Emancipation Day is celebrated on the first day of August every year. There is the usual gathering at the Emancipation Statue and a cultural celebration and wreath-laying ceremony by the Clement Payne Movement and the Israel Lovell Foundation in Golden Square.
Symbolism aside, we believe that emancipation should be a celebration on our achievements in spite of our history of enslavement. We are spending too much time rehashing our past and not charting a way forward for advancement.
During this period, the issue of reparations also stalks the air and then disappears until the following year. Recently, however, CARICOM Heads of Government set up a committee to address this issue on an ongoing basis.
It is too early to gauge what impact this move would have on the debate but is a tacit recognition that the issue of reparations needs some structure and institutional weight behind it if it is to make any inroads into the corridors of power in Britain.
It is accepted that discussion on reparations would arouse strong emotions among descendants of slaves as it goes to the core of their existence. Indeed slavery was the foundation of modern Britain and a major source of wealth for the British Empire.
Slavery is more of an economic “crime” though it was considered legal at the time and therein lies the difficulty. It was the exploitation upon which the West Indies sugar trade was based and not only slave owners benefited but ship owners who transported the slaves.
The campaign against slavery began in the late 18th Century as revulsion against it spread. This led to the abolition of the trade in slaves by law in 1808 and later the Emancipation Act of 1834 which provided compensation to slave owners but treated slaves as chattel.
In February, British newspaper The Independent carried an article: Britain’s Colonial Shame: Slave Owners Given Huge Payouts after Abolition. This story gave an account of the true scale of Britain’s involvement in the slave trade.
This article was in response to the release of previously unseen records of documents that revealed how Britain’s most prominent and wealthiest families received the modern equivalent of billions of pounds in compensation after slavery was abolished.
It reported that Dr Nick Draper from the University College of London, who studied the compensation papers, said that one-fifth of wealthy Victorian Britons derived all or part of their fortune from the slave economy (see www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs).
The records indicate that the British government paid out £20 million to compensate about 3 000 slave-owning families in Britain, Caribbean and Africa for the loss of their “property” when slave ownership was abolished in Britain’s colonies in 1833. Not one cent was given to the freed slaves to find homes and to start new lives.
This manifest injustice gives real impetus to the moral conviction of Professor Sir Hilary Beckles and others who have been in the vanguard for reparations. They deserve our full support but the challenges are monumental.