Commentary
Gabrielle Hossein
DR GABRIELLE HOSEIN
At the age of 11, Ziya still did not understand the reason for celebrating Emancipation Day. She learned about national holidays in school, we often discuss slavery and indenture (as well as capitalism and patriarchy), and she has participated in Emancipation Day commemorations and visited Emancipation Village many times.
However, with children, you have to say things many times in many ways for their little minds to grasp the big ideas.
I think she wondered what it was about her almost teenage life, so far removed from almost two centuries ago. I don’t think this is unusual for children. If we don’t connect with how historical events shape our lives, those moments can feel distant and finished.
I see it with my students, many born after 2000, who are disconnected from even more recent moments, be it the labor resistance of the 1930s, the beginning of adult voting, independence in 1962, or the Black Power movement. of the 1970s. And in TT’s multicultural politics, our history is often reduced to what we wear on a given day or what we cook, as well as the cultural arts. Or it becomes another family day at the beach.
Activists talk about these as important because culture is how ancestral practices are remembered, but unless you’re already ideologically invested, it may take more to make the past seem relevant to a little girl’s present. .
I think I used a lot of words, maybe too many, and I’m not sure they came through. August 1, 1834 is one of the most important dates in the history of colonization and the Caribbean, I said. It is also one of the most significant dates in all of Western history. It is also important whether you are African, Indian, Chinese, Douglas or Syrian.
This is because it marks the last time that human beings can legally be defined as property. This directly affected Ziya’s ancestors, but it also changed all of our lives and was a major milestone in the discourse of human rights, or the idea that every human being is a person and is equal to every other.
In this way, the legacy of African history in the Americas, particularly the resistance of enslaved Africans, is one that we have all inherited and benefited from because it led the way to the modern legal world that we now take for granted. of course.
Even all this was too much to destroy, for it is difficult to understand what the words “the end of slavery” mean, especially to a man, when his horrors seem so unimaginable now. As an Indian mother of a Douglas daughter, I wanted her to also understand why Indians should commemorate this day, not just ethnicize it as for Africans, as many do, not simply recognizing it as national, because we all should we celebrate the end of African slavery. , but also seeing how it constituted the reality of all those who came even after emancipation, establishing today a foundation for rights. We often emphasize our differences, but we must also learn how we are connected to each other’s past.
Indenture was a system of exploitation, inequality, extraction and violence, but because of emancipation it was not a system of slavery. Contract workers had rights. These have been systematically violated and denied, but have existed for plantation workers ever since.
The Slavery Abolition Act was passed in the British parliament in 1833, but came into force on 1 August 1834, abolishing slavery throughout most of the British Empire (excluding some colonies held by the East India Company). However, only slaves under the age of six were freed (another important fact for a child to think about).
For everyone else, unpaid forced labor continued for 40 hours a week for four years to compensate slave owners for the loss of their “property,” that is, human beings. Although initially to continue for six years, this “tenure” system ended at midnight on July 31, 1838, due to widespread resistance to it.
A lot of big words for an 11-year-old, but I wanted her to relate to these meetings not because she’s told she should, not as a result of her conviction, and not because she absorbs what she should value without question.
Rather, I wanted to try to have this relevance to her contemporary world. That’s what historians do. They walk with the past as alive as the present.
Parenting is about finding ways to create such connections for our children as well.
Diary of a Working Mother
Entry 470
