On this 188th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Britain’s colonies in this part of the world, Trinidad and Tobago can be proud to have been the first independent country in the world to mark emancipation with a national holiday on August 1, the day slavery was abolished in 1834.
In the 37 years since the holiday took effect in 1985, several other countries have followed suit. The growing movement to commemorate the day on which enslaved Africans were emancipated across parts of the British empire, including the Caribbean, has helped to intensify interest and draw attention to European enslavement of Africans, not only among people of African descent, but among all those who stand against the dehumanization of people on the basis of race, color, class, sex, religion, and the many other ways in which people are divided in order for a system of debased power to rule.
It is incredible how long it has taken for this movement to take root and spread thanks to the brainwashing that has led many to the view that the system of slavery should be allowed to remain in the past and that the modern generation should let it go.
However, European enslavement of Africans was not a Disney movie, but real life for generations of Africans who were bought and sold and made to live and die as enslaved people for nearly 200 years, and for the societies that exploited that were left to rebuild from the broken pieces. left behind by the colonial powers.
Although the case was made 78 years ago by Dr Eric Williams, historian and first Prime Minister of independent Trinidad and Tobago in his seminal work Capitalism and Slavery, it is only relatively recently that there has been a popular understanding of how the economic system of slavery was used to finance Europe’s industrialization and technological progress—a point directly related to today’s global inequality between countries labeled developed, developing, and underdeveloped.
This awareness has skewed the global conversation on reparations. Many who were confused by the claim for “their grandfather’s back wages”, as succinctly described by Mighty Chalkdust (Hollis Liverpool) in kaiso, are beginning to understand the case for damages and the variety of ways in which they can be be considered as compensation. for an unspeakable wrong for which justice is long overdue.
Among the system’s most enduring and debilitating legacies are social divisions based on race, color, and class, built upon an edifice of divide and rule. So deeply embedded were those values in Caribbean society that today, more than 200 years later, they survive in the recesses of culture, ever available to disrupt our aspirations for unity.
All this underlines the degree to which emancipation must be for us much more than a date on the calendar. We must recognize it as a process towards securing justice by freeing ourselves from the grip of the tentacles of our traumatic history.
The task for us, as Bob Marley said, is to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery.
