Thousands celebrate Emancipation 2K8

Aug 02, 2008 News

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Thousands flocked the National Park yesterday for the annual Emancipation Day activities.
Both young and old celebrated together the anniversary of the day Africans were freed from slavery.

Yesterday marked the 174th anniversary of the abolition of slavery within the British colonies. Africans were freed from slavery in 1834.

The event at the National Park was a spectacle to behold, with every colour of the rainbow on display, as were a wide range of food and drinks, along with several cultural displays.

A number of local artistes heated up the large turnout with their presentations, ranging from dances to acrobatic performances.

The event was organised by the African Cultural Development Association (ACDA), and was aimed at commemorating the activity whilst enlightening the participants.

Among those present at the event yesterday were Prime Minister Samuel Hinds, PNCR leader Robert Corbin and attorney-at-law Basil Williams.

There were performances from Celeste David, who had the crowd singing along with her “I’m waiting”; the Crystallite Dancers, who did a crowd pleasing performance; and the National School of Dance, with a number of cultural pieces; as well as a special Surinamese group invited specially for the event.

The presence of Africans in Guyana as slaves dated back to the early decades of the seventeenth century, when they were brought here by Dutch traders and settlers who created the infamous transatlantic slave trade that forced the migration of millions of Africans from West and, to a much lesser extent, East Africa to the Americas, between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.

As elsewhere in the Americas, slavery in Guyana was a cruel institution, under which the victims suffered serious disabilities for which they usually could obtain no redress.

These disabilities included long hours of hard work, especially for field slaves, insufficient clothing, poor housing, food which was deficient in both quantity and nutritional value, unsatisfactory medical attention; severe, often sadistic punishment, and for females, sexual exploitation.

As late as 1825, Demerara and Essequibo had a slave population of about 72,000 and Berbice some 21,000.
In the latter half of the eighteenth century, Caribbean slavery began to come under increasingly serious attack from two sources.

One of them was an essentially secular intellectual movement centred in France known by historians as the Enlightenment, and led by renowned thinkers like Jean Jacques Rousseau who stressed ideas such as the liberty, equality and fraternity of the human race.

The second source was a humanitarian movement in England which emerged out of a major evangelical revival there.

The first major success by the new anti-slavery protesters was gained in the British Isles in the 1770s, when slavery was outlawed in England in 1772 and in Scotland in 1778 by judicial decisions.

These decisions in the English and Scottish courts recognising the freedom of slaves in these two countries were made in the famous Somerset case in England in 1772, and the less known Knight case in Scotland in 1778.

It was obviously somewhat easy to secure the abolition of slavery in these countries, where there was an abundance of free labourers and only about 14,000 to15,000 slaves.

Time proved, however, that it was much more difficult to abolish slavery in the Caribbean, where the institution was pervasive and considered indispensable to the economy.

Opposition to slavery became more intense and better organised in the 1780s, when British humanitarians in 1787 formed the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, led by men such as Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce. Their initial focus was an attack on the Atlantic slave trade, not on slavery itself.

They conducted a systematic campaign on two fronts, seeking to sensitise the British public to the evils of the trade and endeavouring to persuade the British Parliament to abolish it.

Eventually their relentless efforts were successful, for in 1807 the British Parliament declared the slave trade illegal for all British nationals and subjects.

The decision to abolish slavery was also prompted by the fear generated by the resistance of the captives, witnessed especially in two of the most massive slave rebellions ever seen in the Caribbean. In 1823 in Demerara and 1831 in Jamaica slavery came under attack.

These uprisings convinced many residents in Britain that once slavery continued, violent slave resistance would occur, causing much loss of life and considerable damage to property in the Caribbean.
The final impetus to abolition was political.

In 1832, a new Parliament was elected in Britain under a new reform bill which altered electoral requirements.

The new ruling party and Parliament which came to power demonstrated soon that they were more committed to reform than their predecessors.

It was they who took the decisive action which resulted in slavery being abolished partially on August 1, 1834 with a four-year period of apprenticeship that was supposed to end in 1838.

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