Emancipation Celebrations in Trinidad and Tobago - The Experience of A Lifetime

EMANCIPATION LAUNCH 2010 WELCOME ADDRESS AND THE KWAME TURE MEMORIAL LECTURE SERIES

By Tracy Wilson, Director of the Public Education Committee

Event Date: June 17, 2010

Welcome to the launch of Emancipation 2010 and the launch of the Kwame Ture

Memorial Public Lecture Series. This year marks the 172nd Anniversary of our

Ancestors’ emancipation from chattel slavery in Trinidad and Tobago, the then British

colonies of the West Indies and elsewhere in the world where Britain had enslaved

Africans. It is not a very long time ago. Indeed, it is less than six generations ago if you

count a generation as 30 years. However, we, their children, are here and continue the

struggle for our authenticity. Indeed, it is in us that the spirit of our ancestors lives.

This year is also the 206th anniversary of the Haitian Revolution; a revolution which set

the stage for the end of African enslavement in the West Indies. Our brothers and sisters

in Haiti waged a 12 year war of revolution beginning in 1791 to successfully defeat

the main slave-owning powers of Europe. Haiti, too, was an integral part of the larger

Caribbean insurgency of African liberation fighters from the Eastern Caribbean. We

were told by Dr. Claudius Fergus of the History Department of UWI, in his presentation,

The Atlantic Slave Trade: Sinners, Saints and the Truth, to a similar forum in 2007

that “Simultaneously in the Eastern Caribbean, from Antigua in the north to Grenada

in the South, African war chiefs and their guerrilla bands wreaked severe havoc on the

colonial system, setting entire colonies on fire, driving the British army out of several

islands including St Lucia and Guadeloupe, and leaving them a mere toehold in other

islands like Grenada and St Vincent.

The Maroon Liberators operated as an Alliance, moving from island to island in pirogues

and fishing canoes, landing on rocky wind-swept coasts seldom guarded by colonial

forts. General Ralph Abercrombie, most of you should remember the name, Abercrombie

Street here in Port of Spain is named after him, who was specially sent in 1796 to

relieve the pressure on the beleaguered British army in Haiti, was compelled instead, to

engage these guerrillas in order to restore sovereignty in her old colonies. By the time

he regained control of the main English islands, it was too late to prevent defeat of the

British army in Haiti, and this was followed by the army’s humiliating withdrawal in

1798.”

This year, 2010, also marks the 40th Anniversary of the Black Power Revolution in

Trinidad and Tobago. It was a period in which Africans throughout the Diaspora

demonstrated their desire for justice, dignity, identity and empowerment and challenged

the bastions of racism and white advantage. In Black Power in the Caribbean, the

authors noted among others that “The Black Power Movement in Trinidad and Tobago

had taken shape over a two year period. Its first major action was in solidarity with

Brother Walter Rodney, banned from the staff of the University of the West Indies

in Jamaica in 1968 for his militant views. Then came the defense of the West Indian

brothers in Montreal, many of whom were Trinidadians, who had participated in the

1969 struggle at Sir George Williams University. Subsequently the students at UWI,

St Augustine prevented Governor General Michener of Canada from speaking on the

campus.” It was out of these struggles that the National Joint Action Committee was

formed. It was a core group of student radicals and individual trade union leaders fused

with the urban unemployed, sections of the workers’ movement and members of the

East Indian population. This group, through a variety of actions and over a period

of about four months in 1970, challenged the status quo and, in the process, got the

Government to begin to seriously address some of the disadvantages and indignities that

Black people were facing every day in some of the major institutions of this country.

There have been setbacks both in Haiti and in Trinidad and Tobago over the last few

years and a flagging of the spirit. The never ending onslaught of Haiti by the United

States, Canada and France and the increase in intensity with the assumption to power by

Jean Bertrand Aristide generated civil strife that has not yet run its course. When this is

coupled to the natural disasters of the last four years or so, and specifically the earthquake

of January 12, it is clear that our people in Haiti have been battered and bruised but not

knocked down.

In the case of Trinidad and Tobago, some of the advances of the 1970’s have been

eroded as overt racism again made its presence felt in the race-based clubs, the sexual

exploitation of our young women by others, the ensnaring of some of our young men

in criminal activities and the lack of positive information about Africans in the schools’

educational material.

Thus this year the Emancipation Support Committee intends to invoke that desire for

reclamation of our authenticity, cultural integrity, sense of justice and fair play. Hence

our Theme for 2010 is Reawakening the Spirit of Liberty.

There is much to be done to reclaim our authenticity. We cannot be defeated by the

few among us who take life rather than nurture life nor can we follow the many into a

mindless materialism that is devouring our soul and challenging our sanity. We need to

make ourselves whole again. There is the need to study, and to become more informed

about the history of our ancestors, about the other groups who make up this multi cultural

landscape we call Trinidad and Tobago, and our contributions to the progress of the

World. There is much to do to assist Haiti in getting on the right track. There is much to

do to weld a people, our people, together.

