Emancipation Day, Trinidad & Tobago
August 2, 2019
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.
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
Dr. Ernest Eastman; a descendant of the emancipated slaves who settled in Sierra Leone, talked about the early history of this country
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