What Should Emancipation Mean to YOU?

Thesis Number 1

NO ONE CAN STEAL OR TAKE YOUR CULTURE AWAY.

I am always intrigued when local commentators say that the slavemaster, whoever he or she was, “took away our culture and our language.” Culture is. You are nothing without your culture. No one can take away your culture from you. You may adapt your culture to the situation in which you find yourself but anyone here in this audience who leaves and goes abroad to London or Paris always takes their culture with them. They simply adopt their culture (which is nothing more than the way you do the things you do) to fit the new circumstances of your life.

William Hardin was the biggest slave owner in this country. He and his son owned about 20 sugar estates in the country. They owned about 1,495 Africans in this country. When slavery ended Trinidad received L1,039,119 of the L20,000 the British government paid out in compensation, Burnley received L48,283 for the enslaved Africans he owned.

In his own way, he had something to say about the behavior of the enslaved population which left him afraid. He said in 1834, the year of formal slavery ended:

“The night is to the Negroes the favorite portion of the 24 hours when the white man dares not encounter the slaves, and is obliged from the exhaustion of the day to seek repose. The period of time the African has always been accustomed to consider as preeminently alone. His principal journeys, and his principal amusements are carried on during the night; the loss of any portion of it will be felt more sensible than any other privations, and the apprehension of it will tend more to keep him to his duty than stripes or any other mode of punishment. These places of confinement must of course be so formed as to allow the culprit proper and be entitled free under control and surveillance of the special justice (Slave Master of Trinidad, p. 87)

As to language. My mother used to say “Boy, yo’ born with an English tongue in your head.” I loved my mother, but she was wrong on this matter. No one is ever born with a language, English or African. One is born with “an inbuilt capacity for leading language.” That is to say, that if you were born in China, you will speak Chinese. If you were born in Igboland (that is in southern Nigeria), you will speak the Ibgo language.

One can also adopt or blend one's native language (that is, the language we spoke in Africa) with the language of the country to which you were brought. Louis Bennette, Miss Lou, was a legendary Jamaican poet, who exploited the Jamaican language to the fullest. She used to say, “We, in Jamaica, speak a sweet Twi language.”

What did she mean by that? She meant that the Jamaican language is shaped by a mix of English vocabulary, “Twi” (Akan) that Africans brought with them to Jamaica. No one could have “taken their language away from them.” They merely adapted to their situation and created a new language.

Thesis Number 2

IT WAS AFRICANS IN THE NEW WORLD WHO STARTED THE STRUGGLE FOR THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY AND MADE THE CASE FOR REPARATIONS.Africans in the New World who first started the struggle for liberation and reparations.

If you read any book about slavery, you will come across a passage that reads: "William Wilberforce (1759-July 1833) was a British philanthropist, and a leader of the movement to abolish the Atlantic slave trade.” If you look further, you will see that slavery was ended because of the goodness of these white men who felt sorry for the treatment of Black people received in the Atlantic and decided to free these black bodies. These white men and women were called humanitarians.

That fiction held up for centuries for over five hundred years until an African scholar called Jose Lingua Nafafe, wrote a book called Lourenco da Silva Mendonca and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century. He writes:

“In 1684, Lourenco da Silva de Mendonca from the kingdom of Kongo in the Indies arrived in Rome to take up an important role for Black peoples. That role was to bring an ethical and criminal case before the Vatican court. Which accused the nations involved in Atlantic slavery, including the Vatican, Italy, Spain and Portugal, of committing crimes against humanity. It detailed the ‘tyrannical sale of human beings…the diabolical abuse of this kind of slavery…which they committed against any Divine or Human Law….He carried with him the hopes of enslaved Africans and other oppressed groups in what was a remarkable moment that I, would argue, challenges the established interpretation of the history of abolition.”

Fast forward to 1938 when a young Trinidadian students goes to defend his thesis, “The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery” in which he argued that Britain ended the slave trade not for humanitatina ideals but for economic reasons. In 1944, after much more research, he turned that dissertation into Capitalism and Slavery; a book that is one of the monumental texts on the abolition of slavery.

