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Why Commemorate the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans to the Caribbean?[/b][/align]
source:
http://www.jnht.com/bl_conceptpaper.htm
Establishing a Planning Committee:[/b]
In December 2005, the then Prime Minister of Jamaica, the Most Hon. P.J. Patterson launched the Jamaica National Bicentenary Planning Committee with Professor Verene Shepherd (Professor of Social History at the UWI, Mona) as Chair.
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The Mandate of the JNBPC:[/b]
The mandate given to the JNBPC was to find appropriate and meaningful ways to mark the end of the brutal Middle Passage to the former British-colonized Caribbean and to honour the ancestors who contributed to the struggle to end the trade in enslaved Africans in 1807-08.
Conscious of our mandate as articulated by the former Prime Minister and our own understanding of our role, the JNBPC adopted as its slogan: “Our Freedom Journey: Honouring Our Ancestors‿.[/b]
How Did Abolition Come About?:
Briefly and simply, the sequence was as follows: from the moment of capture and forced relocation to the Caribbean, enslaved Africans and other anti-slavery activists inside and outside of the Caribbean fought to end the trade in Africans. Heightened struggle by the 19[suP]th[/suP] century, Haitian emancipation in 1804 and the adoption by Haitians of a regional emancipatory logic motivated an anti-slave trade and anti-slavery movement in the UK and the Caribbean. So successful was this movement that in 1804 the House of Commons passed the TST abolition Bill, but it was thrown out by the House of Lords. In 1805, the British Prime Minister, William Pitt, secured an Order-in-Council indicating that as of 1806, certain Crown Colonies in the BWI (Berbice, Demerara, Essequibo & Trinidad) would no longer be allowed to import Africans (especially to start new plantations). Thus Trinidad (and no doubt Guyana) plans to use 2006 to begin its commemorative activities, with others opting for 2007-08. In January 1806, Charles Fox, Pitt’s successor, moved a resolution for the immediate and total abolition of the TST but no Bill was passed in that year. The Slave Trade Abolition Bill was eventually passed in the British House of Lords by 41 votes to 20 on 25[suP]th[/suP] March 1807. In the House of Commons it had been carried by 114 to 15; and it became law in May 1807 to be effected by 1[suP]st[/suP] January 1808 except for particular cases.
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But Why Bother?[/b]
The questions that have been posed by some in the Jamaican society are, why commemorate such a violent and brutal aspect of our history? Should we not forget the past and focus on the future? Perhaps forgetting that enslaved Africans were victims, not perpetrators of their “shameful‿ condition, some Councillors from the St. Elizabeth Parish Council asked recently: why revisit such a shameful past?
There are several reasons why the JNBPC would not support this perspective.
- First, Jamaicans cannot just ignore its slavery past. As a former colony first of Spain and later of Britain, Jamaica was affected by the sordid episode of the trans-Atlantic trade in Africans, the majority of whom were free people in their own country before capture and shipment. Indeed, whether we wish to focus on it or not, it is a fact that the Caribbean was a primordial site of slavery. The debate over the numbers forcefully extracted from Africa and shipped across the Middle Passage to the Caribbean still rages; but recent quantitative data estimate that the region accounted for 42%, of the estimated 15 million Africans forcefully removed from Africa from the 15[suP]th[/suP] to the 19[suP]th[/suP] century. Among the British colonized Caribbean territories, Jamaica accounted for the majority of the total imported. Estimates by David Eltis indicate that for the period 1519-1867, Jamaica and Barbados received 11.2% and 5.1% of the trade respectively, compared to 4.2% for the Guianas and 3.2% for the British Windward Islands and Trinidad combined.
- A second, if clichéd answer is that those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it.
