THEODORE LEWIS

How good and how pleasant it would be

Before God and man, yeah

To see the unification of all Africans, yeah

As it's been said already

Let it be done, yeah

We are the children of the Rastaman

Chorus:

So, Africa unite

'Cause the children wanna come home, yeah

- Bob Marley, Africa Unite

Just some more diasporic lyrics, as I continue to bristle at the sight of my brother George Floyd with his hands in chains behind his back, and a white man kneeling on his neck, on terrain familiar to me. Writing here is cathartic.

They did the same thing to Muhammad Ali. Took away his ability to fight.

I did not see in the Caribbean the kind of outrage one saw in streets everywhere in the world, over the killing of Floyd. But this is not to be read as indifference. Deep in Caribbean inherited memory of the cruelty of slavery, the Floyd killing fits. African strings vibrate.

In a recent article Prof Verene Shepherd of Mona wrote that 'For over 400 years Africans and their descendants were classified in law as nonhuman - chattel property and real estate.' On page 28 she published a table titled 'Africans executed following the Morant Bay rebellion' in Jamaica. The tally was 25 hangings, and two shot.

This was in 1865, three decades after emancipation.

The lethargy we see in the region with respect to African linkages belies the fact that at earlier times the Caribbean was a significant centre of diasporic cohesion. Jamaica was at the heart of much of this because it was the site of the first African arrival in the Caribbean, in 1513. For me, it's not just reparations. There are more Africans in Venezuela than in this country.

Are they OK?

When the country was captured from Spain by the English in 1655, many Africans fought alongside the Spanish, who had first brought them, before switching sides, or fleeing to the hinterland as Maroons. The Maroons were to engage in conflict with British troops - the First Maroon War began in 1728, running into 1740. In an article published in the journal Slavery and Abolition in 2020, Michael Sivapragasam writes that in the Second Maroon War of 1795-96, significant numbers of slaves took freedom, to fight on the side of their brethren in Trelawny.

At the heart of the African diaspora in the Caribbean stands Haiti. It was there that the back of slavery was broken, coming out of an uprising in the cane fields that spanned 1791 to 1804. It is no coincidence that the official end of the slave trade was 1807.

Jamaica was to descend into turmoil again at Christmas in 1831, the decade of emancipation, the result of a widespread insurrection led by Samuel Sharpe. The abolishment of slavery was to follow soon.

changed in the Caribbean after the Haitian revolt. Was that not the beginning of Black Power in the region? I don't mean the version about which I have heard Raffique Shah lay claims. I mean the one that gave us the likes of Eric Williams and Grantley Adams, men who pulled us from the ruins. And thought grand tho