RJR News

A leading Jamaican Educator is targeting educational support from and cooperation with Scotland as one means by which Jamaica might secure a form of reparation from the Scots for their involvement in Jamaican slavery and the slave trade. 

“This is an area that we could explore with the Scots in terms of probably partnership and twinning of schools and even the building of schools” said Ruel Reid, Chairman of Jamaica’s National Council on Education, on the August 1 edition of That’s a Rap! 

Continuing, Reid who is also a Special Advisor to Jamaica’s Minister of Education, revealed that the government needed to build 100 additional schools immediately as part of its Education Transformation Programme, “and I think that it would be nice to (have the Scots) contributing to the building of a number of schools. Teacher training and cooperation between our universities are areas that could also be explored.” 

The Reparations debate was reignited on the programme, which featured a rebroadcast of a documentary done two years ago highlighting the Scotland-Jamaica slavery connections. In that documentary, guided by Jamaica born, Scotland based Professor Geoff Palmer; the enduring legacies of the Scottish involvement in Jamaican slavery in the 18^th and 19^th centuries were highlighted. 

In the documentary Kevin Walsh, Editor of the West Edinburgh Times and Scottish historian, Dr. James Cant, agreed that the country’s involvement in Jamaican slavery should no longer be hidden and forms of reparation, including educational support for Jamaica, should be pursued by the Scottish authorities. 

Professor Brian Meeks, Director of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, readily supported that approach when he also spoke on the August 1 edition of That’s a Rap! 

“Cooperation in Education is a great idea… at the university level there are many aspects of our universities in which we might be in advance of what might exist in Scottish institutions, in terms of our research in tropical medicine for example. So there might well be many mutually cooperative areas, but we need to do the accounting and then see what the possibilities for cooperation are.” 

That accounting is very important for Professor Meeks, however; because, in his view, no amount of cooperation will suffice if there is not a proper understanding of the material and psychological cost of the experience of slavery and colonialism. 

“If you were to try to put a figure to it this would be billions upon billions of contemporary dollars pounds Euros etc… it would appear almost impossible, but nevertheless an accounting must be done as to the cost of the slave trade – a real accounting which takes into consideration the reality that West Africans were involved in it as well – but at the same time the benefits to Europe and the Western World from that trade, and then on that basis we sit down and talk about what this has meant for the destruction or the warping of societies in our part of the world and people in our part of the world and how we can address it in a concrete way. But you can’t begin to address it in a concrete realistic way unless you do an absolute accounting as best as we can, given our limitations.” 

Furthermore, he said, several weaknesses in the Jamaican today – its political economy and its psychology - was framed in its history. 

“The fact that we have never really become an industrial country is not just a matter of entrepreneurial weakness on the part of Jamaicans but it was British policy to specifically discourage by law the development of secondary and tertiary industries that would allow value added to take place within the colonial space. This was the case in Jamaica as it was, classically; in India where a very flourishing textile industry before the British took hold of the Sub-Continent was destroyed in the interest of allowing the Manchester mills to dominate their space. So for us to understand the problems we have… we must understand the past.” 

The two separate states, Scotland and England, formally united in 1707 to establish the union now known as Great Britain. The Scottish economy which at that time was in tatters, rapidly recovered under the new arrangement, fueled in part by the wealth generated by slavery and the plantation economies of Jamaica and other British West Indian territories. 

It is now acknowledged that Jamaica provided a major portion of that wealth and it is for this reason that interests in Jamaica and Scotland are now advancing the view that the devolved Scottish government should provide tangible support to Jamaica; irrespective of what the official British Government policy on reparation might be. 

Is this a realistic prospect? Time will tell.