THE Guyanese nationality is a rich amalgam of diverse cultures and religions woven into a complex tapestry of which the common denominator is the suffering that foreshadowed our emergence from colonial domination into an independent Republic.

Our sharing of events began even before the Guyana experience and it is in Africa that the greatest Indian of all times, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, began his fight for liberation against the discriminatory apartheid system.

It is against this background that the entire nation celebrates, not merely the emancipation of our ancestors from slavery, but our emergence into an era where liberation of the mind has produced outstanding achievers in every area of human endeavour.

Slavery is a relative term. One can be enslaved by his love, his hate, societal mores, the defects of his own psyche, and within the boundaries of his own limitations.

But an enslavement where one human being is levelled to the equal, and below, of a beast of burden, is a degradation both to the oppressed and the oppressor, for while one allows the bestiality of his physical being, the other displays a bestiality of a mind domineered by greed and godlessness - which perhaps is a worse enslavement.

The history of the middle passage is much written of and well documented, but it is our foreparents whose forbearance and courage in the face of a dehumanisation and degradation of themselves and souls with whom we are concerned and honouring today.

In 1829, a 300-ton sailing ship weighed anchor from a port in Mozambique on the East Coast of Africa bound for Cuba with its priceless cargo of bartered items - 800 men, women and children naked, shaved, branded and chained - all packed spoon-wise in the hold and above deck: 800 souls that, prior to the shattering of their dreams and lives, had been fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters - all reduced to units of miserable flesh that had value now only according to their work capacity. All other factors that made them individual members of the human race eradicated by their capture and enslavement.

Conditions aboard lent themselves to a situation where, before the ship reached port, 320 priceless lives had been lost to the dreaded scourge of smallpox.

Slavery was not a new development then. It had been a recurrent evil in the annals of history; but the brutality meted out b the colonials to the African slaves has few parallels.

Sugarcane was discovered in the year 325 BCE during the invasion of India by one of Alexander the Great’s soldiers. The Arabs brought it to Egypt, Persia and Spain when they conquered that country in the eighth century. From the latter country, Columbus, on his second voyage, brought cuttings which were planted in the Dominican Republic of the West Indies. He had made another discover in the form of a climate and soil perfect for growing sugarcane.

The Spanish tried to enslave the indigenous people [the various tribes are currently collectively known as Amerindians of these colonies, but they proved unsuited, so, in 1510, the Spanish King Ferdinand sanctioned the transportation of a large vessel of African slaves, commencing a dark period of dehumanization which lasted over 300 years.

Tyranny will always find a ready defence and one noted English political personality of the period during slavery opined: “The possibility of doing without slaves in the West Indies will always prevent the traffic from being dropped. The absolute necessity of carrying on must, since there is no other, be its excuse.” And, safe in the knowledge of the complicity of African accomplices who bartered their own baubles, one British Lord boasted: “As to the supply of Negroes, we have such a decided superiority in the African trade that it is allowed we have slaves one-sixth cheaper.”

A nation which calmly accepted the enslavement and inhuman treatment of its own innocent children were not a people noted for their overwhelming compassion, but the English, having during this period descended to the levels of the perpetration of the greatest evil, also ascended to the heights of the greatest good; and it is outstanding English men and women whose bitter opposition led to the abolition of the slave trade and eventual emancipation of those already enslaved.

They used every possible means in their efforts toward this end and one advertisement read: “B>Henderson Warehouse respectfully informs the Friends of Africa that she has on sale an assortment of sugar basins labeled in gold letters `East India Sugar Not Made By Slaves’.

It continued: “A family that used 5 lbs of sugar per week will, by using East Indian instead of West Indian for 21 months, prevent the slavery or murder of one fellow creature. Eight such families in 19 1/2 years will prevent the slavery or murder of 100.”

The landscape of the African Diaspora is emblazoned with a constellation of stars such as Henri Christophe, whose sword cleaved a way to his country’s freedom, Toussaint L’Overture of whom Wordsworth wrote: “There’s not a breathing of the common wind/ Thy friends are exultations, agonies/ and love, and man’s unconquerable mind”. Olaudah Equiano, who used his mighty pen to fight his people’s battle, the Maroons of Jamaica who defied the colonials by running away and forming the first black community in the colonies; and our own Cuffy, Damon and others sprinkled across the annals of history and the universe in one unending march of triumph over the shackles of environment and circumstance.
Longfellow wrote in `The Slave’s Dream’ verse 1 of which reads:
Beside the ungathered rice he lay, his sickle in his hand
His breast was bare, his matted hair was buried in the sand
Again in the mist and shadow of sleep he saw his native land

And verses 6, 7, & 8, which read:

At night he heard the lion roar, and the hyena scream
And the river-horse as he crushed the reeds beside some hidden stream
And the fiery steed, like a glorious roll of drums, through the triumph of his dream

The forests, with their myriad tongues, shouted of liberty

And the beasts of the desert cried aloud, with a voice so loud and free

That he started in his sleep and smiled at their tempestuous glee

He did not feel the driver’s whip, nor the burning heat of day
For death had illuminated the land of sleep, and his lifeless body lay
Freed of the iron getter that the soul had broken and thrown away

In a situation where dreams and death occasioned the only freedom from utmost cruelty and abject servility of the total being, perhaps none of us could ever have the depth of insight to visualise the sheer guts, to put it vulgarly, yet graphically, it took a people born into conditions of subjection and degradation to rise above their own traumas and carve a path of freedom whereon their descendants could proudly stride.