The leaders of the 15-member Caribbean Community(CARICOM) grouping are preparing to meet with their African counterparts in Ethiopia on Sunday, two days after the Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, told another gathering of African and Caribbean people that the greatest antidote to their collective challenges is partnership.
Mottley, along with her counterparts from St. Kitts and Nevis, Dr. Terrance Drew and Grenada’s Dickon Mithcell, addressed the Africa Diaspora Day held under the theme “The Global Africa We Want: Collaboration Without Borders”.
The event was held as part of the Intra-Africa Trade and Investment Forum (IATF2025), taking place here through Wednesday.
Mottley said that the former president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, who spoke before her, “left us with a very clear understanding that what confronts us is the need for a comprehensive resetting from an economic perspective, from a cultural perspective, from a technological perspective, from language”.
She said that people have been indoctrinated for centuries to believe that one race is inferior and one race is superior.
Mottley recommended the film “Origin”, a 2023 American biographical drama written and directed by Ava DuVernay, a Black American filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer, who is the a recipient of two Primetime Emmy Awards, two NAACP Image Awards, a BAFTA Film Award, and a BAFTA TV Award, as well as a nominee for an Academy Award and Golden Globe.
The Barbados prime minister said the film speaks to “the commonalities with respect to caste that would cause humanity or aspects of humanity to treat one race superior and one inferior, one caste superior and one inferior.
“But the reality is that the greatest antidote comes probably through our economic partnerships, because in today’s world, people follow the money, straight and simple.”
She said that Africa and its diaspora, including the Caribbean, “have now to move from just simply the claiming of bonds and familial ties to building the institutional framework and to creating the opportunities for trade and investment, for cultural exchange, for connectivity in a more structured way than we have ever done.
“The conversations and the rhetoric are simply not enough,” Mottley said, adding, “and I pray that when we leave Africa this weekend, that we will reach an agreement on an institutional framework that will allow us to move to a different level”.
She said the concept of the Global Commission of Africa is important “because if we were to simply harness the power of Africa globally, it would become a phenomenal force that could be ignored by no civilisation or no country on the planet Earth”.
The Barbadian leader said that this is known to be true, noting that while people speak of India, it is a country of over 800 ethnicities but one country.
“When we speak of China, we speak of over 250 ethnicities, but we speak of one country,” Mottley said “and, if we were to look within Africa itself, within Nigeria, you are speaking of over 300 ethnicities, even though most people only know the first four — Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo.
“So what is it that stops us from claiming the global diaspora and acting accordingly, in the same way that India and China have so done?”
Mottley also noted that the President and Chair of the Board of Directors of the Africa Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), Professor Benedict Oramah, made the point that “it is in the reassembling of our heritage and power as African people that we can truly reach where we need to reach on our terms”.
She noted that the late St. Lucian Nobel Laureate, Sir Derek Walcott, once said, “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
“My friends, across the Caribbean and Africa, we are the reassembled. Organisations shattered are vessels of sovereignty, of ecological harmony, of ancestral continuity. And we can choose to allow those divisions to become deeper at the very time when AI and technology threaten to deepen the divisions and widen the inequity that our people face.
“Or we can choose, however difficult it may be, to rise above the insular and the national conversations, to understand that if this world is not going to treat with respect to an international rules-based order, then we are going to see a consolidation of power, a consolidation of territory, and a consolidation of influence.”
Mottley said that if that consolidation of power, of territory, and influence takes place, “I ask the question, what becomes of the individual African countries in the diaspora?
“It is not for us to react to international circumstances. It is for us to be firm craftsmen of the fate that we believe is ours and to navigate in this perilous and uncertain world a future that reassembles the vase that was broken.”
The Second Africa-CARICOM Summit on Sunday is being convened on the third CARICOM-Africa Day, under the theme “Transcontinental Partnership in Pursuit of Reparatory Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations.”
The Guyana-based CARICOM Secretariat said the summit aligns with the principles of the African Union-CARICOM memorandum of understanding on strengthening engagement and fostering linkages between CARICOM and Africa.
The Summit is expected to welcome the presidents of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and heads of the African and Caribbean development banks, as well as Afreximbank.
Representatives from the broader AU and UN systems, along with other strategic regional and global partners, including the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States; Permanent Forum of People of African Descent; civil society, and diaspora organisations, are also expected to attend. (CMC)
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