Trinidad and Tobago Emancipation Day

On August 1, 1985, Trinidad and Tobago became the first country in the world to declare a national holiday to commemorate the abolition of slavery.

Obviously, we celebrate the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834. However, individual colonies in British North America (which later became the United States of America) abolished slavery, beginning with Rhode Island in 1774. The first national abolition was declared in the French Revolution of 1789, and maintained afterward only in the independent Republic of Haiti.

Slavery was abolished permanently in the French Empire in 1848, in the Spanish Empire in 1880, and in Brazil in 1888. (Brazil is central, since it received more than one-third of all Africans imported in the slave trade). Also, while we do not often think beyond the European-Atlantic slave trade, the Middle Eastern trade in African slaves was also significant. Opposition to slavery in Africa and Asia was not as strong as it was in the Caribbean, Europe and the United States.

Saudi Arabia and Angola abolished slavery officially only in the 1960s. Although legal slavery by then had probably ceased to exist, some Berber peoples continued to own slaves until at least 1975, and in areas of Africa and Asia, authentic slavery still exists surreptitiously.

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