Emancipation Day, Trinidad & Tobago

A national holiday to commemorate the abolition of slavery

By Theo Edwards

“Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley and his wife Sharon take a picture with members of the Shell Invaders Steel Orchestra during the Prime Minister’s Emancipation Celebration at the Diplomatic Centre, St Ann’s, on Saturday.”

A dual-island Caribbean nation with distinctive Creole traditions and cuisines, Trinidad’s capital, Port of Spain, hosts a boisterous carnival featuring calypso and soca music.

First colonized by the Spanish, the islands came under British control in the early 19th century. Sugar plantations dominated the colonial economy throughout the nineteenth century. Sugar cane fields cover the island and mills for refining it. Until the abolition of slavery, the main source of labor was force enslaved Africans –men, women, and children brought from Africa to the Caribbean.

The advent of the Industrial Revolution spawned the rise of a new group of influential men in the British Parliament who believed that slavery was no longer economically viable.

In 1833 Thomas Buxton presented The Emancipation Bill in Parliament. The Act passed and came into effect on August 1, 1834. On that day, thousands of slaves in the British West Indies became free men and women.

On August 1, 1985, one-hundred and fifty-one years later, the government of Trinidad and Tobago declared Emancipation Day a national holiday to commemorate the abolition of slavery.

Video Image Courtesy: Andy St-John

Prime Minister Emancipation Day Message

“My Fel­low cit­i­zens to­day we cel­e­brate Eman­ci­pa­tion Day, as a na­tion­al hol­i­day. It is im­por­tant to note that we, in Trinidad and To­ba­go, are unique in that since Au­gust 1, 1985, we have been com­mem­o­rat­ing, every year, the abo­li­tion of slav­ery in the for­mer British West In­dies, on this date.

We have long recog­nised slav­ery as the sad, dark side of hu­man ex­is­tence, in that al­most every peo­ple, every race across the world has had this wretched ex­pe­ri­ence but we from West Africa have suf­fered the worst.

His­to­ri­ans con­tin­ue to doc­u­ment these cru­el ex­ploita­tions, in hu­man so­ci­eties, from cen­tu­ry-old events in the Arab world to the evo­lu­tion of democ­ra­cy in an­cient Greece, de­vel­op­ments which helped to shape mod­ern West­ern civil­i­sa­tion of which we are a part.

Our schol­ars iden­ti­fy the African slave trade, and slav­ery as dif­fer­ent in the en­tire hu­man ex­is­tence.

Slav­ery ex­ist­ed there, be­fore the Eu­ro­peans came, but it was con­sid­ered “in­ter­nal” and “pa­tri­ar­chal”, ac­cord­ing to our own renown, in­ter­na­tion­al schol­ar, CLR James, who al­so told us that in the 16th cen­tu­ry Cen­tral Africa was a ter­ri­to­ry of peace, and a hap­py civil­i­sa­tion; the home to a peas­antry, which in many re­spects was su­pe­ri­or to the serfs in large ar­eas of Eu­rope.

But this way of life was dis­rupt­ed by the Eu­ro­pean’s in­ter­ven­tion. In a UN­ESCO study on Race and His­to­ry, Claude Levi-Strauss, de­scribed this in­ter­ven­tion as “the de­ci­sive mo­ment in the his­to­ry of hu­man civil­i­sa­tion”.
Our late Prime Min­is­ter, Dr Er­ic Williams demon­strat­ed con­clu­sive­ly, in his ac­claimed work, Cap­i­tal­ism and Slav­ery, that it was the cap­i­tal, de­rived from the slave trade and slav­ery, which cre­at­ed the In­dus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion of the 1760s. This then trans­formed Eng­land in­to the work­shop of the world and lat­er al­lowed it to cre­ate its glob­al em­pire.

Slav­ery has left many a black per­son scarred and de­nud­ed of ba­sic val­ues. In the eyes of some, the per­cep­tion re­mains that blacks have been placed at the bot­tom of every “good” list, and the “top” of every bad one. De­spite, their strengths, re­source­ful­ness and in­tel­li­gence, they are forced still to cry out to the world that “Black is beau­ti­ful, too”.

This is the 21st cen­tu­ry, a tec­ton­ic shift is tak­ing place; there is a new “Scram­ble for Africa” The world’s su­per­pow­ers are turn­ing at­ten­tion to Africa, again, as the new eco­nom­ic fron­tier. The UN pre­dicts that by 2025 there will be more Africans than Chi­nese peo­ple in the world, as African economies are among the fastest-grow­ing in the world.

What this means for the African per­son in Trinidad and To­ba­go is a ques­tion that every one of this race must ask. I urge that we all ac­knowl­edge this past. We must con­tin­ue to re­search the rich, his­tor­i­cal an­ces­try of African civil­i­sa­tions – the lega­cy from whence we came. We must con­tin­ue to re­mem­ber how we came here and what we are en­gaged in build­ing here, a new so­ci­ety based on equal­i­ty and har­mo­ny in our colour­ful and vi­brant democ­ra­cy.

Re­mem­ber the strug­gles of the fore-par­ents on and off the plan­ta­tions to the birth and growth of this na­tion.

Then let us find ways to un­lock, and eman­ci­pate our­selves from the men­tal chains, and, fi­nal­ly, em­brace the op­por­tu­ni­ties of the 21st cen­tu­ry — with an un­der­stand­ing that Trinidad and To­ba­go will on­ly achieve the fu­ture which we all, as cit­i­zens, cre­ate for our gen­er­a­tions to come.”

— OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER

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