The Tribune

By Canon S Sebastian Campbell

EMANCIPATION – August, for just under 200 years now has been celebrated as the month of freedom. Throughout the next few weeks we will plunge into the depth of this term – freedom – in our quest to be both educational and challenging.

We do this exploration in light of the fact that our schools are closed during the summer, the time when we observe and celebrate two of the greatest pillars of our history, Independence and Emancipation. Consequently, we fail to have that captive audience who should be indoctrinated and steeped in things from the pre-1973 era when colonial holidays were intentionally placed to parallel school days. In light of these facts we can never over-emphasise the urgent need of our educational system to promote Afro-Bahamian history in all our schools on all our islands. How are we to properly indoctrinate our children about these two venerated pillars of our history, is indeed a question we must address.

Both the Emancipation and Independence holidays are reduced to time of social escapes given only to fun and frolic. Our national celebrations, then, are empty and meaningless.

August Monday forces us to accept the dark era of our history. Slavery led to the development in the West Indies of a society classified according to the colour, wealth and education. Slaves automatically reverted to the bottom of the social ladder and legislation was written to enforce their inferior status. Collins wrote: “The Whites formed the highest class by reason of their colour, and their economic and political privileges.

Before 1838, the early European colonists in the West Indies did much of their own labour or hired a small work force to help in the cattle rearing or in farming crops such as tobacco ,which were not too labour intensive. As time went on, the Europeans became wealthier and farmed labour intensive crops such as sugar cane.

“They began to consider physical labour beneath the dignity of white men and depended more and more on others. These factors determined the types of labourers used in the West Indies between 1492 and 1838.”

This quote, from historical documents, stresses 300 of pure hell, ushered in by the coming of Christopher Columbus to our shores.

The first people dehumanised in this way were our original ancestors, the Arawaks. They were dragged off mainly to the cane fields and mines in Hispaniola. They were not adaptable to these occupations, which were beyond their physical strength. Overworked and ill-treated they were eventually wiped out. Las Casas, a priest, was the one who inspired the Europeans then to turn to Africa as a source of cheap labour. African slaves soon became the only supply of labour in West Indies.

No other scourge in history is worse than this one. Recruitment of slaves promoted intertribal jealousy, strife and war among Africans encouraged by profit seeking, greedy, Europeans. The brutality of this was symbolised by slave forts and factories. Here Africans were converted into slaves destined for the West Indies. “The misery in Africa was continued in the Atlantic crossing where fear of the unknown, death by disease on overcrowded ships, attempts at suicide were among the most outstanding features.”

The survivors were auctioned on arrival. Families being ‘yucked’ apart, the blazing sun, whipping, overbearing work and ungodly degradation was to be the way of life for human beings how downgraded to a status below the animals. All funnelled by greed for power and wealth.

It is said that Las Casas did repent; only God could have pity on his miserable soul.

Many arguments were advanced for and against slavery. The first critics in the British Islands were Quakers. Most people accepted slavery as necessary for survival. Towards the end of the 18th century organised campaigns were being launched against slavery. Some of the reformers like William Wilberforce were well-intentioned; however there was also an economic condition that urged the abolitionist movement, sugar was on a decline and could have been produced cheaper without slaves. In the 1820s the formation of the antislavery society and the zeal of the reformers caused new culture to transform the negative minds towards slavery. The Emancipation Act was passed in August 1833 and brought into effect in Monday, August 1, 1834. From this day slavery was to be “utterly and forever abolished and declared unlawful throughout the British Colonies.” Thus we celebrate August Monday every year as Emancipation Day. Three-hundred years of slavery and the price exacted for freedom truly deserves better observance than we give to it.

Freedom, though, is not automatic, we in every generation must fight to protect that which we have and then go on building upon it. In many respects we are not totally free. Our minds are still colonially enslaved. Foreign honours, dress, wigs, institutions and language are still preferred over and above the urgent challenge to carve out our own Bahamian identity. Our minds are still locked into a syndrome of foreign being better. We are more “Little England” today than Barbados ever was.

Let us resolve to move forward, upward, and onward together to the beckoning hands of change in which we can find even more degrees of freedom.

Father of the Nation, the late Sir Lynden O Pindling classically put it, “We must steer courageously into the chilling teeth of the prevailing winds of change.”