Reparations and Repatriation stand at the very heart of ORU’s mission. They are not slogans — they are the unfinished business of history, and the rightful claim of African people in the Caribbean and across the diaspora.

Reparations: a debt that has not been paid

For more than four centuries, millions of Africans were stolen, enslaved and worked without pay, their labour building the wealth of empires while their humanity was denied. In St. Kitts and Nevis, as across the Caribbean, the sugar economy and the society around it were built on this enslaved African labour. The harm did not end with emancipation; its consequences — economic, social and psychological — are still carried by African people today.

Reparatory justice is the work of repairing that harm: a formal reckoning with the truth, and concrete measures to address its lasting effects. This is a recognised cause at the highest levels of our region. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) established the CARICOM Reparations Commission, which advances a Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice — including a full and formal apology, support for repatriation, programmes to address the public-health and educational deficits rooted in slavery, the development of cultural institutions, debt relief and more. As part of CARICOM, St. Kitts and Nevis stands within this regional movement.

ORU commits to advocating, lobbying and negotiating for reparatory justice on behalf of the Rastafari Nation — locally, regionally and internationally — and to educating our community about its meaning and its progress.

Repatriation: the right of return

From the earliest days of the movement, Rastafari have upheld Repatriation — the right of African people in the diaspora to return to Africa, the ancestral homeland from which their forebears were taken. This is both a spiritual longing and a concrete claim of justice.

The aspiration found real form when Emperor Haile Selassie I granted land at Shashamane, in Ethiopia, for members of the African diaspora and Rastafari who wished to resettle on the continent — and Rastafari from across the world have made that journey. Repatriation, as Rastafari understand it, is not exile or expulsion; it is the free and dignified return of a people to their roots, with the support and recognition that justice demands.

ORU’s commitment

ORU works to keep both causes alive in St. Kitts and Nevis: to teach their history and meaning, to connect our community with the wider regional and international movements pursuing them, and to represent the Rastafari Nation wherever these matters are debated and decided. Reparations and Repatriation are, for InI, a matter of justice owed — and we intend to see them carried forward for the generations to come.