Dear Honorable Mr. Warmington:
The Global Afrikan Congress (GAC) writes to you publicly because of the statements you recently made in the House of Representatives concerning Jamaica’s petition to His Majesty King Charles III and its referral to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.
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I want to point out that this letter is not motivated by a disagreement between two Jamaican politicians of the same party or the opposition for that matter.
On the contrary, and importantly, this letter is specifically motivated by history, truth, the dignity of millions of African and African-descendant people, and Jamaica’s responsibility to understand and defend its own history and pursue justice.
Specifically, this letter is motivated as a response to your own words in Parliament when you stated:
“My roots are here in Jamaica and not in Africa.”
Further, you then described your own JLP government delegation’s visit to London as an embarrassment, saying:
“I’m embarrassed at the spectacle of the photo ops in London.”
Additionally, and unfortunately, you displayed your disdain by comparing the JLP government delegation’s visit to the nursery rhyme Pussycat, Pussycat, concluding:
“I left a petition on the empty chair.”
Sir, you then turned to what should have been the substance of the reparations issue when you stated:
“We keep on speaking of the buyers of the slaves, but nobody speaks of the sellers of the slave.”
Respectfully, you continued your uninformed assertions when you stated:
“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.”
Again, you scornfully asked why Jamaicans continue to speak about “the white man who bought the slaves” while refusing to ask about “the black man in Africa who sold the slave to the white man,” adding:
“They didn’t go there and catch slaves.”
We in the Global Afrikan Congress (GAC) challenge your 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 of it.
The problem is not that you have raised the question of African involvement in the history of the slave trade.
The problem is that you have presented an extraordinarily complex historical system of European invasion, military coercion, commercial expansion, warfare, forced transportation, plantation enslavement, colonial law, and racial ideology as though a simple distinction between African sellers and European buyers can adequately explain it.
Further, there was no market for buying and selling free Africans. On the contrary, there was coercion at bayonet point by Europeans to forcibly coerce Africans to round up other Africans not for sale but for European appeasement and forcible capture for the enslaved person awaiting ships. Hence, your depiction of a market in Africans is not only based on misinformation, but it is also an example of how many of us have internationalized racism.
The history of the Transatlantic Trade in enslaved Africans cannot properly be understood by asking only who physically captured a particular African and who purchased that person.
We must ask much larger and more insightful questions such as the following:
1. Who created the enormous transatlantic demand for enslaved labor?
2. Who organized the Atlantic commercial system for African labor?
3. Who financed and insured the voyages of European ships and their cargoes?
4. Who controlled the ships and shipping networks?
5. Who established and protected the plantation economy?
6. Who developed colonial laws defining Africans and their descendants as property?
7. Who accumulated wealth from the system, and where is the wealth?
8. Who defended the enslavement of Africans through colonial governments and legislatures?
9. Who maintained the system through military and imperial power?
Unfortunately, contrary to your simplistic and infantile responses in our country’s parliament, the cited questions cannot be answered by simply saying that Africans sold Africans.
AFRICAN PARTICIPATION MUST BE UNDERSTOOD IN ITS HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Your intervention overlooks an important distinction: participation is not necessarily consent, and coercion is not the same as voluntary responsibility.
The European invasion and expansion of the Atlantic slave system did not occur in a political vacuum.
European powers established fortified trading centers, commercial networks, and military relationships along the African coast and increasingly penetrated established African political and economic systems.
Sadly, the colonial miseducation and misconception that you demonstrated as an MP requires clarification for you and other Black folks who may think like you that the existing African communities did not resist the massive European invasion and encroachment on those communities.
Thus, it must be underscored that African societies fought against the capture and enslavement of their peoples.
Further, in circumstances in which Africans were compelled, threatened, manipulated, or forced to assist European traders and military forces, such coercion cannot and should not be misconstrued simply as Africans “selling Africans.”
The historical circumstances under which Africans became involved must therefore be carefully examined and understood to avoid colonial-constructed, ignorant proclamations such as your recent historically inaccurate outbursts in the chamber of the Jamaican Parliament.
Historical accuracy and the education of the Jamaican people require not only that Jamaican MPs be informed about topics they are blissfully misinformed about but, importantly, that they verify historical facts rather than fictions.
Had MP Warmington taken some time to inform himself about the vicious history of the European invasion of Africa, he would have learned that Africans resisted that invasion and that limitless numbers of Africans were slaughtered. In contrast, others were coerced at gunpoint to round up fellow Africans in the European onslaught of African resources.
