Bicentenary 2007
Why Commemorate the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans to the Caribbean ?(Context Paper)
Establishing a Planning Committee:
In December 2005, the then Prime Minister of Jamaica, the Most Hon. P.J. Patterson launched the Jamaica National Bicentenary Planning Committee with Professor Verene Shepherd (Professor of Social History at the UWI, Mona) as Chair.
The Mandate of the
JNBPC:
The mandate given to the JNBPC was to find appropriate and meaningful
ways to mark the end of the brutal Middle Passage to the former
British-colonized
Briefly
and simply, the sequence was as follows: from the moment of capture and forced
relocation to the Caribbean, enslaved Africans and other anti-slavery activists
inside and outside of the
But Why Bother?
The questions that have been posed by some in the Jamaican
society are, why commemorate such a violent and brutal aspect of our history?
Should we not forget the past and focus on the future? Perhaps forgetting that
enslaved Africans were victims, not perpetrators of their "shameful" condition,
some Councillors from the St. Elizabeth Parish Council asked recently: why
revisit such a shameful past?
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First, Jamaicans cannot just ignore its slavery past. As a former
colony first of Spain and later of Britain, Jamaica was affected by the sordid
episode of the trans-Atlantic trade in Africans, the majority of whom were free
people in their own country before capture and shipment. Indeed,
whether we wish to focus on it or not, it is a fact that the Caribbean was a
primordial site of slavery. The debate over the
numbers forcefully extracted from Africa and shipped across the Middle Passage
to the Caribbean still rages; but recent quantitative data estimate that
the region accounted for 42%, of the estimated 15 million Africans forcefully
removed from Africa from the 15th
to the 19th century. Among the British colonized Caribbean territories,
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A second, if clichéd answer is that those who do not learn from history
are bound to repeat it.
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Third, all nations need an understanding of their past and a knowledge
about the experiences of their ancestors in order to help them as they build
a future. As Prof. Rex Nettleford always says, "We cannot drive without a
rearview mirror." Among those experiences is the demographic disaster suffered;
for slavery took its toll
on the enslaved population. The brutality combined with other factors led to
a lack of growth by natural means.Jamaica imported close to 1 million
enslaved Africans, yet at Emancipation had just around 300,000 enslaved
people. This demographic trend, if
Thomas Fowell Buxton is to be believed, went against the laws of nature.
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Another reason is that the abolition of the trade
was a momentous one in the history of Jamaica .
Admittedly, the year 1807 did not see the end of slavery, but it ushered in the
phased abolition of a system that involved the forced capture and relocation
to the island of over a million of the ancestors of the majority of the Jamaican
people.
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Another justification is that the struggle to end the
trade involved the enslaved themselves, not just British humanitarians. We need
to showcase this aspect of our history and destabilize the view that "Queen
Victoria Set Us Free".
-
The years 2006-08 will
provide a space for the Caribbean to reflect
on and explore openly its historical relationship to the TST and slavery.
-
If
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We also have to recall
that our culture has been enriched by the African ancestors; and we can use
2007 as an opportunity to showcase this aspect of our history.
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Finally, we can celebrate
the achievements of our ancestors and their contribution to world development.
The productive output of Africans and their descendants, helped to transform
the
So,
preparations for the commemoration of
the bicentenary of the abolition of the TST will give Jamaicans and the
Caribbean as a whole a great opportunity to 1) revisit the history of Africa,
2) study the details of the Middle Passage 3) examine the impact of slavery and
the TST on the region and 4) conduct research that will provide the evidence
that the region needs to advance its case for reparation from Britain.
The process leading up to a phased abolition, as well as those moments in history which deemed the Trade officially abolished by the British (its illegal continuation thereafter notwithstanding), deserve to be observed and commemorated by the descendants of its victims everywhere. We owe it to our forebears, to our own children and to future generations. If we who are in positions of power and influence; if we who are privileged to know and understand this history and its continuing legacies fail to observe this period in history for the benefit our own, who then will do it? Failure to act will be to embrace the shame and silence still characteristic of the relationship with this history elsewhere.
The enduring legacies of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans are such that they continue to have a negative impact upon human development. Human development is a consistently articulated priority of Caribbean governments and indeed of international agencies supportive of the development agenda. Education systems are designed to pursue human development in the context of national, regional and international development imperatives. In the Anglophone Caribbean there have been commendable efforts, through the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), to address the relevance of knowledge of the history of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans to the development of young Caribbean citizens. These efforts fall short however, if only because in many schools Social Studies has replaced history; not all students study history at the level of the CXC examinations and indeed increasingly fewer students are opting to study history at all. The consequence of these factors, therefore, is that many students may be completing their formal secondary education without an understanding of the ways in which the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans has shaped the Caribbean socio-economic and cultural landscape, and thus without a complete appreciation of some of the very fundamental issues surrounding some of the pressing questions confronting Caribbean educators and thinkers as they relate to the human development of Caribbean youths.
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