03 Aug 05

 

THE CARIBBEAN celebrates emancipation from slavery today. It was on 1st August one hundred and seventy two years ago when freedom was won.


Emancipation Day is celebrated each year in all the former British colonies in the West Indies.

Set aside as an anniversary marking the birth of liberty from legalised control, violence and enforced labour, many West Indians and their extended families and friends will be coming together to remind each other of their long walk to freedom.  

Although abolished some 26 years earlier in 1807, it was not until the 1st August of 1833 that the British MP and social reformer - Thomas Buxton, presented the Emancipation Bill before the British Parliament.

Embrace

The ensuing Act then came into effect one year later on 1st August 1834. On that day it seemed as if history had been created for slaves throughout the West Indies.

At last, all peoples of the West Indian colonies would, through legal emancipation, be free to embrace their liberty.

However, and not for the last time, the history of Black people was to record that surviving truism -  power is never freely given.

Amidst the joy and celebration, the small print emerged and a dulling realisation that full freedom would not be granted immediately.

After all, slavery had been a part of the British way of life, not only in England, but across the imperial kingdom. Lest we forget, many English merchants had become very wealthy by trading in slaves and they were not about to give any of that power away overnight.

Collusion

Specifically, chattel slavery, had enforced the absolute legal ownership of a person or persons, and this had included the power to buy and sell a human being as we do products today.

The horrors of slavery re-enacted.
In an attempt to preserve power, if not the status quo, it was further ordered that ‘ex-slaves’ would be apprenticed to their former master for a minimum of four years.

Thus a period of 'apprenticeship' was put in place to bridge the gap between slavery and complete freedom.

History now teaches us that the process of ‘apprenticeship’, most certainly born out of the prevailing slave owners culture of denial, did not achieve their own desired outcomes.

This was because the spirit of collusion and compromise, upon which the economic success of the previous system had depended, was now broken. Liberty, freedom and justice were now renewed goals.

Breathe

It has been a long walk to freedom for those leading the struggle for equity. We know that many of the early slaves lost their lives in reactive and un-coordinated bids for freedom.

Indeed, the recorded and organised lobby for the abolition of slavery begun nearly 300 years ago during the early 18th Century.

In a famous statement countering the legal basis for slavery at the time and attributed to the Judge - William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield in 1772, it was recorded that "the air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe, and so everyone who breathes it becomes free.

Everyone who comes to this island is entitled to the protection of English law, whatever oppression he may have suffered and whatever may be the colour of his skin."

Whilst Judge Murray’s ruling asserted the legal basis for the prohibition of slavery within British borders and jurisdiction, the same ruling did not apply to other nations.

Concerted

Therefore, the United States and the numerous British colonies at that time, continued to operate a system of legal slavery as an integral part of their respective economies.

A statesman named William Wilberforce assumed leadership of the antislavery movement in England and, in 1807, he helped persuade the British Parliament to pass a Bill outlawing the slave trade throughout the British Empire.

The ban was enforced by significant agents of the establishment, including the Royal Navy.

However, even after 1807, slaves were still held, though not sold, within British States. It took a concerted campaign led by Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and members of the so called ‘Clapham Sect’ – a proactive network of like minded social reformers - to assert the call for abolition of all slavery throughout the entire British Empire.

So it was, in 1833, that the Slavery Abolition Act was passed by the British Parliament and it was this law which ordered all slaves under the age of six be freed immediately.

£20 million be paid in compensation to plantation owners in the Caribbean, where homes had been lost. A canon of statutes followed and on 1st August 1838 apprenticeship was abolished, and apprentices in Jamaica and other Caribbean islands became "full free".

It would be another 25 years before Abraham Lincoln’s First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 before a framework was set up for the freeing of all slaves throughout the United States of America.

Emancipation, means freedom from slavery. "Rejoice I am slave no more."

Source: blink.org.uk