Category: Power, Systems & Colonial Structures

Overview
Ahead of the November Commonwealth summit in Antigua and Barbuda, CARICOM reparations chair Hilary Beckles has appealed to King Charles to help advance talks on slavery’s legacy. The request is striking not only for what it asks, but for how it is addressed: to a father and grandfather, as well as a king. The coming meeting may reveal whether that appeal can move from moral language toward an agreed process.

A personal appeal, a public question

On 22 October, Professor Hilary Beckles asked King Charles III to use his influence to advance reparations talks between Britain and the Caribbean. Beckles chairs the CARICOM Reparations Commission, and he made his appeal ahead of next month’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, or CHOGM, in Antigua and Barbuda. (The Guardian, 22 October 2026)

He did not address the king only as a monarch. “I’m appealing to Charles Windsor, a parent, a grandparent,” Beckles said, adding that Charles could reflect on his family’s history and the enrichment slavery had brought to it. Beckles said he believed the king knew that the wealth he was passing to his children and grandchildren came from chattel slavery. (The Guardian)

That is Beckles’s claim, and his framing matters. He is asking a person to bring influence to a political institution. He is asking for a conversation, not handing the question over to sentiment. The difficult issue underneath remains: what can an individual appeal accomplish when the history belongs to institutions, laws and systems of wealth?

The king’s role is not a substitute for decisions by governments. Yet the appeal speaks to a human truth: public authority is carried by people, and people can choose whether to acknowledge what institutions have done.

What is on the table

Beckles called the coming summit “the Chogm of reparations” and the “first round of reparations negotiations.” He said reparatory justice would be the Caribbean delegates’ “number one item on the table,” although there is no dedicated official event on the summit programme. (The Guardian)

The language of the draft communiqué is one measure of how much the Commonwealth is prepared to do. David Comissiong, deputy chair of Barbados’s National Task Force on Reparations, said a paragraph mandating foreign ministers to advance discussions of historical harms through “structured, inclusive, and good faith dialogue” had not been unanimously agreed. A separate paragraph referring to commitments from the Samoa summit and later developments at the UN, African Union and CARICOM had been confirmed. (The Guardian)

Comissiong called the disagreement “very peculiar, to say the least.” The difference between those paragraphs is not small. One records that a conversation should continue. The other would give ministers a specific task: take it forward.

Dorbrene O’Marde, chair of Antigua and Barbuda’s reparations commission, said campaigners would raise reparations in the summit’s major forums. He also announced that a “Global Reparations Caravan,” combining advocacy, demonstrations and culture, was set to launch on 3 November. (The Guardian)

There are calls for Charles to make a formal apology during visits to Guyana and the Bahamas before CHOGM. Commonwealth secretary-general Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey said an apology “wouldn’t hurt” and that “the time has come” for a serious conversation on reparations. Eric Phillips, Guyana’s reparations committee head and CARICOM commission vice-chair, also called for an apology and reparations. (The Guardian)

The summit has not yet settled its language. That uncertainty is part of the story.

Two tracks: apology and law

There is a moral track: apology, dialogue, public recognition. The palace has not committed to an apology. After Jamaica submitted a petition in September, a spokesperson said Charles was committed to promoting greater understanding of slavery and finding ways to address historic wrongs for communities today. (The Guardian)

There is also a legal track. Jamaica’s petition, filed on 7 September and referred by Charles to the Privy Council, asks three questions: Was the enslavement of Africans in Jamaica ever lawful under English law? Did it breach international law or constitute a crime against humanity? Does the United Kingdom have an obligation to provide a reparatory remedy? The hearing is provisionally set for the week of 8 March 2027, and the UK government has been directed to file its case by 20 November 2026. (The Guardian, 16 October 2026; Jamaica Gleaner)

A legal opinion can clarify questions of law. It cannot, by itself, decide how a society remembers, or what practical repair should look like. An apology can recognize harm. It cannot, by itself, redistribute authority or resources. Neither track makes the other unnecessary.

The plainest question in Jamaica’s petition may be the most unsettling: Was this ever lawful? To ask it is to bring the law itself into the account, not only the suffering it failed to prevent, but the rules that authorized it.

Haiti and the cost of delayed repair

Haiti knows the distance between recognition and repair. After Haiti won independence from France in 1804, France imposed a 150 million gold-franc indemnity in 1825 to compensate former slaveholders and secure recognition; the sum was later reduced to 90 million, and Haiti’s payments continued until 1947. In April 2025, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a joint French-Haitian commission of historians to examine the debt’s impact, but no financial reparations were committed. (UN News, 19 April 2025; BBC, 17 April 2025)

The sequence is familiar: first, a wrong is named; then a process is promised. But recognition does not automatically return what was taken. If pressure ends at the moment an institution finds the right words, the ledger remains untouched.

The ledger beneath the language

An apology can be sincere and still leave the structure intact. The question is not only whether the words arrive. It is whether authority over the account changes: who gets to define the harm, name what was taken and decide what is owed.

That is why reparations for slavery are a contest over memory as much as money. Colonial narratives taught many people to see extraction as progress, domination as order, and the colonized as less entitled to define their own history. Those ideas do not disappear when the language becomes more careful. They can survive inside what a society normalizes, what it refuses to measure and whose testimony it treats as credible.

This is where decolonization of the mind becomes more than a phrase. If an empire admits a crime but keeps sole custody of the ledger, it may have changed its public language without changing its understanding of justice. Acknowledgement matters. It is not the same as repair.

I think of this not as a demand to erase anyone’s history, but as an insistence that the full history be told. We cannot build human unity on a story in which some people inherit the benefits of violence while others inherit only the burden of remembering it. We cannot move forward by asking the wounded to accept recognition as the final answer.

CHOGM has not happened. The communiqué remains unsettled, and Jamaica’s hearing is provisional. Nothing here is a completed victory. That is precisely why attention matters: not only to what is said, but to what follows.

The measure is not the apology. It is the ledger.

In Alike Regardless: This Is Where It Began, I write about the work of finding unity through love and self-reflection. That work requires honesty about what divides us, and the courage to change what we have inherited.

Reclaim the mind. Rewrite the future.

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