Reflections of Emancipation

Fri, Aug 6, 2010

by Dr Arnold Thomas,
SVG Indian Heritage Foundation, and former diplomat

Emancipation was not just an historic event that took place on 1 August 1833/1838; it remains a state of mind when almost all Vincentians have been reflecting, or should be reflecting on the long journeys our forefathers took from servitude to freedom.{{more}}

The SVG Indian Heritage Foundation (IHF) joins with the African Heritage Foundation (AHF) in commemorating Emancipation. Indeed Vincentians of Portuguese/Madeiran descent should also be part of the Emancipation events, for the history of both Indians and Portuguese is inextricably linked to Emancipation of slavery way back then.

The records show that the morning after Apprenticeship ended in 1838, the bells rang for ‘workers’ to return to their estate duties, but not a man jack came out. It was the first act of defiance by the newly freed labourers, as all blacks were lumped and labelled, and it created the myth of shortage of labour on the estates. The response, of course, was the introduction of indentured workers, beginning in 1845 with Madeirans, followed by Indians in 1861, and interspersed with ‘Liberated Africans’ from slave ships. The indenture system was a euphemism for a new system of slavery as scholars have labelled it, not just for the newly indentured but for all workers. This was demonstrated in 1862 when workers on Mt. Bentinck estate protested the withdrawal of their customary weekly ration of molasses and sparked what I called elsewhere the ‘molasses riots’ which spread all the way down the windward coast to the outskirts of Kingstown. Twenty years later in 1882 the Indians marched from Argyle estate to the capital to protest treatment and to regain their rights. For the Indians, emancipation from indenture ended by 1890. And the Madeirans here also protested by absconding to other islands such as Nevis.

Formal slavery might have ended 175 years ago, but embedded in the psyche of our people is the constant struggle against oppression and for a better life. Over the years, I have had the opportunity not only to make statements on genocide and slavery at ACP/EU meetings, but to visit some very notorious sites. In my academic career, I once taught a course on “Slavery and Anti-Slavery” at Thames Valley University in the UK. At ACP meetings in Brussels, we listened to representatives from the International Criminal Court giving accounts of the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, followed by rebuttal from the Government of Sudan. My intervention then was to say that we from the Caribbean don’t need to hear any justification for genocide and slavery as we have our own history of slavery and ethnic cleansing as in the case of the Black Caribs.

As a person of non-African origin, let me say that the visits to sites in some African countries were highly emotional as they were for Afro-Caribbeans: in 1999 in the company of then Minister Arnhim Eustace, we visited Goree Island castle in Senegal, crawled through the gate of no return through which so many Africans boarded slave ships for the Caribbean. Did you ever see big men and women cry? Those from the Caribbean did, and Eustace’s comments at the official ceremony were poignant, that he had arrived on the continent via the luxury of a jetliner unlike his forefathers who had to endure the hardships of the middle passage on a slave ship. The next year, we went to Cotonou in the Republic of Benin, this time with Minister John Horne who was then President of the ACP Council of Ministers, and there, too, they have re-built the notorious gate of no return from which thousands were dispatched to Haiti in particular. In 2008, on the occasion of the ACP Summit of Heads of Government in Accra, Ghana, we went to Elmina Castle, similar to Goree Island, where Africans were auctioned and kept in holding cells before being herded through the gate of no return to waiting ships. Ten years after the genocide, we visited Rwanda in 2008 and saw the remains of tens of thousands, another reminder of our violent past in St. Vincent when the Caribs were ethnically cleansed and the remnants exiled. I should also mention the visit to Robben Island in South Africa where Nelson Mandela and other freedom fighters were incarcerated for a long time, another reminder that freedom is an unfinished business.

The point of rehashing these events is that we should be ever mindful of the past from which we came as a people, but even more important, we should look at these ‘historical shipwrecks’ as ‘lighthouses’ to guide us in our quest for a just society. I recall that while waiting for our plane at Congo Brazzaville airport one year, a minister remarked that we in the Caribbean come from paradise but we don’t appreciate it. Coming home to SVG after decades abroad, I thought I was coming back to paradise, to a progressive Vincentian society emancipated from past, only to be jolted by present day realities. It is not an emancipated society when you experience break-ins and theft of valuable property (my laptop, external hard drive, cameras…chock full of memoirs and memories) within hours of arrival; it is not an emancipated society when personal security requires you to literally barricade yourself indoors with guard dogs, security cameras and fenced with razor wire as if living in a state of siege! And finally, it is not an emancipated society when you are called by the racist term ‘coolie’. Whatever happened in our educational system?

Emancipation means much more than commemoration of a past event; it must be a state of mind that recognises that we now live in a multicultural/multiracial society where no one is above the other and we are all our brother’s keeper. Without an effective law and order system to ensure freedom and personal security, there can be no social justice, and this to my mind is the greatest threat on this Emancipation Day.