The people of the Caribbean would be unlikely, this early, to ‘burden’ the proceedings of the September 1-3 First AfriCaribbean Trade and Investment Forum held in Barbados, with a host of exalted expectations. They know better, experience having taught them that excursions into inflated ambitions deriving from being caught up in the moment have, over time, gotten the region nowhere.
This, mind you, does not mean that we should not embrace, even moderately celebrate what, in effect, was a historic platform staged in Bridgetown, probably the first serious high-profile forum for the contemplation of advancing trading and wider business relations between the Caribbean and Africa that extends beyond the infamous era of the trans-Atlantic trafficking in African slaves.
The gathering in Barbados last week, would, one assumes, have been mindful of the historic nature of its mission, that is, to reconnect trade between the Caribbean with Africa on much more palatable grounds than had been the case previously.
One of the immediate-term missions of the forum, one imagines, would have been to begin to fashion the paradigms that will guide the steps of the two regions and out of which will come a template for the implementation of a clearly-defined plan of action. That is why, as far as we have been made aware, the Barbados forum would have brought together ‘delegates’ of different persuasions, from politicians to professionals in various fields including those that have to do with trade, commerce and business, on the whole.
The ‘mix’ was well-advised. It would have been decidedly unwise to leave the proceedings altogether to the designs of the politicians whom, left to themselves, might have been unable to resist the temptation to embark on excursions into rhetoric and reflection, traits which, historically, have played no small part, here in the Caribbean, in retarding timely forward movement in various fields of endeavour. One feels that the presence in Barbados of participants with an entrepreneurial bent would have helped to steer the deliberations in a suitably more pragmatic direction.
In terms of the role which, hopefully, the Barbados forum will play in identifying the issues that will have to be ventilated at various tiers of decision-making both here in the Caribbean and in Africa if business ties are to be seriously structured and incrementally strengthened, its wider significance reposes in the challenge (on this side of the Atlantic) that the initiative places in the lap of the Caribbean, more particularly, Caribbean governments and Business Support Organizations. Here, one expects that there will be critical roles for both the machinery of the Caribbean Community as well as the diplomatic outfits of its member countries to undertake supporting roles that will complement the understandings arrived at in Bridgetown last week.
The wider Caribbean and African societies will, of course, not remain unaffected by anticipated deepening of trade and commercial ties between the countries on both sides of the divide. Once these ties begin to take root they are certain to have implications for the cementing of more durable socio-cultural ties between Africa and the Caribbean.
Here, history, unquestionably, is in the making. The post-colonial socio-economic and diplomatic ties between Africa and the Caribbean have been decidedly tenuous, largely a function of the poignant and painful historical occurrences that link them. Setting aside the slave trade those ‘links’ that have been most clearly identifiable are the diplomatic ones that have manifested themselves, chiefly, in the support afforded which the Caribbean has historically given those countries in Africa, Southern Africa, that have had to endure the dire repercussions of white minority rule.
Here the Caribbean may well find itself chastised by analysts for failing to convert those earlier linkages into more robust post-apartheid Caribbean/Africa ties. These may well have included much earlier trade and business links with countries like South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Mozambique. Pity, indeed, that the Caribbean and Africa have failed to graft commercial and business ties onto their respective bilateral diplomatic portfolios much earlier, rather than have to become preoccupied with their respective post-colonial socio-economic distractions and in the instances of significant swathes of Africa, the blight of race-driven apartheid and the consequential struggle in Southern Africa, particularly, to leave those ‘demons’ behind.
In sum, the post-colonial history of the relationship between Africa and the Caribbean has been considerably less than it might have been, in different circumstances.
That said, last week’s forum, which seeks, albeit, belatedly to strengthen business and commercial ties between the Caribbean and Africa, is as much a historically significant initiative as it is, for both sides, a practical one.
One might add that the prospects for the advancement of economic ties between the Caribbean and Africa have already been kick-started by a shared interest in the oil and gas industry on both sides of the divide, out of which has emerged mutual expressions of interest in the deepening of business ties. Those aforementioned instances of bilateral contact driven by common economic interests (the oil and gas sector) can help to serve as springboards for the deepening of business and economic ties, which, it seems, is the ultimate objective of the recent Barbados forum.
As an aside one might well ask why, over many decades, the strong historical links between Africa and the Caribbean notwithstanding, there has not, up until now, been any previous concerted attempt to create the infrastructure for lasting trade/commercial ties between Africa and the Caribbean. Once this issue is explored carefully, some of the truths that such probing may yield are likely to prove to be unpalatable to both Africa and the Caribbean.
As a generalized comment, cogent analysis of which would require far more room than the confines of this editorial allow, it has to be said that over those many decades where little of any real substance has happened to bring Africa and the Caribbean closer together, the two regions have been fighting their respective development-related ‘demons,’ which, in some instances were virtually identical in nature and which had their origins in European colonization and its extensively documented consequences. That said, in both the Caribbean and Africa we have witnessed the emergence of generous measures of self-inflicted demons, so much so that what is often referred to here in the Caribbean as the consequences of a colonial past may well have come to be seen, to some degree as a worn-out cliché.
We, the Caribbean and Africa, are going to have to wait and see where the recent deliberations in Bridgetown will take us.
