By Ashford Peters
History lecturers at the University of the West Indies (UWI) say a newly launched book on the history of St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) presents compelling evidence of African enslavement and native genocide, which strengthens the case for reparatory justice pursued by the African Union and CARICOM against European nations.
The UWI lecturers pinpointed what they deemed to be strong evidence during the official launch of the history book titled: “St. Vincent and the Grenadines – A General History to the Year 2025, Volume One”.
The book is written by Vincentian historians Adrian Fraser, Cleve Scott, and Garrey Dennie, each of whom holds a doctorate in the humanities or social sciences, namely history and political science.
The book is written from a native perspective and captures the indigenous life, enslavement, resistance, emancipation, and European conquest through genocide, and it emphasises reparatory justice.
The African Union has declared 2026-2036 as a decade of reparations, and the CARICOM Reparations Commission is established a 10-point plan for reparatory justice.
In his remarks at the book launch hosted by the UWI Cave Hill Campus, Barbados, Rodney Worrell, head of the Department of History, Philosophy and Psychology noted that, having been written from a native perspective, the Vincentian authors interrogated a lot more sources than the colonisers possibly would have done, hence “the revisionist history is a welcome addition to the unfolding Caribbean story”.
Worrell said that, as evidenced in the text, SVG has a rich and wonderful history, and that the publication was motivated by an appreciation of history’s value to understanding the past, the present, and, indeed, the future.
“So, I know we live in a moment when we tend to poo-poo and marginalise history, but this publication is timely in that it helps to prosecute the case for reparations and reparatory justice, because in this work we’re seeing a deep discussion on genocide, we’re seeing a deep discussion on slavery,” Worrell said.
“So, this text is adding to the evidence in the fight for reparatory justice in St. Vincent and the Grenadines and in the wider Caribbean. And we hope that the state managers inside the region, St. Vincent as well, will not only commission works like this, but they will also ensure … that the students are exposed to the discipline of history, and they will make full use of textbooks of this nature.”
In his review of the textbook at the same ceremony, Senior Lecturer of history at the UWI, Cave Hill Campus, Henderson Carter said the book shows how the First Nation people settled in SVG and transformed an area of virgin land into settled communities, and how the Europeans came and demanded land.
“It also shows why the Garifuna and the Kalinago refused to give up their land. Now it left us resistance. Here are people with big guns and cannon, and the Garifuna and the Kalinago are saying, ‘No! We’re not giving up this land.’”
Carter said the Vincentian authors show how the Kalinago and the Garifuna saw land.
“Land was food security. Land was shelter. Land contained the graves of the ancestors. How are you going to give up that?” Carter said, noting that the book also explains why SVG did not experience the sugar revolution in the 1640s.
He said the Garifuna and Kalinago were holding up the drive by the English and the French to expand the country, to plant sugar, among other things, and so that the sugar revolution only came after they had subdued the Garifuna after 1797.
Carter said there was a subsequent “flood of enslaved Africans”, approximately 16,000 of them imported between 1791 and 1795, “and then you see sugar production increasing, rivalling, the authors argue, Barbados in terms of its volume”
Carter said that for him, the best part of the book is the resistance of Chatoyer — SVG’s first and only national hero — noting that Scott, also a UWI lecturer, took him last year to Dorsetshire Hill — a village overlooking the capital, Kingstown — where the poor white people from Barbados were sent in the 1860s.
Chatoyer supposedly met his death at Dorsetshire Hill during an ambush by the British.
“But here is Chatoyer, waging a war of resistance from the 1770s right up until his final ambush in the dead of the night. Then you have the final surrender of the Garifuna people. And that surrender led to their removal from St. Vincent and the Grenadines to Balliceaux.”
Balliceaux, a 320-acre island of barren land without rivers or any fresh water source in the Northern Grenadines, became home to 5,000 Kalinago and Garifuna after they were exiled by the British.
“I want you to understand that 320 acres, which is a plantation like Warren’s today, or the Bell Plantation, but without rivers, without streams. And there are 5,000 people living there,” Carter said, citing what is deemed to be evidence of African enslavement and native genocide.
Carter further stated: “Lots of people starved. Lots of people died from diseases. And then in 1797, the British took some 2,000 of them to Roatan in the Bay of Honduras … off that barren island.
“That story is a story of genocide. How could you take 5,000 people away from their homeland to a place where you know they’re going to starve? That is a story of genocide. That is the evidence we need to make the point about reparations.
“And that is the importance of the book, that even though we’re talking about reparations, we need to do the research, do the spread work; to say to our communities, this is the evidence. And then to make that point in international courts, this is the evidence.
“My view is that reparations, that movement, will become stronger when histories like these are written. So, it’s “not just about saying, yes, we want reparations. It is saying, look, this has been done.
Carter highlighted a witness account by an enslaved person in the book, Ashton Warner.
