That’s why I’ll share these notes with you, as I encourage the real and pretentious descendants of the sun to contemplate slavery, emancipation and the present condition for this entire month. And beyond.

Naturally, no group should be entitled to subjugate any other group for that first group’s gain. None should own, control and make serfs, bondsmen or slaves of others. The highest forms of human relationships should be built or evolved from mutually agreed upon contracts. Free and voluntary. Based on acceptance, even love. In Teachers College we learnt that a few people actually did not mind being servants for lower castes - or even slaves! Credit that to their state-of-mind then. Ignorance? Defeatism?

Then there was the usual history assignment: “Was slavery born of racism? Or racism of slavery”. Lovely, stimulating sometimes heated debate. What’s your take? After all, “White” people enslaved White people and “Black” people enslaved and profited off their own.

Against the background of the next two paragraphs then, let’s consider the consequences of Emancipation.

Some of us would have studied or re-read of the “contributions” the Slave Trade and West Indian Slavery made to making Britain “great” - economically. We would have re-visited the Triangular Trade whereby the British sent their manufactured goods to Africa and exchanged them for slaves.

Across the Middle Passage, those ships then unloaded their cargo of African human “property” in the West Indies and Demerara and Berbice. The empty ships then loaded up with sugar bound for Britain once again. From developing the great shipyards of Glasgow and Liverpool and the metallurgical industries, the manufacture of wool and the export of refined rum and sugar to the establishment of Insurance and banking companies, slave labour and its trade enriched the Mother of the Colonies.

But then, we would have garnered, stiff competition from its thirteen independent-minded North American Colonies and the constant conduct of France in the then “world economy,” combined with the humanitarian concerns, to bring an end to the trade in slaves in this part of the then British Empire. Granville Sharp’s medical and political attention to an ex-slave in Britain, the emergence of the London Mission-ary Society and the “conscience” evoked in such men as Lord Mansfield, Wilber-force, Clarkson, Henry Dun-das, Pitt, Buxton and the Poet Cowper precipitated the end of the trade, then in 1834, the Emancipation of the Slaves in these parts.

It is what happened immediately after Emancipation here that we should reflect much more upon, I feel. To really appreciate how little we’ve really achieved - as an “emancipated, liberated, independent people”.

Obviously Emancipation was inevitable - for all of the reasons which caused it. But consider these facts.

Emancipation -
Compensation and Consequences

When, in 1834, the slaves were freed - physically and legally - even that “first freedom” was conditional upon their becoming “apprentices” still to work under certain constraints. The slaves received nothing for the earlier holocaust of the millions of their fellows; for the centuries of contributions to the wealth and power of Britain. All they actually received was the first of August as a day of rest to attend church and the indication that they had to register to continue their toil, this time as apprentices under the same slave masters.

But the Planters? The former slave masters? Well those in British Guiana received some $21,000,000 (US) as compensation for their various “losses”. 85,000 slaves were “freed”. The governor of the day, Sir James Carmichael-Smyth, attended St George’s Cathedral in the morning and St Andrew’s Kirk in the afternoon. These were churches of the State.

The truth is the Africans were thrown, literally, on their own. There was no grand scheme to house or settle them - to pay them money for starting up. It is to the eternal credit of our own “Guyanese” freedmen that they had saved enough to purchase abandoned plantations; to create the first semi-formal Co-operative societies and a system of local government. But whatever the amounts of their endeavours are quantified into, the sabotage, the importation of their replacement, all conspired to relegate the Black man into drawers of water and hewers of wood, generally. Franz Fanon’s wretched of the earth. Those Africans who pulled themselves up into prosperity, who exhibited and demonstrated the fierce pride of pre-Emancipation protests, who made it despite unfair competition and all that colonialism had to offer, are to be congratulated and immortalised.

No wonder one British documentary on the subject actually justified the immigration mass movement towards Britain and North America by the descendants of those slaves. The trouble with that immigration is this: even as they can justify going to reap some of their own wealth created hundreds of years ago, they take their brains and skills right back to the oppressors’ descendants - further sustaining their enrichment. Can they, can we ever win? One hundred and sixty-nine years after “Emancipation”?

A Cokeless economy?
Pause to reflect that this past Wednesday marked eighteen (18) years since Forbes Burnham made his grand but sudden exit from the Guyana he had created - or foisted - for many of us.

Recall that his rigid restrictions on imported foodstuff, the use of foreign exchange and some basic freedoms, had plunged us, in 1985, into a social, political and economic morass. Especially economic. Just before and after his passing therefore, a robust blackmarket underground economy had emerged to virtually keep this country alive. Witness the establishment of the “poor” Guyanese trader - despised, or admired, throughout the Caribbean and beyond.

Well, since my last two pieces, “Cocaine gave them a start” and “Forgive me, my creator”, which explored the moral dilemma posed by the normally-good who support cocaine-funded enterprises, and the reality of the pervasive power of the narco-trade in this blighted society, I’ve been asked another powerful question.

“Fenty, do you really believe”, the knowledgeable, cynical, sometimes immoral fellows asked, “that over the past five years this economy could have survived without the input of cocaine funds in many sectors? Especially commercial?” I would assume a serious countenance in response. I would lamely then reply “yes”. And when the boys asked me to quantify any recent significant, strategic investment captured by government, I ask for time to get the facts and figures from the ministries, the President’s Office and Go-Invest. And I say too, that just as I can’t prove the drug lords’ guilt in court, I have no real evidence that it is their money which keeps us surviving. What do you think?

August Cultural
Well, according to our advertisers, entertainment “promoters”, and many young TV presenters, our Guyana summer, which I presume will precede our very own autumn and winter later this year, is here.

For older me, the unseasonal rain still makes this period the August Holidays! And I join in welcoming all the sports teams, Guyanese and others who are in our kind of town right now. I look for hope in things cultural. Emancipation creativity was joined by good mini-TV biographies of Roy Geddes and father Bernard Darke. The Henry Josiah and Christmas Annual literary competitions were launched last Saturday. I am inspired to produce a series of publications themed, unsung heroes.

And this August also accommodates Carifesta in Suriname and Folk festival in New York. Shouldn’t we market Mashramani at these events? And at Caribana and Labour Day? I’m beginning to like this August. Despite my ever-present personal problems.

Sun and Rain
1) Gosh I realise the work that should be done when I hear how much the young GBC announcer did not know about Buxton’s history.

2) When and how could our rich hinterland be made really accessible to our coastlanders? Before the Brazilians and other foreign friends?

3) A personal bit of humour has to do with my New York-born granddaughter on her first visit to Guyana. She loves the animal that shouldn’t be on the road but naturally hates the mosquitoes.

On my TV show and in the other media, she has become familiar with the DEC salt campaign which uses a jingle with words I couldn’t openly use when I was eleven.

Wonder what her mother will say when she sings the ditty back in NY? The one about elephantiasis and hydrocele - by other names?

`Til next week!