After a pounding Observer editorial and an incisive comment from Professor Rex Nettleford, the last thing I want to do is to pile on the St Elizabeth Parish Council for not supporting plans to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the ending of the monstrous trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans.

Claude Robinson

But we must reflect on the thinking and attitude betrayed by members of the council in rejecting a resolution forwarded to other parish councils from the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation (KSAC) for "meaningful" national observances of the anniversary in 2007.

On the face of it, the council seems to lack a full appreciation for what is being planned and, more importantly, how the observances can actually help us, especially the descendants of enslaved Africans, to use the 'pain and shame' to reclaim our civilisation, fractured by one of history's cruellest interruptions.

Last Sunday's Observer reported that at the regular monthly meeting of the St Elizabeth Parish Council on Thursday, March 10, Councillor Broderick Wright (JLP - Lacovia Division) led the opposition to the KSAC resolution.

Arguing that slavery and the trafficking of slaves were shameful aspects of Jamaica's past, Wright cited what he said was a position taken decades ago by National Hero Sir Alexander Bustamante, founding father of the Jamaica Labour Party, that 'we should celebrate our achievements (but) we should not look back at our shame', the newspaper reported.

Both JLP and People's National Party (PNP) councillors voiced support for Wright's stance and a decision was taken in short order without a vote, "not to support" the KSAC resolution.

This was clearly their considered position because they were repeated in subsequent interviews with the newspaper.
"I do not wish to remember that kind of thing," said Winston Sinclair (PNP - Myersville Division). "Talking about the slave trade and slavery is just reminding ourselves that whites had domination over us. We need to leave slavery behind and forget it. All I want to know is how to develop this country."

On the contrary, I think we need to remember. We need to confront the legacies that still persist, including the lack of confidence in self, that make it so much harder to achieve the very development that Councillor Sinclair so rightly believes we must achieve.

Accordingly, we need to look at what is being planned, why it is important, how it can be used to overcome the very shame that so preoccupied the minds of the people's representatives and community leaders in St Elizabeth, the home of the Maroons of Accompong.

First, the observances are being planned by a 50-member national committee with members drawn from across Jamaica, representing people of all political and religious persuasion; from different organisations and institutions. It was launched by Prime Minister P J Patterson last December.

The committee will focus on the ways in which the enslaved struggled to end the trade and slavery, according to chairperson, Professor Verene Shepherd, professor of social history at the UWI, Mona. "We wish to honour and memorialise them." The slogan for the year is "Our Freedom Journey: Honouring Our Ancestors".

"The monuments that we wish to build and the ancestors we wish to honour" are not related to "white abolitionists" as the St Elizabeth councillors suggested in their statements, she commented.

Professor Shepherd told me that the intention was not to celebrate 'white domination'. "This has never been our objective. At the same time, we cannot distort the history and ignore the entire abolitionist movement. But we believe the contribution of Africans and the Caribbean to the abolition movement has not been told and publicised; and so we hope to help this process," she said.

"We should observe certain official dates in the history of the phased abolition of the trade, but ensure that the events planned for such dates do not celebrate British humanitarianism and the "Queen Victoria set us free" myth.

"While not ignoring the complex and multi-dimensional struggle for abolition, especially on the part of British humanitarians, the aim of the various educational institutions and cultural agencies in the country should be to reinforce the agency on the part of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the ending of the trans-Atlantic slave trade."

Scholars in the Caribbean and beyond have been examining the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans as a phenomenon in world history for over 100 years.

Walter Rodney, the late Guyanese historian who some readers will remember as the focal point in the 'Rodney Affair' in Jamaica in 1969, has written extensively on 'how Europe underdeveloped Africa'.
He makes the point that from the 15th century, and continuing for four-and-a-half centuries, the conduct of the trans-Atlantic slave trade contributed to the development of Western Europe to the same degree that it contributed to the underdevelopment of Africa.

Some 15 million Africans may have been uprooted and brought to the Caribbean and the Americas under the most inhumane conditions of the Middle Passage. Their contribution to economic development of Europe and America cannot be contested.

"The forced relocation of Africans to the Americas and the productive output of such Africans and their descendants, helped to transform the Atlantic into a complex trading area, turning it into the centre of the international economy," according to a background paper prepared by Prof Shepherd and Dr Sandra Gift.

Legacies of Slavery

We know that the enduring legacies of the slave trade, slavery and colonialism continue to have a negative impact upon human development.

The continued display of the legacies of African slavery in western modernity: issues of low self-esteem; perceptions of a weak Caribbean identity; African-Caribbean self-disparagement; the internalisation of the myth of Black inferiority and White superiority have been identified by several Caribbean scholars as being among the legacies of slavery to be confronted in the contemporary Caribbean, say Shepherd and Gift.

In other words, we see the legacy in the constant efforts to lighten the skin or change hair texture through chemical interventions or choice of sexual partner; the preference for foreign food, fashion and expertise.
I agree with the organisers of the commemoration that it 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 trans-Atlantic slave trade on the region; and
4)conduct research that will provide the evidence that the region needs to advance its case for reparation from Britain.

Reparation, of course, is not easy to calculate, nor is it easy to determine the particular beneficiaries. But I think it is important that we establish the principle as stated by Shepherd and Gift.

"Those who participated in slavery in the Caribbean and in the Americas generally long after the institution was declared illegal in their own countries (and long reminded of its inhumanity by philosophers), should adopt reparation, if only as an act of reconciliation."

The premise of the argument is both simple and compelling: The slave trade and slavery were crimes against humanity and, as we have seen with several other crimes against humanity - including the holocaust - such crimes should not go unpunished.

President Jacques Chirac of France and the Anglican Church in Britain have apologised for their countries' roles in slavery. That's a good step. They need to go much further and we should encourage them to take that other step and acknowledge the principle of reparation, even as an important symbol of reconciliation.

In Jamaica, we also need to do a lot more towards our own reconciliation between the descendants of the great house and plantation field. Only the myopic could argue that we have not made progress, but we have to take more steps towards healing the divisions of class and race.

Now that the St Elizabeth Parish Council has again put the issue on the public agenda, it may be an opportunity for the organising committee to mobilise broader national support, including the help of corporate Jamaica, that can contribute to financial and human resources to ensuring the success of the events.

It is also an opportunity for the media to publish features and documentaries on the contribution of our ancestors to ending the trans-Atlantic trade in Africans, to the abolition of slavery and our role in laying the foundations for the political independence that Councillor Wright called one of the "positives in our history".

If we in the media can join with the organisers of the commemoration to communicate messages that "empower, uplift and enlighten; messages that can give hope to those who despair and convey a sense of self-worth to those who may feel worthless", then we would have made a difference.

As Professor Shepherd said, "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."

Claude Robinson is senior research fellow in the Mona School of Business, UWI.

kcr@cwjamaica.com

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