Change how we teach African history

This according to cultural activist Eintou Pearl Springer who again lamented the lack of local and especially local African history taught in schools.

Speaking to Newsday yesterday after the performance of her play, “Freedom Morning Come” at the Treasury building, Port-of- Spain, Springer said none of the country’s children knew anything about the history the play depicted so it was important that people fight the “foolish education system” that did not properly represent the history of the country.

“It is a crime that continues the enslavement of the mind...

(Marcus) Garvey said if you don’t know where you come from, how would you know where you’re going? Our children do not have any sense of who they are, what they went through, because it’s nowhere. It’s not in the schools, it’s not in the churches, it’s not on the television, so our people are dislocated from themselves.

It’s critically important.” She said crime did not occur in a vacuum, but that one of the reasons was when people felt “dislocated and disowned.” She said African people were treated like aliens and they feel like aliens because there were “no marks of remembrance or history.” “The presence of the African is not recognised in any of the place names, as if Africa had nothing to do with this city. There’s not even a placard on the Treasury Building to say the Emancipation Proclamation was read here.” In addition she said buildings important to the country’s African history were not being recognised as historical sites, while some were torn down, such as the home of lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams who organised the First Pan-African Conference in London in 1900. “Nobody seems to care about these thing. This lack of sense of self and non-recognition of the role of Africa is having an affect on the psyche of our young people.” Springer said part of the process of reparation must be the telling of the African story from the perspective of the African.

Hence, Freedom Morning Come, which commemorates August 1, 1834 when the Emancipation Proclamation was read.

The Emancipation Bill was presented in Parliament by Thomas Buxton in 1833 and it came into effect on August 1, 1834. The Bill gave the slaves apprentice status, rather than complete freedom, for a four- to six-year period and thousands of slaves gathered in front of the Treasury Building to protest.

The production highlighted six slaves who sat in front of the Treasury Building while waiting for the proclamation to be read.

The slaves heckled and jeered at the governor while he sat inside speaking to a representative of the planters and slave owners.

The two men sat inside complaining about the behaviour of the slaves, how they rejected the proposed plan of four years apprenticeship for domestic slaves and six years for field slaves.

They spoke of how the slaves were refusing to work even though they would work fewer days and get paid because they believed the crown granted them full freedom. They also spoke about how much money the planters were losing, how much money the planters would be paid for the loss of their slaves, and the plans to bring indentured labourers to fill the gap of the slaves once they were completely free.

Meanwhile, the slaves sat outside recalling some the evils they and other slaves experienced over the years, including being whipped, hanged and beheaded for trifling matters.