- Third, all nations need an understanding of their past and a knowledge about the experiences of their ancestors in order to help them as they build a future. As Prof. Rex Nettleford always says, “We cannot drive without a rearview mirror.‿ Among those experiences is the demographic disaster suffered; for slavery took its toll on the enslaved population. The brutality combined with other factors led to a lack of growth by natural means. Jamaica imported close to 1 million enslaved Africans, yet at Emancipation had just around 300,000 enslaved people. This demographic trend, if Thomas Fowell Buxton is to be believed, went against the laws of nature.
- Another reason is that the abolition of the trade was a momentous one in the history of Jamaica. Admittedly, the year 1807 did not see the end of slavery, but it ushered in the phased abolition of a system that involved the forced capture and relocation to the island of over a million of the ancestors of the majority of the Jamaican people.
- Another justification is that the struggle to end the trade involved the enslaved themselves, not just British humanitarians. We need to showcase this aspect of our history and destabilize the view that “Queen Victoria Set Us Free‿.
- The years 2006-08 will provide a space for the Caribbean to reflect on and explore openly its historical relationship to the TST and slavery.
- If Jamaica does not get on board, the nation will be judged harshly by history as well as by others in the African diaspora who have already embarked on plans to mark the bicentennial.
- We also have to recall that our culture has been enriched by the African ancestors; and we can use 2007 as an opportunity to showcase this aspect of our history.
- Finally, we can celebrate the achievements of our ancestors and their contribution to world development. The productive output of Africans and their descendants, helped to transform the Atlantic into a complex trading area, turning it into the centre of the international economy. Franklin Knight has observed that “without [enslaved] Africans and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the potential economic value of the Americas could never have been achieved‿(1991, p. 72); and Eric Williams has long shown the impact that commodities from Africa and the Americas had on British industrial development (1944)
So, preparations for the commemoration of the bicentenary of the abolition of the TST 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 TST on the region and 4) conduct research that will provide the evidence that the region needs to advance its case for reparation from Britain.
The process leading up to a phased abolition, as well as those moments in history which deemed the Trade officially abolished by the British (its illegal continuation thereafter notwithstanding), deserve to be observed and commemorated by the descendants of its victims everywhere. 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.
The enduring legacies of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans are such that they continue to have a negative impact upon human development. Human development is a consistently articulated priority of Caribbean governments and indeed of international agencies supportive of the development agenda. Education systems are designed to pursue human development in the context of national, regional and international development imperatives. In the Anglophone Caribbean there have been commendable efforts, through the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), to address the relevance of knowledge of the history of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans to the development of young Caribbean citizens. These efforts fall short however, if only because in many schools Social Studies has replaced history; not all students study history at the level of the CXC examinations and indeed increasingly fewer students are opting to study history at all. The consequence of these factors, therefore, is that many students may be completing their formal secondary education without an understanding of the ways in which the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans has shaped the Caribbean socio-economic and cultural landscape, and thus without a complete appreciation of some of the very fundamental issues surrounding some of the pressing questions confronting Caribbean educators and thinkers as they relate to the human development of Caribbean youths.
References[/b]
Curtin, P (1969) The slave trade: A census[/i] . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press
Eltis, D (2000), The rise of African slavery in the Americas[/i]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Gift, Sandra (2005). PhD Dissertation on the pedagogical aspects of the TST. UWI, St. Augustine Campus.
Knight, F (1991) “Slavery and Lagging Capitalism in the Spanish and Portuguese American Empire‿, in B. Solow, ed.,
Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 72
Robinson, R. (2000).
The Debt: What America owes to Blacks. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc.
Rodney, W. (2000). How Europe became the dominant section of a world-wide trade system.
In V. Shepherd & H. M. Beckles (Eds
.), Caribbean slavery in the Atlantic world: A student reader (pp.1-10). Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers .
Shepherd, V. A. & Beckles, H. (2005). UWI and the Bicentenary of the Passing of the “British Slave Trade Abolition Act‿ [1807-2007][/i]
Shepherd, V. A. (2005). Plans to Commemorate the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans to the Caribbean[/i]
Williams, Eric (1944). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
Van Sertima, I. (1976). They came before Columbus[/i] .New York: Random House
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