One hundred and sixty-five years ago today, the church bells rang out to signal the end of an institution so degrading to the human spirit, that it is hard nowadays to encompass within the imagination either the full extent of its physical brutality, or the absolute measure of its psychic oppression. Yet those who crowded the churches on August 1, 1838, were not the debased beings a barbaric system had sought to create; they were men and women who had managed to assert their humanity in circumstances where the scope for personal automony had been reduced to the barest minimum.

While as is well known they asserted that humanity in periodic open revolt, they also did so in other more subtle and enduring ways. In a world which denied them both legal and moral personality, they took fragments of African tradition and combined this with what was appropriate from their current experience to create a social and a spiritual universe of their own. In circumstances which appeared hopeless, they invested life with meaning, and in so doing fashioned a framework for survival which could be passed down the generations.

Who cannot be stirred by the story of those denied access by law to specie and Joe notes, who nevertheless painstakingly over many years accumulated small coins by selling the produce from their Sunday labours? And who cannot be moved by the post-emancipation story of them walking for miles down the East Coast to Georgetown pushing wheelbarrows loaded with that small coinage to pay for entire plantations?

These were people who against all the odds had acquired a sense of purpose, had set themselves goals and had worked hard so they would be able to take advantage of any opportunity, however seemingly unpromising, when it presented itself. Surely their industry, dedication and vision is an example to all their descendants for whom, even in the darkest days of slavery, they had struggled to rise above the definitions the planters had sought to impose, so they would have something meaningful to bequeath.

For many decades after 1838, a planter-dominated Court of Policy contrived to block avenues of advancement for the emancipated Creoles in myriad ways. Yet, as A A Thorne, writing on the occasion of the Emancipation Septuagenary in 1908 said, by the time of the Jubilee in 1888 the Africans were making a huge input into creating the economic value of the colony: “They furnished the breakfast tables of the rich and the poor alike with vegetables they cultivated in their small farms; they earned by hard toil, physical endurance and indomitable perseverance in the almost inaccessible hinterland the gold which was the interest on their capital of solid labour and dauntless energy; they purchased the imports on which very high ad valorem duties were placed to furnish necessary revenues for the depleted exchequer...”

He might have added that as a consequence of their recognition of the importance of education, they were also supplying members for the professions. Tutored in the harshest of all possible schools in a socially hostile environment, the first generation of emancipated Africans understood what was necessary to secure personal and group advancement. Fifty years later, African leaders still had no doubts as to what was required. J R Moore, the first black clergyman in the local Anglican church exhorted his congregation in his Emancipation Jubilee sermon to stress “brain power,” and he charged both teachers and parents to do their part in cultivating the minds of the younger generation.

Times may have changed, but what is required for social regeneration has not. As the ancestors knew only too well, it is still hard work, education - and vision.