Kingston, 15 April 2024 – The Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport, the Honourable Olivia Grange, has welcomed the apology of the United Reformed Church of England, Scotland and Wales for its “role in transatlantic slavery and the scars which continue to blight our society, our church and the lives of Black people in our midst and around the globe”.

The apology to Jamaica was given on Sunday (yesterday) by the United Reformed Church’s General Assembly Moderator, the Reverend Dr Tessa Henry-Robinson, at a special ceremony at Webster Memorial United Church in St Andrew.

The ceremony was attended by Minister Grange who has responsibility for reparations.

The United Reformed Church was created in 1972 with the merger of the Presbyterian Church of England and the Congregational Church of England and Wales.

Minister Grange said “many of the churches from the UK invested in the project of the trade in and enslavement of African people on plantations here in Jamaica and it is fitting that the church should repent, apologise and redress the wrongs committed by their parent churches.”

Dr Henry-Robinson, in her apology, said her church committed “in a true spirit of repentance to find constructive ways in which we can move from saying I’m sorry into concrete actions of repairing justice.”

The Minister said the apology from the United Reformed Church was the outcome of discussions with churches in the United Kingdom by the National Council on Reparations through its sub-committee, the Churches Reparations Action Forum.

Minister Grange said she accepted the apology in the “spirit of repair, restoration and reconciliation, as demanded by God our Creator.”

The Minister called on other churches in the UK, especially those who sent representatives to Jamaica to witness this historic apology, to “signal to your government that the Christian thing to do is to admit culpability by way of an apology and to engage with us to determine the various forms that reparations may take.”

Minister Grange said the Government of Jamaica would continue to pursue reparations for the hundreds of years of chattel enslavement of our African ancestors on plantations in this country.

“It is not enough that the enslavers and their descendants should regret the suffering that slavery inflicted on our ancestors. When you have done something wrong, you must take responsibility for it, apologise and try to set things right,” Minister Grange said.

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MESSAGE BY THE HONOURABLE OLIVIA GRANGE, CD, MP MINISTER OF CULTURE, GENDER, ENTERTAINMENT AND SPORT FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DAY FOR THE REMEMBRANCE OF THE VICTIMS OF SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE

25 March 2022
 
On this day, March 25, we pause in deep reflection, in memory of our ancestors who were captured, tortured, encaged and shackled even before they made that perilous journey called the Middle Passage to slavery on plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas.

We open the eyes of our hearts to look at them as they disembark in shackles, to be auctioned as property to merciless men who were determined to carry out these heinous acts of the worst examples of man’s inhumanity to man. We think of the many who never arrived because some jumped ship into the Atlantic Ocean rather than endure a life of slavery. Others were mercilessly thrown overboard, like those on the Zong in December 1781, by heartless men who were determined to claim insurance for loss of property.

In 2007, under my leadership, as we celebrated the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, we staged a Memorial Service by Kingston Harbour in honour of our ancestors who never had a decent burial, including those for whom the sea was their final home.

Though the enslavers shackled their body, they could not shackle their mind. They fought against enslavement and never accepted the fate that was imposed upon them. They lived their ancestral culture and traditions and used them to build resilience and fierce determination.
We remember them today. We salute them, African warriors, hands made strong by the hand of the Almighty – Captain Kojo, Queen Mother Nanny, Chief Tacky and Chief Jamaica, Quao, Accompong, Sam Sharpe, Dove, Gardner, and the woman I named Fyah. We salute the nameless, faceless supporters of the revolts, rebellions and wars, unwilling to be owned, determined to return to the freedom they knew by any means necessary.

Today we remember them like it was yesterday. The stories of their resilience and struggles have not been lost on us. Today, we govern ourselves because of their sacrifice. We boldly contest the world stage and establish our Brand Jamaica because their royal blood courses through our veins.

Today, I invite every Jamaican to pause for even one minute at any time of the day in gratitude and respect for our ancestors. We do not call them victims because indeed they were victors. We pledge never to forget. Our mission now is to advance with urgency the thrust to demand reparations for the atrocities they suffered that made the colonisers rich and bequeathed to us an unending reality of persistent poverty.