The UWI lecturer quoted Warner, as recorded in the book:
“The whole gang of field slaves is divided … and every man able to work has not only to endure crop time, the severe daily labour, but to work half the night also, or three whole nights in the week.”
Carter noted that the slaves worked night and day, especially in the boiling house and in the rum house.
He further quoted Warner:
“The work is very severe, and great numbers of the slaves during this period sink under it and become ill. But if they complain, their complaints are not readily believed or are considered only a pretence to escape from labour.”
Carter reiterated that within the text, the writers help readers to understand what happened on the plantations through the voice of the enslaved.
By today’s standards, slavery was an abomination, though it continues to be practiced in many parts of Africa and the Middle East.
This wickedness needs to be stamped out!
An evil institution by today’s moral codes, slavery was practiced around the world, including North and South America, before European contact. Indeed, in places like Canada, indigenous slavery was abolished by the British colonists, not by local insurrections.
Indeed, also, it was the British who voluntarily abolished this wicked institution, one that our African brethren sold us into, in all its colonial possessions during the 19th century.
As for our own indigenous people, Chatoyer was a slave owner whose allegiance was to the French colonists in SVG.
This traitor should not be our national hero!
As for genocide, if that was the intent of the British, they would never have transferred the indigenous people to Roatan.
As for reparations, we must stop blaming all our current adversaries on the British for a system of slavery that ended in 1838, nearly 200 years ago, or 10 generations in the past.
There is not a single British person who is responsible for Caribbean slavery and damn few who ever benefited from its legacy.
Stop blaming the living for the sins of the dead, especially sins generally not seen as such when they were practiced!
Instead, we should ignore all these “woke” pseudo-scholars — activists masquerading as professors — at the University of the West Indies, an institution ironically established by the British government, and get up and get to build our country on our own terms.
Let’s stop all this demeaning begging and begin standing on our own two feet as proud Vincentians!
We should be damn glad that we are not still living in West Africa, our ancestral homeland, a region most of whose people are worse off than us because of chronic local wars and systemic political corruption.
West and Central African countries supplied nearly all the slaves sent to the New World. White slave buyers rarely set foot outside coastal slave holding fortresses because of the threat of contracting a lethal case of malaria, to which they were highly susceptible, but depended instead on many coastal ethnic groups who either violently captured slaves and sell them to the Europeans or who engaged in slave acquisition from interior populations.
In short, without the direct and active complicity of these Black African slavers and their political leaders, there would have been very New World slavery.
Accordingly, if reparations are to be paid, it should start with demands that countries like Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo pony up for killing, kidnapping, and transporting millions of their very own African people to the slave traders.
But none of this is on the table because those most complicit in the slave trade will never pay any reparations.
If so, why should the British, French, Dutch, Spaniards, and Portuguese be expected carry the whole blame and burden for slavery?
The simple answer is that they have much more money and are more easily susceptible to guilt than their West African counterparts.
In short, if you want to understand the reparations movement, just follow the money.
C Ben David’s argument that Africans bear primary responsibility for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade is a profound historical distortion. While it is true that some African elites and kingdoms participated in the trade, this narrow focus deliberately ignores the overwhelming agency and design of European powers. Europeans created the unprecedented economic demand, the maritime technology for a trans-oceanic system, and the brutal framework of chattel slavery—a race-based, hereditary form of bondage distinct from most pre-existing African practices. To isolate the role of African intermediaries is to absolve the architects of a system built on industrialised kidnapping, dehumanisation, and genocide, which was fuelled by European weapons and goods. This framing falsely equates a complex, coerced participation with ultimate responsibility.
The essay’s praise for British abolition as a voluntary moral act, while dismissing calls for reparations as blaming “the living for the sins of the dead”, is equally flawed. British abolition followed centuries of immense profit and was driven as much by relentless slave rebellions and changing economic interests as by humanitarianism. More critically, the legacy of slavery did not end in 1838; it evolved into decades of exploitative apprenticeship, colonial rule, and systematic economic extraction that structured the persistent inequalities we see today. Reparations discourse is not about personal guilt but about acknowledging that institutions and nations—including those in the Caribbean—still grapple with the deep, intergenerational wounds and uneven development directly engineered by this history.
Finally, the dismissal of scholars as “woke” activists and the attack on complex national figures like Chatoyer reveal the argument’s true purpose: to enforce historical amnesia in the name of a shallow nationalism. True pride and self-determination cannot be built on a sanitised past. Understanding the full scope of our history—with all its moral complexities, resistance, and trauma—is not “demeaning begging”; it is the essential foundation for any society that seeks to stand firm on its own terms. To build a just future, we must have the courage to confront the uncomfortable truths of how our present was shaped.
My responding comment seems to have been too complicated.
When we start praising white supremacy, remember what Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, among others in the USA, died for; remember Marcus Garvey, George William Gordon and Paul Bogle; and pray for absolution.
So where do we go from here? Our Hisroty must be recorded and taught in the schools, so generations would know how their foreparents go to a country they will call HOME.