Mr. Warmington and others who are misinformed, as he is, must be informed of that history, which must be taught to all Jamaicans.
Similarly, where African individuals collaborated in capturing their fellow Africans in exchange for European bribes, their conduct can be studied within its specific historical circumstances.
However, none of this exonerates the blood-soaked and criminal responsibilities of the European powers that transformed the trafficking of Africans into a massive transatlantic commercial and plantation system. Indeed, the Jamaican Parliament itself made this distinction.
Further, in responding to your intervention, Opposition MP Damion Crawford distinguished between African involvement that was not state-sanctioned and a British slave-trading system that was sanctioned through Parliament, enforced by laws and state strategies.
We in the GAC believe that such a distinction deserves serious consideration.
Thus, the issue is the structure of power that created, expanded, institutionalized, and sustained the Atlantic system of racialized chattel enslavement and the barbarism that came with it in the plantation system, and its intergenerational lingering effects and aftermath that still impact socioeconomic inequalities and underdevelopment, our collective psychology, and self-esteem.
READ THE BRITISH PARLIAMENTARY RECORD
Honorable Member, before making further declarations about Britain’s and Africa’s respective responsibilities as it relates to the slave trade in and the enslavement of Africans, we respectfully and strongly encourage you to read the British parliamentary record on the debates concerning the slave trade, the Parliamentary Papers, the testimony concerning slavery, the debates concerning abolition, and the debates concerning emancipation.
Further, we in the GAC also respectfully suggest that you read what British parliamentarians said about British merchants, British ships, British capital, British plantations, colonial legislation, and the economic interests attached to slavery for your own political education about the enslavement of Africans.
The British Parliament’s own historical record provides extensive documentation of Britain’s involvement in the development, regulation, and eventual abolition of the slave trade and slavery.
This is important because the history does not have to be reconstructed solely from the writings of African-descendant activists, as Britain’s own parliamentary record speaks volumes about the slave trade and the enslavement of Africans.
Jamaicans have every right to read it.
THE QUESTION IS NOT SIMPLY WHO SOLD — BUT WHO CONTROLLED THE SYSTEM
The Global Afrikan Congress (GAC) is not interested in replacing one simplistic version of history with another.
We solely seek historical truth and justice!
We therefore reject both the denial of African agency and the denial of European imperial responsibility.
However, your parliamentary intervention, Mr. Warmington, placed extraordinary emphasis on African sellers while substantially removing the European political classes from the discussion, including the (Royal Family), institutions, military, commercial, and legal structures that made the Atlantic slave system possible on the scale and sustainability it reached.
That is the historical problem.
A system involving many participants can still have identifiable centers of power.
Here, we must examine responsibility in the context of organized power, coercion, law, economic control, and historical consequence.
That is why the question of Britain’s responsibility cannot be dismissed by saying that Africans were involved in the capture or transfer of enslaved people.
JAMAICA’S PETITION IS A LEGAL QUESTION
Sir, you described Jamaica’s initiative to petition King Charles 111 as an embarrassment, though Jamaica’s petition asks specific legal questions to be referred to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.
What’s embarrassing for you about this legitimate action about Reparations is unclear. Are you embarrassed about asking legal questions and holding white power structures accountable? Are you embarrassed about asking questions that make white people uncomfortable?
Specifically, the legal questions raised in the petition concern whether the seizure, transportation, and enslavement of Africans in Jamaica under British rule were lawful under English law; whether those practices breached relevant international obligations; and whether the United Kingdom has a legal obligation to provide a reparatory remedy to Jamaica. What is there to be embarrassed about these fundamental questions of justice regarding African humanity?
The petition was filed on September 7, 2026, and King Charles III has now referred it to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.
You may disagree with Jamaica’s strategy.
You may question the constitutional or legal basis of the petition.
You may argue that Jamaica should pursue another course.
However, disagreement with the Government’s legal strategy does not justify reducing the petition’s historical foundation to the question of Africans being sellers of Africans to Europeans.
The petition has now become a legal matter.
Sir, as a Jamaican parliamentarian, the least you can and should do is allow due process of the law and the historical evidence to be examined.
YOUR RESPONSIBILITY AS A MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT
Honorable Member, you have served for many years in the Jamaican Parliament; as such, your words therefore carry institutional weight.
