Continuing the Emancipation conversation

Every year on the anniversary of Emancipation we tend to ask the same question- “Are we really emancipated?” We arrive at the same conclusion. We are not. Some persons turn to the philosophy of Bob Marley and agree with him that we are still desperately in need of mental emancipation. The question is based on some confusion and on certain assumptions. We are indeed, really talking about two different things. What for us was achieved on August 1, 1838 was nothing more than a legal matter.{{more}} In other words slavery no longer existed by law or by fiat. This was undoubtedly important for what it did was to give us some space to begin to refashion our lives.

The critical point that is made when we argue that we still need to emancipate ourselves is that we still retain vestiges of slavery; that we still hold on to some of the values and are still subjected to some of the controls imposed on us by the slave system. Some of our brothers and sisters, ex-slaves, had already removed themselves from the system. Many had before that eventful day, run away. Many had devised creative ways of countering the system even while they remained on the plantations. They had mocked their supposed masters in song and dance. Many had continued to practice their own religion, the way they knew. Often when either by choice or force they had to listen to the preachings of the European pastors, they did not necessarily take away the messages that they were supposed to. They still saw things in their own images, in their African context. Some were free in their African selves.

But the battle did not end there. A system that was just as vicious as slavery took full control of those who had gotten that legal freedom. It was the system of colonialism that completely engulfed us. The African writer Wa’ Thiongo provides us with a framework that we can use to examine what happened then. He argues that when a master tries to control his subjects by use of the gun that control is only effective as long as the gun remains fixed on the subjects. What is more effective as a means of control is the suppression of the culture of a people. Slavery was to a large extent control by the gun. Colonialism concentrated on cleaning the slate, on erasing to the extent it could, the culture of the former slaves. It did this by the use of education and religion that were key components of colonial rule. Why do you think the Shaker religion, as it was then called, was banned? They were clear about this. It savoured of African ‘primitivism’. They were talking about the African culture which they considered barbaric and which they had to stamp out in order to control.

Europe and European culture were presumed to be superior. Europe was a civilisation. Africa was not. So they said. Africa was all barbarism. The slaves had to try to adopt the European culture and rid themselves of their Africanness. So the path was laid out for them. Attend the church of the coloniser and become educated. The contradictions set in from very early. The established religion was still, after the so-called freedom day, reluctant to embrace the African people, the ‘emancipated people’. That religion was then the religion of the master. In St.Vincent it was the Methodists who reached out to the ex-slaves. It was the Churches that then controlled education. Education in St. Vincent was packaged in denominational labels, largely dominated by the Anglicans and Methodists with a few Roman Catholic scatterings.

Out of this process emerged what the late Lloyd Best referred to as Afro-Saxons- an African people with a false mental and physical garb. Our people who were given the opportunity to absorb the education of the colonial masters, used to argue during the period when they were fighting for elected representation, that they had achieved sufficiently high levels of British education to be able to govern themselves. In other words they had become like their masters. They had imbibed the civilisation of those who controlled them to a level sufficient to allow them to assume some measure of governance. The Afro-Saxon was being created. Lloyd Best found it funny that when we went to England to ask for independence we were clothed in the same garb as the colonial master. The system catered for a few, the few who were expected to take over when the colonial master left and to assist him while he was there in his efforts to control. For the bulk of the people education was meaningless. Eric Williams told us about this. What the system needed were people to plant sugar canes. To plant sugar canes and work in the industry in the areas they were allowed to, demanded merely or largely only physical labour power. The tasks were largely menial ones so you did not have to be educated. They were prepared to leave the education for the few who were expected to man the public service and other institutions of the coloniser. So in the sense that we are arguing that we are still not emancipated, those who were really emancipated were the ones who were on the margins of the civilisation that the colonisers had created in the plantation society. There were two sets of people, those who had absorbed the civilisation of the master through education and some extent religion and those who remained on the outside.

Many of the practitioners of Shakerism, the religion of the African people, were forced to baptise their children in the churches of the colonisers and so were mainly nominal Methodists, the Christian religion with which they were associated. They had to make this accommodation because, at first, of the discrimination against their Shaker religion and later because of the ban on the religion. There is evidence of many having been forced out of the Methodist churches because they were practising something that appeared to be at odds with Methodism. And so the contradictions went on in the colonial society. There was a divide between town and country. The town was where the values were supposed to have taken hold. The country was the centre of the plantations. Real civilisation in the country was limited to the planter and his class, and to the Europeans who were employed on the plantations. The majority of people in the country areas were workers on the plantations and those who had physically moved themselves from the plantations but were still dependent on them for occasional work.

Education was designed to move you further away from what elements of Africanism remained within you. The history books described the African civilisations as primitive. Our heroes were people who had enslaved us- the Raleighs and Drakes. At school we sang in praise of a Britannia that dominated and ruled. It was made more palatable by the buns and ginger beer we were fed on Empire day. Oh! How we looked forward to that day. Talk about emancipation! We were really slaves to the culture of our colonisers. But as on the slave plantation there were those who were fighting against the system. There were those who were exposed to the same colonial education and religion but who were able to liberate themselves and fight for the liberation of others. There are many examples scattered throughout our history. The final insult came at independence when our colonisers packaged for us ‘made in Britain’ constitutions. We have now largely acknowledged this and have been struggling to unravel ourselves from the constitutional packages that have been stifling us. But at this stage we are still caught in the wrappings. So who is really emancipated? That is the question!