GET SLAVERY HISTORY RIGHT

THE Global Afrikan Congress (GAC) has pointedly told Government Member of Parliament Everald Warmington that he has a “misinformed understanding” of history in relation to the transatlantic slave trade and has urged him to apologise for his recent comments on the issue in the legislature. Additionally, the organisation recommended that he undertake a process of what it calls “historical self-repair” and directed him to the works of historians, scholars and writers who have examined the history of Africa, the Caribbean, European expansion, slavery, colonialism, and resistance. In an open letter to the St Catherine South Western Member of Parliament, the GAC, described as an international umbrella organisation created by and for Africans and people of African descent, challenged Warmington’s comments relating to Jamaica’s petition to King Charles III and the King’s referral of the appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

The petition asks the Privy Council to make determinations on Britain’s seizure, transportation, chattelisation, and enslavement of Jamaica’s ancestors from the mid-17th century to 1834. On September 22, after Culture Minister Olivia Grange — who led a delegation that delivered the petition to Buckingham Palace on September 7 — informed Parliament that King Charles has referred the petition to the Privy Council, Warmington said he found the delegation’s visit to London embarrassing. “I’m embarrassed at the spectacle of the photo ops in London.

We went there and [it] remind me of this nursery rhyme: Pussycat, Pussycat where have you been? I’ve been to London to see the king. Pussycat, Pussycat what did you do there?

I left a petition on the empty chair,” Warmington declared in the House. “We keep on speaking of the buyers of the slaves, but nobody speaks of the sellers of the slave. The white man didn’t go to Africa and pick up enslaved people and take them across here.

They were caught by black people who sold them to the white man to come here,” he added. In response, the GAC said Warmington displayed a “subjective and derisive formulation of history”. “We respect your right to your own interpretation of history, though it is a colonial formulation and historically falsified to justify their crimes.

However, we vigorously assert that you don’t have the right to rewrite history based on your obviously misinformed understanding o…