One hun­dred and eighty-sev­en years af­ter the of­fi­cial end of slav­ery was an­nounced through the Eman­ci­pa­tion Procla­ma­tion, there is a need for con­tin­u­ing re­flec­tion on both the ex­pe­ri­ence and con­se­quences of that most in­iq­ui­tous de­hu­man­i­sa­tion of a peo­ple.

Eman­ci­pa­tion meant that the chains on the chat­tels, hu­man be­ings trans­formed in­to the prop­er­ty of the slave own­ers, like goats, hors­es, pigs, for the mas­ter to do with as he pleased, were re­moved. How­ev­er, it was not a sim­ple mat­ter of a peo­ple, hav­ing been stripped of their very hu­man­i­ty, be­ing set phys­i­cal­ly free.

The chal­lenge for the en­slaved Africans all over the British West In­dies was to re-cre­ate a hu­man so­ci­ety, that which they were de­nied over the few hun­dreds of years start­ing from the 17th cen­tu­ry.

As the mod­ern gen­er­a­tion of West In­di­an his­to­ri­ans have not­ed, com­pen­sa­tion for this most odi­ous de­nial of their hu­man­i­ty, was giv­en not to the “eman­ci­pat­ed” slave, but to the British planters who had ex­ploit­ed un­paid labour and amassed for­tunes for them­selves and the Unit­ed King­dom.

Britain, with the as­sem­bled re­sources of the slave trade and slav­ery, was able to gen­er­ate the In­dus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion of the 18th and 19th cen­turies.

It is be­cause of such un­com­pen­sat­ed ex­ploita­tion of a peo­ple and their labour, that the West In­di­an lob­by of the 21st cen­tu­ry con­tin­ues to make a case for Repa­ra­tions for both free slave labour and the phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal harm done to the en­slaved and the gen­er­a­tions of their de­scen­dants since then.

That the Africans in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean have built a civil­i­sa­tion and par­tic­i­pat­ed in sev­er­al as­pects of the con­tem­po­rary world, and with dis­tinc­tion, has been quite an ac­com­plish­ment.

With­out doubt, there re­mains a long road ahead of chal­lenges for the gen­er­a­tions of to­day and those to come.

In Trinidad and To­ba­go and the rest of the Caribbean, ed­u­ca­tion and pro­fes­sion­al ca­reers have been built, de­mo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nance has been firm­ly plant­ed in the soil by suc­ceed­ing gov­ern­ments and the sense of re­new­al by peo­ple of the Afro-Caribbean na­tions has been achieved.

Amongst those out­stand­ing ob­jec­tives to be ac­com­plished is a suc­cess­ful shift and ex­pan­sion of the eco­nom­ic cen­tre of life in the re­gion to cre­ate di­ver­si­fied and in­te­grat­ed economies.

Wide­spread in­dus­tri­al pro­duc­tion, the pro­vi­sion of fi­nan­cial and com­put­er ser­vices, the de­vel­op­ment of re­search and tech­nol­o­gy, fed by grad­u­ates of ter­tiary lev­el in­sti­tu­tions such as The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, the Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Guyana, have to be spread through­out the re­gion. For many, the eman­ci­pa­tion of the mind con­tin­ues to be a chal­lenge. In in­stances, over­turn­ing the dam­age done by slav­ery and colo­nial rule and ma­nip­u­la­tion, is far more of a for­mi­da­ble ob­jec­tive than the falling away of the phys­i­cal chains.

In all of the above and more, the ma­jor­i­ty Afro-Caribbean so­ci­eties of the present need to be mind­ful of the fact that there are oth­er eth­nic groups in the re­gion which have evolved with quite a de­gree of har­mo­nious in­ter­ac­tion in Guyana, Suri­name and Trinidad and To­ba­go.

That is a re­al­i­ty to be con­sid­ered and planned for as an as­pect of an eman­ci­pat­ed West In­dies. As we con­tem­plate on all of this, as we do every year at this time, there is still much to cel­e­brate dur­ing to­day’s African Eman­ci­pa­tion Day fes­tiv­i­ties.