Like the ancestors, we will not be daunted. We are assured that we will overcome and build prosperity for all our people.

Olivia Grange, CD, MP
Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport

Kingston, 21 March 2022 – The Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport, the Honourable Olivia Grange, has urged the National Council on Reparation to move quickly to finalise the national policy - the Roadmap to Reparation.

Addressing members of the Council at a retreat on Saturday, Minister Grange congratulated them on the work they’ve been doing, but told them that the time had come to step up the pace.

According to Minister Grange, the Council must “seize the moment of the global movement and momentum in favour of the alignment of our local and global human experiences with the human right we have to equality and equity.”

In this regard, the Minister urged the Council to remain singularly focused on developing the Roadmap to Reparation.

Minister Grange said:

“We need a roadmap for legal and diplomatic actions which will bring us monetary reparation. The crafting of a petition is an important start and many thanks to the Council for the tremendous work done in this regard. And I have to single out members [Frank] Phipps and [Anthony] Gifford; and also Mike Henry, though not a member of the Council. Thank you for being so passionate and focused on achieving this goal.

We need that roadmap that will extinguish a debt we have never owed.

We need that roadmap that will see restitution made and institutions established that will show the greatness of our people who were stolen from Africa and in whose name, we will lay our claim for reparation including Repatriation to the Continent…

We need the roadmap to ease of cultural exchange, strategic engagement, strong linkages for commerce, trade, travel, and celebration of each other, with each other.”

Minister Grange said the Roadmap to Reparation must also engage young people from dormancy to full participation in the reparations movement. In this regard, the Minister announced that she would soon assume joint chairmanship of the Council, along with Mrs Laleta Davis Mattis, and would also be expanding the membership of the Council to include the youth, the Attorney General’s Chambers and members of the Diaspora.

The Minster said it was critical that Council ended its weekend retreat with a clear strategy for moving forward with achievable goals.

She urged the Council to continue to “work impatiently for justice for the atrocities committed against our ancestors, and those which flow from this history and persist against our people today…”

The National Council on Reparation is an advisory Council in the Ministry of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport. It was established after the Jamaican Parliament unanimously passed a resolution moved by the Honourable Mike Henry to pursue reparations from the British Government, to compensate descendants of Africans, who were enslaved by them.

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Kingston, 25 January 2021 (JIS): Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport Minister, the Honourable Olivia Grange, is calling for the urgent implementation of reparations for Africans and people of African descent affected by racial injustice.

She said that reparations should address the moral, economic, political and legal obligations of States in relation to past and present atrocities rooted in slavery and colonialism, such as racial discrimination, xenophobia and racial intolerance.

“Providing reparations for slavery and colonialism requires that States not only fulfil remedial obligations resulting from specific historical wrongful acts but also to transform contemporary structures of racial injustice, inequality, discrimination and subordination that are the product of the centuries of racial machinery built through slavery and colonialism,” she noted.

Minister Grange was addressing a webinar in commemoration of World Day for African and Afro-descendent Culture on Sunday (January 24) held under the theme ‘People of African Descent: Defamation, Race Relations, and Development Institutions’.

The webinar was hosted by the Ministry of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sports and the Jamaica National Council on Reparation.

Minister Grange said that a structural approach to providing reparations for slavery and colonialism under public international law and international human rights law is necessary.

She encouraged UNESCO to work even more closely with the National Council on Reparation and similar entities “to promote measures to address inherent imbalances in our historic and current social and economic landscape”.

Participants in the virtual event included State Minister in the Ministry, the Honourable Alando Terrelonge; Chair of the National Council on Reparation, Laleta Davis Mattis; Director and Representative of UNESCO, Sadia Sanchez-Vegas, among others.

Observed annually on January 24, World Day for African and Afro-descendant Culture celebrates the many vibrant cultures of the African continent and African diaspora around the world and promotes them as agents for sustainable development, dialogue and peace.

