 We're ahead of today's observance of the Second African Union Caribbean Community AU Caricom Day. The Regional Integration Unit of the Office of St. Lucia's Ambassador to Caricom and the OECS requested that I muse about Africa Caribbean ties. Now I really didn't know where to start as I'd touched down on African soil long before knowing much about the continent. In fact my first visits were to South Africa and Somalia during summer holidays while attending St. Mary's College in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Now back then as a working student on a banana boat I knew nothing much about Nelson Mandela or apartheid. So I felt free visiting sites like Cape Town's Historic Table Mountain and touring public sites around the port of Durban until I was briefly arrested and detained for touching a white lady as she passed by. Now what really happened was that with shore leave, meaning the amount of time you're allowed a show from the boat, about to expire and mean not having a watch, all I had done was ask a lady passing by on a Durban street what's the time miss? Really that's all I did. Well I got arrested, detained and it took the ship's agent to come to the station with my seaman's passport to prove that I was not what the white surgeon described as a rude little black boy. He would therefore order however that I remain aboard the ship until it sails. Our next spots were in Kisimayo and Moka in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. Passed forward to the last century my next landing was in Zimbabwe in the mid-1990s attending a Congress of the International Organization of Journalists. By then I had joined hundreds of thousands worldwide signing dozens of annual petitions and resolutions directed at the United Nations Human Rights Commission, calling for the release of Nelson Mandela and lifting the apartheid regimes ban on the African National Congress. Nelson Mandela would be eventually released and he led the ANC to victory in free and fair elections becoming the first black president of the Republic of South Africa. I was therefore and it was also for me a great moment when in 1998 I attended the Carrickham Summit right here in St. Lucia with Nelson Mandela as a special guest and I actually shook his hand more than once. I had attended that summit here as a member of the Guyana delegation because I was working in Guyana at the time and the delegation was led by President Janet Jagan and it included Foreign Affairs Minister Clement Rohe and Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Elizabeth Harper who is still on the job as we speak. It would take 23 years after the Mandela Carrickham Summit in St. Lucia before African and Caribbean leaders met again at that level this time online and that was on September 7, 2021. But the issue that has drawn African and Carrickham Nations closest over the past decade has been the call by 14 Carrickham governments in July 2013 who for reparations from Britain and the European Union member states that benefited from and built empires of slavery and native genocide. Today the African Union and Carrickham are discussing an upcoming reparations summit in Guyana with expectations of others to follow in the Caribbean in Europe and of course in the Americas to eventually unite the various threads and strands of the global reparations movement that has now gone continental across African, American, Caribbean, European and other regions that have people of African descent. Now Carrickham and African Union governments are also expected to support calls for a second decade for people of African descent to be designated from 2025 to 2039 and for reparations for slavery and native genocide to also occupy a more permanent place on the agendas of the upcoming United Nations General Assembly and the next Commonwealth Summit. Earlier this year St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonzales as President Temporari of the community of Latin American and Caribbean states, CELAC, was able to extract from the European Union expressions of sorrow and regret about slavery much akin to the Buckingham Palace's expressions of royal sorrow by Queen Elizabeth, now the late Queen Elizabeth in the year before she died and through the tongues of her son and grandson Charles and William her immediate heirs in waiting. Prime Minister Gonzales also announced in Brussels that Carrickham will soon seek a ruling from the International Criminal Court on chattel slavery as the greatest crime against humanity as designated by the United Nations itself. Also earlier this year the Brattle Group led by former International Criminal Court Judge Patrick Robinson released findings of a study that 31 that the study found that 31 former slaveholding states including Brazil, France, the Nordic states, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom and the USA together the owe as much as 107.8 trillion US dollars in reparations to the Caribbean and the Americas for slavery of which Britain owes Carrickham's 14 nations 24 trillion US dollars which amount has been described by Judge Robinson as an underestimation when compared with the damage that was caused by the slave trade. So Carrickham's call for reparations has been joined by the African Union which regards the Caribbean and other nations of people of African descent as its sixth region. India's current Prime Minister Narendra Modi also hopes to convince Carrickham to extend its call for reparations for native genocide and slavery to also include indentureship to cater for Indians also who were uprooted and shipped to the Caribbean to keep the wheels of fortune turning for the plantation owners after the slavery was officially abolished. So the call for inclusion of indentureship is getting between growing lukewarm support and loud outright opposition particularly in Carrickham member states where Africans and Indians from the two largest new population majorities but there are also those who like Carrickham Reparations Commission chair and vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies Hilary Beckles who believe that Africans Amerindians and East Indians according to him and I quote there was three acts of a single plea and I quote again a trifecta in chains in an imperial domination and that so he receives as part of a process of British and European extraction of wealth through genocide and mass exploitation. Meanwhile with the ministries of external affairs represented on most if not all national reparation committees like in St. Lucia and in light of the continuing globalization of the reparations movement it would also be useful for respective ambassadors of Carrickham and the OACS to the Commonwealth, CELAC, Organization of American States, United Nations etc. to embark on a series of periodic meetings on matters related to reparations, AU Carrickham ties, the call for a second decade for people of African descent and the preparation for an eventual Carrickham reparations summit sooner than later.