Letter of the Day | Reparations is, in law, a defamation case

THE EDITOR, Madam:
This month, in a Kingston courtroom, the defamation suit that had shadowed Minister Daryl Vaz for the better part of four decades was resolved. The man who spread the falsehood apologised, accepted that his words were “categorically false”, and Vaz declared himself vindicated. Note what actually repaired him: not, chiefly, money, but the correction – the restoration of his good name in the same public square where it had been damaged.
That is the principle the reparations debate has overlooked for 50 years. We have fought reparations as a debt of money, and lost on that ground, trading blows over who should be paid and whether they would simply spend a cheque back into the oppressor’s economy. But defamation law was never chiefly about money. Its stated purpose is to vindicate the victim and restore his reputation; the authorities concede that where reputation is the injury, a payment alone is an inadequate remedy. The setting right of the record is the true repair.
By that measure, Africans are the most defamed people in history – and the defamation was load-bearing. You cannot enslave and colonise those you regard as equals. First, you must publish them into something less: savage, criminal, unclean, godless, contributionless. Those are not idle insults. They are, item by item, the categories the common law calls defamation per se – accusations so ruinous that harm is presumed.
And here is the feature that should end the argument. In defamation, truth is a defence, and the burden of proving it falls on the defendant. So, put him to proof. In four centuries, the defamer has never once been made to discharge that burden. He has asserted the inferiority of the African and relied on the institutions that found it convenient to agree. A proper reckoning would compel him to prove, on the record, what he has only ever assumed – and to answer, at last, the questions our scholars from Diop to Clarke have pressed and been dismissed rather than answered.
The damage is not vague, and it is not spent. It is written on the child taught to despise her own reflection; it was ratified in 2020 when a court upheld a school’s ban on a five-year-old’s locs as “unhygienic”, before the Court of Appeal corrected it in 2024. The lie is still being published – most recently by a British politician who this year recast the victim as the debtor.
Daryl Vaz desired the restoration of his name, and received it. So is the African. Give us not first the cheque, but the trial: put the defamer to proof, and let the record be corrected in open court. That is a reparation no one can spend, and no one can take back.

Keisha McDonald
Attorney-at-law
St Ann