‘Kicking and screaming!’

THE 2026 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) opens in St John’s, Antigua, today amid a deepening rift over slavery and reparation, with Caribbean leaders welcoming British Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s openness to a formal apology for chattel slavery but firmly rejecting his dismissal of reparation as “not the right answer”, insisting that reparatory justice must remain at the heart of the talks. Burnham’s position in an op-ed for The Guardian newspaper in England, days before his arrival in Antigua and Barbuda for the summit, was immediately seen by Dr Ralph Gonsalves, senior advisor and elder for The Repair Campaign, as Britain yielding to mounting international pressure to negotiate.

“They coming to the table, but they coming kicking and screaming,” Gonsalves, who served as prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines for 24 years, told the Jamaica Observer on Saturday. “It’s a positive move, but we have to understand that this is only the commencement of the journey, and that they are coming kicking and screaming,” Gonsalves said. At the same time, he said he expects that the tone of the discussions at the summit would be “respectful, frank, honest, and at times robust”. GONSALVES... it’s a positive move, but we have to understand that this is only the commencement of the journey, and that they are coming kicking and screaming Gonsalves said that while slavery and reparation were not formally on the CHOGM agenda, there is no doubt that the issues will be raised by Caribbean Community (Caricom) leaders, as well as their counterparts from Africa and India. He pointed to the United Nations General Assembly adoption of a resolution on March 25, 2026, declaring the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement as “the…