Williams, of course, got this seminal idea from his godfather and intellectual mentor, C. L.R. James, another Trinidadian, who in the Preface to the first edition of The Black Jacobins (1838), wrote the following about the Haitian Revolution that began in 1791 and ended 1804:

The revolt is the only successful slave revolt in history. The transformation of slaves, trembling in hundreds before a single white man, into a people able to organize themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day, is one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement.”

Thesis Number 3

THE MENTAL ANGUISH AFRICANS UNDERWENT DURING SLAVERY AS EXPLAINED BY ANOTHER OF OUR LESSER KNOW SCHOLARS.

Even before James and Williams wrote their books, another Black man named Philip Henry Douglin, a pastor from St. Clements in St. Madeline was preaching about the inhumanity of slavery and the deleterious effect it had on our minds. In 1888 in his "Jubilee of Emancipation Address" that appeared in the San Fernando Gazette Douglin wrote. PAGE SEVEN OF YOUR BOOLETS READ AS FOLLOWS:

“Painfully intense as are the narratives you have read of the sufferings of the slaves, they are only the outsides. They are only visible. There are a thousand little evils which cannot be expressed. There is a sorrow of heart which no stranger can intermeddle. There are secret agonies, known only to God, which are far more acute than any external tortures. Oh! It is not the smiting of the back, until the earth is crimsoned with streams of blood—it is not the pursuing of human beings with blood hounds–it is not the branding of the person, or the amputation of the limbs—it is not the killing of the body — it is not these that are the keenest sufferings that a people can undergo. These affect only the outward man, and may leave the majestic mind untouched. But those inflictions which tend to contract and destroy the mind— those cruelties which benumb the sensibility of the soul– those influences which chill and arrest the currency of the heart’s affection— these are the awful instruments of real suffering and degradation; and these have been made to operate on the Negro” (page 7)

So that even as Bob Marley sang “Redemption Song” in October 1980, he was re-echoling the words of Canon Douglin, when lamented:
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery

None but ourselves can free our minds

Have no fear for atomic energy

'Cause none of them can stop the time

How long shall they kill our prophets

While we stand aside and look? Ooh!

Some say it's just a part of it

We've got to fulfill the book…

As I end these remarks on this first EMANCIPATION DAY CELEBRATION FUNCTION, IT IS WISE TO REMEMBER THAT We, in the wilderness, have been singing these songs for a long time. We can even go back to Jimmy Cliff, “By the Rivers of Babylon,” where he reminds us:
By the rivers of Babylon

Where he sat down

And there he wept

When he remembered Zion

'Cause the wicked carried us away in captivity

Required from us a song

How can we sing King Alpha's song

In a strange land?

So what are the strange sounds we should remember as we talk about our need to emancipate our minds from mental slavery?

The first thing we know about is our local and certainly international slavery. We cannot know much about our condition unless we read and study it. Our history did not begin in 1956. It goes a long way back. We should study it. We pay more attention to our poets, our calypsonians, our historians, our dancers, our scientists, our philosophers, but most of all we should respect what they do.

The second thing we must know is that when we came to this strange land, it was our people's struggle to free ourselves beginning in Palmares, Brazil, the first major slave revolt in the Atlantic that started around 1605 and went until 1694 when it was put down.

It means that part of the struggle to redeem ourselves must begin with a knowledge of ourselves which entails reading about our people and their condition and more importantly and always remembering that none but ourselves can liberate ourselves from the conditions in which we find ourselves.

IN OTHER WORDS, THE STRUGGLE BEGIN WITH EACH ONE OF US OR AS THE POET EDGAR ALBER GUEST SAYS:

You are the one who has to decide

Whether you’ll do it or toss it aside

You are the one who must make up your mind

Whether you’ll lead or will linger behind

Whether you will try for the goal that’s afar

Or be content to stay where you are.

Take or leave it. Here’s something to do!

Just think it over–it’s all up to you.