 Today, the Caribbean community observes another Caricom Africa Day. I congratulate the Regional Integration Unit, Office of the Prime Minister of St. Lucia, for initiating what has been titled Caricom Africa Musings to draw attention to the strong relationship between our two regions. This relationship has a long genealogy, dating back to the journeys of trade and exploration that free Africans made to our region, long before the start of the transatlantic trafficking in enslaved Africans as our eminent Guyanese scholar Ivan Van Sertima recorded. But as we know, by the 15th century, European colonizers had introduced a different kind of journey, the forced trafficking of millions of Africans to a life of chattel enslavement in the Americas, including in the Caricom region. We applaud the contributions that Africans made to Caribbean culture as evidence in our languages, or fashion, cuisine, dances, sport, music, religions, and ideologies. Above all, we celebrate the contributions that Africans made to Caribbean freedom. Europeans, of course, tried to punish resistance out of them. But they refused to be what they wanted them to be. They knew that Babylon's system was the vampire. Thanks, Africa, for African anti-colonial warriors, a shanty queen, none of the Jamaican maroons, a can chief techie, or king court, of the 1736 war in Antigua, Barbuda, fancy some say, a can born chief techie of the 1760 war in Jamaica, a can atta and kofi. Of the 1763 Burbis war in what is now Guyana. The revolutionaries of the Haitian Revolution, African Juan Boussa of the 1816 war in Barbados, and so many, many more. Let us realize that our civilizations are intertwined, and let us use that knowledge to inspire what we do now and what we do in the future. Not only do we have to continue to rebuild those cultural and intellectual bridges disconnected by European colonizers and enslavers, but we must unite to call them to account for what they did to our people and environments. They killed our leaders, extracted our wealth, passed laws to denounce us as non-humans, and disrupted our path to development. The inequality in development continues to today. We cannot accept this. Our future development lies in repertory justice. Let us commit today to work together to ensure we get what is due. And let us reject the interpretation of loans and grants as reparation. Above all, let us prepare our societies to get reparation, especially our young people. That preparation lies in history education at all levels of our education system and across our societies. Without that, we are lost people.