed ties to Europe and North America, and place relations with African states as the Caribbean’s principal foreign policy priority.  Linked to this foreign policy orientation, is the equally important re-orientations of the economic, financial and trade relations with Africa. Currently, the continuing failure to develop trade and economic relations with Africa is one of the biggest economic development failures of the Caribbean. 

Only the total mental enslavement of our Caribbean policy makers can explain why, despite the huge markets in Africa, the rich mineral and agricultural resources of the continent, and despite the repeated failures of the traditional neo-colonial development options, the English-speaking Caribbean has not moved decisively to pursue sustained economic and trade relations to tap into the huge economic potential of Africa.  To date, for example, despite repeated promises, direct air links between Africa and the Caribbean are yet to be achieved in a sustained and reliable manner as a key pillar of the Caribbean tourism industry and as facilitator of African and Caribbean economic relations.  There are no direct shipping arrangements between Africa and the Caribbean and there are no existing trade relations.  Clearly, the next stage of Caribbean development, must by necessity, involve the placing of economic and trade relations with the African continent at the centre.

(f) The Reparations Question

Finally, while the reparations question can be treated as a foreign policy question, it also has specific domestic implications which warrants its treatment as a separate issue in this skeletal outline of the pan-African Manifesto. The issue of the European colonial powers being held accountable through reparations for slavery, colonialism and indigenous genocide remains one of the most important foreign policy issues confronting the Caribbean region in the twenty-first century, and it must form a central plank of our political thought and action in the twenty-first century. However, in the pursuit of this policy objective, the Caribbean needs to abandon any assumed “advancement” over Africa on the reparations question.  Instead, the English-speaking Caribbean should seek to advance reparatory justice on terms agreed upon between Africa and the Caribbean as a unified front against the enslaver and genocidal nations of Europe.  Unless the demand for reparations is a genuinely pan-African enterprise, the racist European powers will divide, rule and defeat the reparations project.

However, and finally, this reparatory thrust is not strictly a foreign a foreign policy question, but also equally includes the domestic question of “self-repair”.  An essential and indispensable part of the agenda of liberation for the English-speaking Caribbean in the 21^st Century includes a thorough process of internal self-examination of all the ways in which our societies have failed to repair themselves, from our various forms of continued self-hate to the names of our streets. The first step in our emancipation must be the overcoming of our mental slavery.  Thus, while we demand reparations from outside, we take all the necessary steps to decolonize our internal selves and societies, based on the realization that “none but ourselves can free our minds”. 

Tennyson S.D. Joseph is a Caribbean national and a member of the Global Pan-African Movement (GPAM – North America).  He is a former Senator in the Parliament of St. Lucia and is currently an Associate Professor of Political Science at North Carolina Central University.