Consequently, when you speak in the House of Representatives about Africa, Africans, slavery and the history of Jamaica, you are not speaking as a private citizen but rather as a political representative or MP of your constituents.
As such, your words are heard across Jamaica, the Caribbean, continental Africa and the global African Diaspora.
Sir, millions of African-descendant people live with the historical consequences of the Transatlantic Trade in enslaved Africans, plantation slavery, colonialism, institutionalized anti-Black racism, in our profession, jobs, housing, law enforcement, policing, and racial discrimination.
As such, your remarks cannot be treated as merely casual conversation.
For these reasons, your remarks deserve historical scrutiny; specifically, when they present a biased and falsified interpretation as the principal explanation for the greatest crimes in human history, they deserve to be challenged.
AN APOLOGY AND HISTORICAL SELF-REPAIR
The Global Afrikan Congress (GAC) therefore calls upon you to take two steps.
First, correct the parliamentary record and apologize.
Mr. Warmington, in your political capacity as an MP, you should acknowledge that your statements presented an incomplete and historically misleading account of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans and the system of plantation enslavement.
Indeed, an apology would not diminish you; on the contrary, Sir, you would potentially recuperate the respect you lost for your historical misrepresentation of the slave trade in Africa. Sir, only intellectually and politically secure men can correct their political misrepresentation of history or anything.
Second, undertake what we call historical self-repair.
One answer to colonial miseducation is not another slogan. On the contrary, it is reading, research, comparison of sources, and serious historical study.
We therefore invite you to undertake that process.
A GLOBAL AFRIKAN CONGRESS (GAC) READING PROGRAMME
We recommend that you begin with the works of historians, scholars and writers who have examined the history of Africa, the Caribbean, European expansion, slavery, colonialism and resistance, including:
• Eric Williams — Capitalism and Slavery
• Walter Rodney — How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
• Walter Rodney — The Groundings with My Brothers
• Hilary Beckles — Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide
• C. L. R. James — The Black Jacobins
• Richard Hart — writings on Jamaican slavery, resistance, and emancipation
• Hugh Thomas — The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade
• Edward Kamau Brathwaite — writings on Caribbean society and colonial history
• Derek Walcott — writings on Caribbean history, colonialism and identity
• Olaudah Equiano — The Interesting Narrative
• Mary Prince — The History of Mary Prince
• John Henrik Clarke — writings on African and African-Diaspora history
As suggested earlier, we also encourage you to read the original British Parliamentary debates and Parliamentary Papers on the slave trade, slavery, and emancipation.
Read the evidence.
Then make your argument.
THE GLOBAL AFRIKAN CONGRESS (GAC) IS PREPARED TO HELP
The Global Afrikan Congress (GAC) would be pleased to assist you in developing a short program of historical study on the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans and plantation enslavement.
Through our networks in Canada, we can seek the participation of qualified professors and scholars in History, Black Studies, African Studies and Caribbean Studies, including willing educators associated with institutions such as Dalhousie University, the University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University.
We can also identify accessible online courses and educational resources from universities in the United States and elsewhere.
This is not an offer to tell you what political position you must adopt; rather, it is a sincere offer to help ensure that when you speak on this subject in the Jamaican Parliament, your position is grounded in serious historical evidence.
JAMAICA DESERVES BETTER
Honorable Mr. Warmington, the history of African enslavement is not somebody else’s history.
It is Jamaican history.
It is Caribbean history.
It is African history.
It is the history of the African Diaspora.
The Jamaican people deserve a parliamentary debate that is informed by historical evidence rather than inherited colonial assumptions and heresy.
If, after studying the historical and legal evidence, you continue to oppose Jamaica’s reparations initiative, you have every right to make that argument, though you should make it from knowledge rather than assumptions; historical research rather than inherited narratives; and respect rather than dismissal for the people whose history is being debated.
Respectfully and in keeping with our earlier arguments, we therefore ask you to correct the parliamentary record, apologize for the historically misleading impression your remarks created, and undertake the reading and research necessary to speak on this subject with the authority expected of a Member of Parliament.
The Global Afrikan Congress (GAC) remains prepared to assist.
History is a responsibility.
Jamaicans deserve nothing less of their parliamentarians.
Respectfully,
Original signed by:
Cikiah Thomas
Ambassador General
Global Afrikan Congress (GAC)
