Features
Melissa Doughty
The Chairman of the Emancipation Support Committee of Trinidad and Tobago (ESCTT) Zakiya Uzoma-Wadada did not shy away from addressing the concerns of crime and criminality that heavily affect areas populated by descendants of enslaved African people.
While she acknowledged that it seemed that way, she believed that the root causes of these issues were not being adequately addressed.
“We’re not trying to understand the problem and when activists like us try to raise the issues, people say, ‘You’re making excuses.’ No we are not!
“If you live in a society and 80-90 percent of that particular population are those who are incarcerated in that society, something is wrong. Not just with the people who are doing it, but it’s what’s going on in society that’s creating an environment that facilitates that kind of behavior and interaction between people.”
In an interview at Queen’s Park Savannah, as workers busily prepared the space for the Pan African Festival, Uzoma-Wadada said that while Emancipation has been observed for 186 years, the process was still an ongoing one.
Respecting Emancipation was important so that people remembered that other people thought it was acceptable to treat people that way.
She said many attitudes in the way others treated dark-skinned people and even how they treated themselves remained affected by the colonial and enslaving experience.
Although enslaved people were emancipated, the process was not complete and each generation faced challenges in this regard, she said.
Problems like white supremacy persisted despite emancipation, Wadada added.
She referred to the words of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, which echoed Jamaican reggae legend Bob Marley, saying that until the philosophy that holds one race superior to another is finally and completely discredited and abandoned, there will always be war.
“We will have war on the world stage, we will have war in our communities, there will always be war, and this culture of violence will continue to be part of our reality.”
Wadada said the violence displayed among Afro-Trinidads was not the only violence there was, but it was the most visible.
“We know that crime happens at all levels in our society.”
However, people of African descent always had to struggle, she said.
“For your freedom, you had to fight. Therefore, at every step of the trajectory of our development – as a captive people in this diaspora – we have had to fight. Just fight to be yourself, fight to be considered equal, fight to have equal access to resources.”
Societies that experienced colonial oppression have gang violence as part of their experience.
“Gang violence is not limited to TT,” Wadada said.
The values of money and power replaced honesty and kindness, and often, people talked about it but didn’t act on it, she added.
“If, as a person, your value is tied to money and power and you are not valued differently, you will certainly fight for money and power among yourselves.”
There had to be a cultural change to combat the negative values and Afro-Trinidadian children had to be imbued with a sense of self and history.
That was why culture and its promotion was so important, Wadada said.
“Those young people that you get involved in playing the pan with or that you get involved in drumming or dancing, theater and so on, where they learn to connect with energies that can empower them, strengthen them and make them feel good about themselves theirs. .”
Wadada said that while people used to be prioritized by money and power, now it was having a gun.
“This is what they use to feel empowered, to feel like somebody.”
This was why the committee focused on organizing the Pan African Festival every year, to encourage Afro-Trinidadian youth in positive behaviour.
Afro-Trinidadian children responded to the environments they were placed in and people needed to be “really sympathetic and understanding” of what some of these children went through, she said.
“These are the things we should be using our resources for: checking what’s happening in our communities, what’s happening in our homes.
“Houses will build the community and the community will build the society. We have to think about it differently, approach it differently and not just decide that they are ‘cockroaches’ or they are just worthless beings.”
Wadada said that these people were once all little babies, coming from their mothers, and everyone thought they were so cute.
“They came to meet a world we created. This is what we have allowed. That’s what we never stopped being,” she added.
Wadada questioned TT’s sociological crime-fighting programs and whether they were being evaluated.
“This doesn’t work. We are not evaluating. We’re not saying, ‘We tried this. This was the result. This part of it worked, this part of it didn’t.’
“All of us who are trained, understand that this is how we do things. When we become people in power, there are, perhaps, different things that motivate our decisions. But it’s not always for the well-being of the communities, in that deep, true and honest way,” she said.
Wadada recommended that more of the country’s resources be invested in culture and communities. The culture and concern for people’s social issues and needs changed lives, she said.
“Why don’t we want to make everywhere beautiful for everyone?”
Wadada said she never felt that dark-skinned people and the descendants of slaves deserved the same beauty as others, and these things affected how people felt.
She suggested restructuring and rebuilding some spaces in the country as beautiful spaces were not only about physical infrastructure, but the inclusion of nature, the aesthetics of a space that touched people’s hearts and minds.
Those were the kinds of conversations that needed to be had in the country, she said.
Even in 186 years of emancipation, TT’s biggest challenge was still decolonization. While awareness has been raised globally and nationally through movements such as Pan-Africanism and the TT revolution of the 1970s, institutional racism still affected many.
Some banks (one by name) did not support emancipation, even though it grew out of the 1970 revolution, and these things worried him. A better and different TT could not be built on colonial values and systems, she said.
Despite these, the work of the commission continues, she added.
His 2024 theme was Moving Forward With Our Heads Up, and it meant that dark-skinned people had to keep paying attention, or else a sad, sad world would be created for their children in the national and global, Wadada said.