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Kingston, 21 December 2020 – The Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport, the Honourable Olivia Grange, will be joined by Member of Parliament and Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, the Honourable Floyd Green, to pay floral tribute at the Zong Monument in Black River, St Elizabeth, on Tuesday, December 22, to commemorate the Zong Massacre which took place in 1781.

The Floral Tribute Ceremony starts at 9:00 a.m.

Later between 3:00 p.m. and 5:30 p.m., the Ministry along with the National Council on Reparation (NCR) will facilitate a webinar on The Zong Massacre entitled, Lessons in Racial Discrimination: The Journey Continues.

In asserting the significance of the webinar, Minister Grange declared it as a moment for us as a nation to “pause once more to reflect on the Zong Massacre of 22 December 1781…one of most horrific incidents suffered by our African ancestors at the hands of white mercenaries and oppressors as part of the Trans-Atlantic Trade in Africans.”

She will be the main speaker at the webinar which will also be addressed by Minister Green.

The chairman of the NCR, Mrs Laleta Davis-Mattis, along with Council members, Professor Verene Shepherd and Steven Golding will make presentations, as will two specially invited guests from overseas, Ms Ife Thompson, Barrister, United Nations Fellow and community activist and Ms Marissa Jackson Sow, Attorney, United Nations Fellow, artist, human rights expert and author.

On December 22 in 1781, the slave ship Zong docked in the Black River with half the 440 Africans it had taken from Ghana for slavery as the other Africans were thrown overboard by the ship’s captain.

The Africans who had perished did so from deliberate drowning, diseases and malnutrition.

Water shortage, illness and death on the ship along with poor navigational decisions resulted in confusion. With the captain and crew arguing that water and rations would not last for everyone before arrival in Jamaica, the decision was taken to throw some Africans overboard in order to avoid more deaths which would threaten the profitability of the journey.

Between 29 November 1781 and when the ship arrived in Jamaica, 122 African men, women and children had been drowned by the crew.

The commemoration of the Zong Massacre is within the context of Jamaica observing the United Nations declared International Decade for the People of African Descent.

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(Link: Zoom Meeting ID: 934 3261 4127; Passcode: 804597)

Kingston, 13 August 2019 – The Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport, the Honourable Olivia Grange, has announced the appointment of the National Council on Reparations for the period 29 July 2019 to 28 July 2022.

Minister Grange said the Council — which is within the Ministry of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport — is tasked with formulating strategies to claim, secure and dispense reparations due to the people of Jamaica for the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

The Council, chaired by Laleta Davis-Mattis, includes a diverse membership that possesses the requisite skills to advance the argument of Reparation for the people of Jamaica. The members are drawn from the Legal Fraternity, Academia, the Rastafari Community, Civil Society, the Church and the public sector.

The members are:
Mrs. Laleta Davis-Mattis (Chairperson)
Mr. Bert Samuels (Deputy Chairman)
Professor Verene Shepherd
Mr. Frank Phipps, QC
Lord Anthony Gifford, QC
Dr. Jahlani Niaah
Professor Rupert Lewis
Mr. Steven Golding
Dr. Michael Barnett
Professor Clinton Hutton
Mr. Donald Roberts, CD
Mr. Michael Holgate
Ras Lanceroy Ho-Shing
Mr. Vivian Crawford
Ms. Jo-Anne Archibald
Pastor Bruce A. Fletcher 
Reverend Stephen Jennings, PhD
Dr. Winsome Gordon
Ms. Lorraine Williams Tafari
Ms. Tamika Peart, PhD

The Council also advises the government on matters related to reparatory justice.

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The CARICOM Reparations Youth Baton Relay and Rally started its Jamaica leg today with the Honourable Olivia Grange, Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport, handing over the Baton to the Head Boy and Head Girl of Paul Bogle High School in Morant Bay, St. Thomas.

Culture Minister, the Honourable Olivia “Babsy” Grange has announced that Professor Verene Shepherd and Mrs. Laleta Davis Mattis will co-chair the National Commission on Reparations.