Slave Trade moved Intellect to the Caribbean – Beckles

When millions of Africans were torn from their homes and brought to the Caribbean as slaves, it is not labour that was moved, but intellect; some of the youngest and brightest minds from Africa.

“…All kinds of peoples were caught up in that movement and those are our foreparents,” Sir Hilary Beckles told a gathering at the Methodist Church Hall in Kingstown recently.

Sir Hilary was in St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) for this year’s annual governance meetings of the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) and the annual CXC awards.

He told the gathering, which included 17 of the region’s top students, that historians are now coming to realize and to speak and write about the fact that manual labour was not the only thing brought from Africa during the slave trade.

“If you move five million young people from one place to another place, it is not labour that you are moving, it is intellect that you are moving.

“It is the intellect, the young creative intellect of a country, a region, that you are transporting so that the slave trade was not simply a trade in labour, it was movement of intellect, of talent, of creative genius, of innovators, of priest of writers, of artisans….,” Sir Hilary said.

Sir Hilary, also Chairman of CXC, said it is important to historicize because there is always context and background.

“Four to five million of our ancestors were brought out of Africa and brought to the Caribbean in chains. Over 80 per cent of the five million were young people. The young, beautiful talent of Africa transported across an ocean and brought to these islands, young people, and they were brought here to perform manual labour.

“Our history is filled with the creative ways in which this intellect has expressed itself this past 400 or 500 years,” Sir Hilary said.

The historian also noted that what is true of Africa is also true of Asia, that hundreds and thousands of intellectuals were brought from Asia because they were poor and distressed.

“…Brought across to these islands to labour and the young people of Indian ancestry also demonstrated their intellect continuously over the hundred years of indenture.

“We have a legacy, we have a phenomenal legacy of intellectual engagement in these islands. These islands have demonstrated consistently, the extraordinary concentration of intellectual genius and creativity. The history shows this continuously,” stressed Beckles.

He said it is important to talk about youth and intellect as it is young persons, who have now grown old, who have shaped some of our stronger organisations like the UWI and this generation must continue the tradition.

The vice chancellor said that a few weeks ago, the UWI mobilized its enormous intellectual legacy which saw the UWI being ranked among the top universities in the world by Times Higher Education.