We in the Emancipation Support Committee look forward to receiving your support

in the work of self reclamation, of re-energizing our flagging spirit and recovering our

cultural confidence. We ask you to provide assistance to this organization so that the

work that was started by our forefathers can be accelerated by us and possibly completed

in the next two to three generations.

We are an ancient people some of whom have lost their way. But we must redouble our

effort to find our way and to Reawaken that Spirit of Liberty.

We thank you for attending this launch of Emancipation 2010 and the Kwame Ture

Memorial Public Lecture Series and we welcome you to this familiar place in the

languages of our forefathers, Hotep, Habari Gani, Alafia.

EMANCIPATION LAUNCH 2008 WELCOME ADDRESS

By Tracy Wilson Event Date: May 25, 2008

Welcome one and all to the launch of Emancipation 2008. Every year around this time, May 25, the Emancipation Support Committee launches its Commemoration of Emancipation in order to inform the public of its program of activities and the theme that will guide it. This year, our theme is "Crossing New Frontiers to Conquer Today's Challenges". The challenges we face as a race today are indeed daunting and if we were a less resilient people or a people less committed to survival, we would long have perished.

We are the descendants of those who chose to survive and our accomplishments over the years truly belie our past and present conditions of physical and psychic battering, cultural imperialism and pseudo universalism.

We have survived in many areas of the world and indeed, some members of our global tribe have strived. We have been engaged in all aspects of the growth of Europe and America as both involuntary participants and willing actors. We provided the civilizational base on which Europe stands. We were and are the source and the sinews through which Western Europe and North America accumulated wealth. And we are among the major players in the North American technological revolution.

We have done these things with little material returns to this global tribe of which we are a part. Indeed, we have done these things at great expense to our psychic health and in the process some of us have become strangers to ourselves and aliens to our people's interest. Because we have not profited from our efforts, both physical and intellectual, either as minority groups in the developed nations of Western Europe and North America, or as independent nations in Africa and the Caribbean, our people and the societies in which they live are in disarray. We are now confronted by the new problems of climate change, food scarcity, increases in oil prices, policies of the World Trade Organization and the like. And these have been coupled with the old ones of racism, self hate, migration/brain drain, primary resources exploitation and exportation, poor infrastructure and the like. Thus we need to cross the new frontiers to conquer these problems.

Finding and implementing new solutions will not be easy. Our efforts to control our own destiny have not moved along without intense struggle or tremendous casualities. As independent nations, we have been challenged at every turn with coups and counter-coups, secessionist movements and civil wars, economic dislocation and national destabilization, ethnic and civil violence, and institutional banditry. But there is no shirking our responsibility. Our ancestors, who chose to survive, expect us to push ahead and create the next African Civilization. We dare not disappoint them.

Today, May 25th, is African Liberation Day and it is a day that we celebrate. It was first organized in 1958 as African Freedom Day on the occasion of the First Conference of Independent States held in Ghana and was attended by the then 8 independent countries: Liberia and Ghana, Ethopia, Egypt and Sudan, and Lybia, Tunisia and Morocco. Thus this year marks the 50th anniversary of that historic Conference.

African Freedom Day was celebrated on the 15th of April from 1958 to 1963, and during this period the number of independent states almost quadrupled. Thus when on May 25th 1963, these independent states came together to form the Organization of African Unity, political independence had come to 31 nations in a mere 5 years.

The OAU was formed to focus on the role which States on the African Continent could play to speedily bring an end to colonialism and racialism. Today all the 53 states in Africa are independent but freedom from want, from war, from disease, from famine, from material poverty, from economic dependence and under-development, has not yet been achieved.

In 2001, the OAU was replaced by the African Union and some very positive actions have been taking place including the working out of modalities to give effect to the desire to have the Diaspora as the 6th Region of Africa. Just as the OAU concentrated on the political sphere, the African Union is now concentrating on the economic sphere to give effect to freedom.

Many organizations in the Caribbean and North America celebrated African Liberation Day for many years, however, with the independence of many former colonial territories, the celebrations diminished in participation and content. Several organizations in Trinidad and Tobago continue to observe African Liberation Day and the Emancipation Support Committee is numbered among them.

This year also marks the 170th anniversary of emancipation from chattel slavery by Africans in Trinidad and Tobago, the English speaking Caribbean and elsewhere in the world where Britain had instituted African slavery. You will recall the Proclamation of 1834 which set enslaved Africans free but kept them as unfree apprentices. Our people walked off the plantations in 1838 and that is why we in the Emancipation Support Committee date Emancipation from 1838.

We will celebrate this year's emancipation with all the pomp and pageantry that we can muster and we will of course spend much of our time in the dissemination of information about Africa and Africans, this global tribe whose travails are well known but whose successes are obscured by its inability to tell its own story to itself and the rest of the world.

The Emancipation Support Committee commends you on coming out this evening to mind your business, particularly when at this time there is so much fear for one's personal safety. We welcome all our guests to this new space and particularly those who have journeyed from abroad. We greet you in the languages of our ancestors, Hotep, Habari Gani, Alafia.

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