What Juliet Holness’s election could mean

There is an irony in history that Caribbean people know particularly well. The institutions through which we now seek recognition were often built in a world in which our ancestors were denied recognition; the legal traditions through which we make claims for justice once gave legal form to their subordination; and the Commonwealth, today a voluntary association of independent states, cannot be understood entirely apart from the empire whose dissolution made it necessary. It is against that complicated history that Jamaicans should consider the election of Juliet Holness, Speaker of the House of Representatives, as vice-chairperson of the Executive Committee of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA).

Holness’s well-deserved election on September 17 is significant in its own right. She was elected by fellow Commonwealth parliamentarians at the conclusion of the 69th Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference in Cape Town, South Africa, and will serve for one year while also sitting on the CPA Co-ordinating Committee. But perhaps its greater significance lies in the moment in which it has occurred.

Jamaica is simultaneously deepening its engagement with the international reparation movement. Only recently, Jamaica filed a petition to King Charles III asking that questions concerning the legality of the trafficking and chattel enslavement of Africans be referred to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Earlier this year, the Government reaffirmed Jamaica’s commitment to a conception of reparatory justice extending beyond monetary compensation to apology, restitution, rehabilitation, cessation of continuing harm, and guarantees of non-repetition.

Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness himself has argued that reparation should not be reduced to the idea of a cheque placed into the hands of individual Jamaicans. This observation deserves more consideration than it sometimes receives. For if reparation is concerned not merely with what Britain might someday pay, but with the institutional consequences of centuries of slavery, colonial extraction, and unequal development, then reparatory justice must necessarily concern itself with institutions.

And that brings us back to the Commonwealth. For Caribbean societies, the Commonwealth occupies an unusual historical space. It would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that it descended upon us without history.