Emancipated? No, they are still slaves

THE EDITOR: Can you kindly print this letter in Newsday? We recently celebrated Emancipation Day in Trinidad and Tobago. This holiday reminds us of the day when the colonial masters in Britain officially granted freedom to African slaves. It certainly was not for humanitarian reasons but for economic reasons.

However, today while many hypocrites claim to be “emancipated” they still slavishly imitate Western cultural patterns, and cling on to their inappropriate political and economic models. This is not true freedom but modern slavery. It seems that all the blood that was shed during the great slave rebellions in the past have all been in vain because of a craving for the decadent American lifestyle. The greatest threat to the European presence in Guyana was the 1763 Berbice slave uprising, eventually led by the African born Coffy. This marked the first steps to freedom. The rebellion lasted for ten months and sadly Coffy was betrayed by his own black comrades and eventually committed suicide. The rebellion was brutally crushed but Coffy became a martyr and an inspiration for us all.

The 1831 Slave Revolt in Jamaica in which the slaves rebelled against the white slave masters also reflects the rejection of an imperialist system we should follow. On December 27, the strike began and by January 50,000 slaves were in revolt. The revolt was crushed after many whites were killed and over four hundred slaves were left dead. They gladly sacrificed their lives for the freedom we take for granted today. The greatest black revolution was the one led by Toussaint L’Ouverture which led to the establishment of the first independent black republic. As he distributed guns he told his black forces, ‘The gun is your liberty’. He was practical enough to understand that only a revolution with weapons would lead to freedom during that period. In modern times, the Grenadian Revolution of 1979 led by Maurice Bishop is a shining example of a practical move to earnestly emancipate the Blacks in Grenada and to set an example for the rest of us in the Caribbean. Bishop was driven by the racism he encountered in Britain while studying law. Bishop rejected the hopelessly inadequate Westminster system the British had left and instead sought to build a truly democratic society. He also rejected decadent Western Capitalism and instead turned to Cuba and countries that had rejected Western imperialism.

Unfortunately, the revolution ended tragically when Coard and other hardline Marxist ideologies, dissatisfied with the pace of  reforms,  had Bishop and his comrades executed before a firing squad. The present incompetent government we have today certainly does not have the will and determination of the great Bishop to liberate Afro-Trinidadians and other races here in this country from poverty. Not long after he was freed from prison, Mandela visited Cuba to thank Castro for his support while he was in prison. On a public platform in front a large crowd the two freedom fighters stood together and Fidel sent a message to the audience we must not forget, he said “we must never return to the slave barracks.”

RAPHAEL JOHN LALL
Erin