 Greetings, my name is David Comichand and I am speaking to you from Bridgetown in Barbados. And it's a great privilege and honor to be able to contribute to St. Lucia's celebration of Africa Carycom Day 2023. I think that Africa Carycom Day should be a day on which we dedicate ourselves to further developing the people-to-people relationship between the continent of Africa and our Caribbean region, between the nations and governments and peoples of the African Union and those of our Caribbean community. And so I would just like to reflect a little bit on the connections that we have, particularly the cultural connections between our Caribbean community and the continent of Africa. Of course we all know that the vast majority of the population of the Caribbean community came from the African continent. Our ancestors were brought across the middle passage in those slave ships. In the 17th and 18th century we came from areas of the west coast of Africa that that were known as the upper guinea coast and the lower guinea coast. So we are talking modern-day nations such as Senegal, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, Benin. I think it's fair to say that those would be the areas from which the majority of the black or African people of the Caribbean emanated. And you know, although we know that the European enslavers in the Caribbean did everything possible to strip our ancestors of their African culture, but the reality is that our ancestors brought their African selves with them across that middle passage. So they brought their sense of an African identity, their African personalities, their African instincts, their African worldview, their African sense of spirituality. And they were confronted with a very hostile barbaric environment in the Caribbean, those early slave societies, locations of barbarism. And our ancestors had to resist. They had to resist the oppression. They had to find a way to preserve their intrinsic humanity and to be able to carve out for themselves a meaningful and humane existence in those slavery conditions. And you know, they resisted physically, militarily, but they also resisted culturally. So they took their African instincts, their African personality, their African spirituality, and they impacted on the new environment, the hostile social environment that they had to contend with. And out of that, they created new forms of culture, new, you know, whether we're talking religion, whether we're talking music, dance, folk, law, the Europeans tried to stop them from speaking their African languages. In fact, the historians tell us that one of the ways that the Europeans sought to control them was to mix up language, different African language groups on the plantation, making it difficult for them to communicate with each other and to try to stamp out the African language. But as they impacted on the new environment, they created new Creole languages, new nation languages, which fundamentally are languages with an African core and African essence. So when you look at the Caribbean, when you look at the folk culture, which is really the foundation of the national culture of our Caribbean nations, the folk, the law, the folk, tales, the music, the dance, the poetry, the proverbs, the culinary arts, the craft, the pottery, you name it. These were creations based on an African core, an African essence that our ancestors brought with them. And so when I think of the national cultures of the Caribbean today, I think of a pan-African culture. I think of the Caribbean cultures as our contribution to an overarching pan-African culture and overarching pan-African civilization. So yes, our cultures are not the same as the cultures of continental Africa, but that African core is there in them. That African essence is there in them. That African personality is there in them. So we are, we the Caribbean people and our culture, we are a component of that pan-African civilization and that pan-African culture. And indeed, we bring something very, very valuable to that pan-African civilization and pan-African culture. And you know, even the notion of pan-Africanism, the Caribbean has played such a big part in advancing that notion that the people of the continent of Africa and the African diaspora, that we are inherently one people, that we must unite, we must come together. And you know, we think of the many giants of pan-Africanism that came out of the Caribbean, going back to the 19th century. People like Edward Wilmot Leiden from St. Thomas, the then Danish Virgin Islands, went to Liberia and became Secretary of State and one of the great men of Liberia. We think of Marcus Garvey and his wife, Amy Jakes Garvey. And we think of Rabbi Arnold, who was I have thought of Barbados and his wife, Mignon, in his fold. They went to Ethiopia and made their mark there. We think of George Padmore and C. L. R. James and Rasmukh Konin of Guyana and Stoplica Michael of Poimetturi of Trinidad and Tobago. In Barbados, we think of Kamal Grafit, the great Barbadian poet and scholar who spent close to 10 years in Ghana. And through that experience, we got a deep appreciation of the connection between the Barbadian and Caribbean culture and the culture of continental Africa. And so he came to this understanding that Barbados was our homeland, Ghana was our heartland and the two were intrinsically connected. So it is with that spirit that we came together, the governments and nations of Carycom and the African Union. On the 7th of September, 2021, we had that very first Africa Carycom as a government conference. We designated the 7th of September Africa Carycom Day and it is with that spirit of bringing our peoples together, building these mutually beneficial relationships that we celebrate Africa Carycom Day 2023. I want to wish all of you a very happy and meaningful Africa Carycom Day. Thank you.