THE time has come again to mark the abolition of slavery in Guyana and the world at large.
For long periods and in most places around the world, Man had made slaves of his fellow Man: 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, has been most pernicious and its effects persistent.
This was the period of European take-over 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  the Caribbean and much of the Americas under cultivation.
It has been many years since slavery was abolished, but I cam remember well many old people who spoke to me when I was a boy in the1950s, of seeing marks on their skins, inflicted when they were young  boys and girls, before the abolition of slavery. No doubt there are unrecognised memories and memories of memories shaping our perception of present-day society in which we live and influencing the way we act and behave.
The conditions of this instance of slavery have been rightly decried as showing the lowest level of Man’s inhumanity to man. But perhaps the conditions under which the slaves worked were not much worst 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: 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. As 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. We must cast aside and put behind us bitterness, despondency, reproach for any others, for what should be another story in man’s history.
Let us remove any remaining chips on our shoulders; encourage and help any fellow sons and daughters of slaves to do the same.
Let us recognise that many fellow sons and daughters’ slaves in the Western Hemisphere are earning and are being granted widespread recognition – Bob Marley, Obama, Michelle Obama, Michael Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell, Dr Walter Rodney, Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham, Samuel Hinds, Errol Barrow, Eric Williams, Grantley Adams, Hugh Desmond Hoyte. They are being and have been the best that Man can be and  reached the highest heights that man can reach.