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Even as hundreds celebrated Emancipation Day yesterday, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley urged that lessons be learnt from African ancestors while charting new paths in life.
But economic emancipation, the Prime Minister said, is also equally significant.
Rowley, who spoke at the start of celebrations at the Treasury Building, Port-of-Spain, told the hundreds gathered, “We have a responsibility to understand economic enslavement. It is not only working on the plantation that resulted in enslavement. It is the denial of opportunity and the missing of opportunity that could result in enslavement.”
Noting that enslavement appears to be a feature of the human race, Rowley said it is, for this reason, those who have a history of experiencing the worst should never accept a day of emancipation as simply a day of celebration.
“It requires a reflection and a cognisance of what the future might hold. Freedom always has to be guarded and freedom of opportunity is the greatest emancipation that could ever come to a people.
“Those of you, especially in T&T...let no one write our history and equate the enslavement of African people with any other form of emancipation, for that which our ancestors endured, had no equal brutality and inhumanity,” Rowley added.
He said there must also be cognisance of the legacy that was passed on, adding that the job is not over as history is still being written.
“We acknowledge this day as what has happened in the past and to use the occasion to reflect and honour. We must also use that occasion to accept the responsibility of the present and the future. We have a responsibility to ensure that our children and grandchildren know the true story of emancipation,” Rowley said.
The Emancipation Support Committee (ESC) this year received $1.8 million from the State for its celebrations.
The figure is $200,000 less than what the ESC was given by the Ministry of Community Development, Culture and Arts in 2017.
ESC chairman Khafra Kambon, who said he was pleased with yesterday’s turnout, agreed that a positive collective identity is an important part of empowerment to deal with the many challenges of today, including economic hardships.
He again reiterated that one of the root causes of why people of African descent struggle in this country is due to a system that does not promote or allow them to celebrate their identity.
“One of the things done against Africans was to make us ‘anti-African history’ because we grew up with a sense that Africa was nothing, a backward place. So people don’t have a sense of African history,” Kambon said.
“They know nothing about African history, they know nothing of what Africa was and they don’t learn that in school. Almost everything that you see or hear about Africa sort of confirms that this was a place of backwardness. And then when you see the modern images which are brought to us constantly, they are all negative.”
Kambon noted that while positive steps have been made over the years to erase the stigma of segregation and oppression against blacks in society, there is much left to be done.