PRIME Minister P J Patterson has hailed the emancipation of Jamaicans from slavery in 1838 as a release from “fear and degradation”.

But according to Opposition leader, Edward Seaga, 164 years later three-quarters of the Jamaican people, the descendants of slaves, remained poor and undereducated and have little real access to justice.

The sharply contrasting perspectives of the leaders on post-slavery Jamaica were contained in messages to mark yesterday’s celebration of Emancipation Day, marking the time when Britain fully freed slaves in its West Indian colonies. Slavery was abolished in 1834, but in most territories there was a four-year, so-called apprenticeship period before full freedom.

In his message Seaga said that emancipation was supposed to free slaves to own and develop land, obtain education and enjoy justice.

Yet, he said, their descendants owned mostly marginal, hillside land while 30 per cent of Jamaican students at the primary level and 20 per cent of those in secondary school left illiterate. Three-quarters of all students in secondary schools graduated without a single pass.

The education system, Seaga claimed, substantially served only a quarter of the students in secondary schools.

“Looking at the picture as a whole, what emerges is that three-quarters of the population are not enjoying wealth, education and justice,” said the Opposition leader. “Only one-quarter have really moved up the scales since emancipation 164 years ago.”

Patterson in his message stressed that no society could survive or prosper if the majority of its people are debased for an extended period, without the guarantee of rights.

“That emancipation which we now commemorate means more than the release of the 400,000 slaves from the clutches of the Jamaican slave-masters and the horrendous system over which they presided with impunity for so long,” said Patterson. “Emancipation also released the very slave-master from a system that could not provide any lasting comfort or absolute security, either of mind or body.”

The process, the prime minister argued, promised a society where people could work towards the ideal of sharing the community.

‘It is this inheritance of a free and potentially secure society which is worth celebrating now and beyond,” Patterson said. “This inheritance was brought about in large part by the struggles of our forbears and I call on all Jamaicans, at home and abroad, to honour, respect and treasure the legacy of their historic defeat of what the civilised world now recognises as a crime against humanity — 300 years of transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery.”