THE time has come once again to mark the abolition of slavery in Guyana.
It has been many, many years since slavery was abolished but I can remember well an old lady who spoke to me, a boy in the 1950s, of seeing marks on her mother’s skin, inflicted when her mother was a girl, before the abolition of slavery. No doubt there are unrecognized memories and memories of memories shaping our perception of present day society in which we live and influencing the way we act and behave.
For long periods and in most places in the world, man has made slaves of his fellow man at hand. Europeans made slaves of fellow Europeans; Africans made slaves of fellow Africans; but this last period of widespread slavery when Europeans took Africans as slaves, often with the help of other Africans, was more pernicious and its effect persistent.
This was the period of a European takeover of the Western Hemisphere, the growth of trade, and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
And Europe, perhaps by then reluctant to make slaves of its own people, found convenient African slaves to bring to the Caribbean and much of the Americas under cultivation.
The conditions of this instance of slavery have been rightly decried as showing the lowest levels of Man’s inhumanity to Man. But perhaps the conditions under which slaves worked were not much worse than the conditions under which the poor majority of Europeans worked in those first dark and satanic mines and mills.
Not for the African slaves of this period was there any widespread practice of freedom being granted for good works well done: and even when granted, even today so many years after the abolition of slavery, for all of us with African blood in the Western Hemisphere, our very being declares us Sons and Daughters of slaves.
Not for us, though many times descended, the anonymity of the Greek slaves, freed by his fellow Greek, immediately anonymous among fellow Greeks.
One of the earliest sociologists wrote: “The institution of slavery has disgraced the race and the physiological peculiarities of the race have perpetuated the disgrace.”
Perhaps we Sons and Daughters of slaves must take the lead if this period of slavery is to become just another episode in the history of Man.
Perhaps we must begin acting as if it mattered no more that there was this period of history. Perhaps we must not notice what might be habitual slights; many times these slights are not recognised as being slights and not intended to be so. Perhaps we must even more assume the concerns and the responsibilities of the former masters which were no concerns of slaves.
No doubt there would have developed in creole culture much coming to terms with the fate of slavery if our forefathers were not to yield to melancholy, and not to be overcome by a sense of frustration and futility from continuously testing the chains of slavery.
We must cast aside and put behind us bitterness, despondency, reproach for any others, for what should become another story in man’s history.
Perhaps we should steep ourselves in the attitude of the “Old Salts” -those slaves who had been brought from Africa across the salt seas. They would have known of the life of responsibility for wife and children; responsibility for knowing when it was time to sow and time to reap, and for doing so; responsibility for knowing where and when and how to hunt and fish and needing no master to direct so.