raphael.lall@guardian.co.tt
Racism and negative stereotypes dating back to the colonial era are responsible for the killing of young African males by the police, says Executive Director of the Emancipation Support Committee of T&T (ESCTT) Zakiya Uzoma-Wadada.
“We have a society where 70 to 80 per cent of the people in our prisons are Africans, the majority of the homeless are Africans, if you go into the children’s homes the majority are Black children,” she said.
“We can’t say that African people are worthless and they are not taking advantage of opportunities. We were enslaved for 400 years. We have been working hard for many years transforming minds so that we can have a better understanding of our African heritage.”
Speaking ahead of this year’s Emancipation celebrations under the theme “Commemorating 30 years of Transformation and Resilience,” Uzoma-Wadada explained that police victimisation of Black youths can be traced back to slavery.
“One of the things we must always remember is that the police were created to bring runaway enslaved back to the plantations. The police were always there to look for and arrest African people. They did that on behalf of the colonial masters. Unless we remove that mentality, these things become engraved into our minds as self-hate and all the things that were taught as part of that experience of enslavement.”
She described the killing of three young men in a police-involved shooting in early July in Port-of-Spain as an example of age-old negative stereotyping of Black people, adding that the “attitude of the police to three young Africans from these communities in east Port-of-Spain is very different from the attitude of three young White Caucasians in a different community.”
Uzoma-Wadada added: “Something is wrong here. That is why our goal must be transformation via education. Some of us do not understand our history enough to appreciate and love ourselves and to understand how beautiful we are.”
Government needs to invest more in lower-income communities where people of African decent live rather than spend the biggest chunk of the national budget on national security, she said
“We could go into our communities and we can deal with the challenges, especially in those areas referred to as hot spots. When they find they are in a space where they do not matter and their open survival is at stake they find their own way to survive. This then results in these cases of social unrest,” Uzoma-Wadada explained, adding that the wider population needs to change the negative way they look at people of African descent from lower-income communities.
“For example, we would say that people in the Beetham are this or that but look at their living conditions then compare it to the living conditions of people who behave well. Look at where they live. We have to spend money in these communities,” she said.
More money needed
Activities in the lead-up to tomorrow’s Emancipation Day celebrations began on African Liberation Day on May 25.
According toUzoma-Wadada, staging Emancipation activities is a costly exercise.
“We had our Youba Village Drum Festival, we had the showcasing of the Yoruba Village monument, we had our African fashion show. There was a lecture series going on on the decolonization process and there was also the opening of the Emancipation Village last Thursday,” she said
“We have not received any funds as yet from the Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and Arts. It’s a work in progress. I don’t think there is a final figure as yet, so we’re waiting with a lot of hope. We’re hoping that what we get covers the cost of doing this.
“We were able to get a contribution of $400,000 from the Sports and Culture Fund and that has taken us through to this point. That fund comes out of the Office of the Prime Minister.”
However, she added, that is a “drop in the bucket” since it cost more than $1 million just to set up the Emancipation Village.
“You have to pay artistes, you have to pay the different service providers. There are tents, sound persons, lighting, generators, and other logistics to pay for. It is a costly exercise. We have also asked people to make a contribution of $30 to come to the Village but after 3 pm it is free,” she said.
Celebrating the end of slavery
Emancipation celebrations culminate tomorrow with the Kambulé procession which returns to the streets of Port-of-Spain tomorrow after two years of being curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants will assemble for the early morning event at the Treasury Building where there will be a libation (prayer) and the reading of the Emancipation proclamation.
The procession will go through the streets of Port-of-Spain stopping at historically significant sites on Piccadilly Street, the site of the Yoruba village and Hell Yard, site of the Kambulé riots of 1881, before ending at the Lidj Yasu Omowale Emancipation Village in the Queen’s Park Savannah.
Although slavery was abolished thoughout the British Empire when the Slavery Abolition Act came into effect on August 1, 1834, celebrations and the public holiday only became a regular feature in 1985, one year after government used the occasion of the 150th anniversary of emancipation to declare a public holiday. There were celebrations to mark emancipation in the 19th and early 20th centuries but in 1939 the Legislative Council replaced those activities with Discovery Day, honouring Christopher Columbus
T&T was the first country in the world to declare a national holiday to commemorate the abolition of slavery.
Colonial era relics
The statue of Columbus on Independence Square in Port-of-Spain is among several statues and street names from T&T’s colonial past that are the focus of an ongoing campaign by the Cross Rhodes Freedom Project led by Shabaka Kambon.
The country waas recently challenged by Gaynor Legall, coordinator of the “Slave Trade and British Empire Audit” of historic monuments, buildings, and street names in Wales to “grow a backbone and take charge of all the symbolism on the island.” She did so in her contribution to a panel discussion which was part of the Kwame Ture Memorial Lecture Series, one of the major event hosted in the countdown to Emancipation Day.
Legall said local children grow up surrounded by white supremacist monuments honouring people like Thomas Picton whom she identified among 204 persons commemorated in Wales that were associated with the slave trade. Picton, the first British Governor of Trinidad (1797 - 1803), was celebrated as a British war hero merely because he was the highest-ranking officer to die at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
In July 2020, the Cardiff City Council in Wales voted to remove a marble statue of Picton with a motion stating that heightened awareness about the history of slavery must include a reassessment of the regard in which we hold Picton and many others who were actors and beneficiaries.”
However, in T&T little has been done to remove the names of these colonial-era human rights abusers.
“At this moment there are seven streets named in Picton’s honour, one housing settlement, an apartment complex, and a fort. The Freedom Project’s Cross Rhodes Campaign petition to Parliament to establish a National Committee to address the matter was read and approved in the House of Representatives on July 1, 2020, without a dissenting voice. To this date, there has been no action from the authorities,” said Kambon.