Colonialism’s long and everlasting footprint is still so deep in the Caribbean psyche that we, as a community of majority descendants of enslaved Africans and Indentured Indians, still see nothing wrong in continuing to pay homage to and mechanically remember acts and actions that grind against our own history, from honouring those who subjected our fore-parents to elements of The Worst Crime Against Humanity known to Humankind (Slavery), to celebrating holidays that simply have no place in today’s Caribbean quest for truth about and Reparations for Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, Apprenticeship and Indentureship.

Take the observance of August 1st as Emancipation Day in the (British) Commonwealth Caribbean.
This colonial holiday has been observed for as long as any Caribbean person alive can remember, but most not really understanding why it was declared.
But since 1998, the United Nations (through UNESCO) has been calling for observance of August 23 as the International Day for Remembering Trans-Atlantic Slavery and its Abolition Caribbean Community (CARICOM), a call governments have absolutely ignored.

Why the UNESCO call? Because our infatuation with the August 1 holiday has blinded too many to too many facts about Emancipation and slavery that ought to be known to better understand where we stand today, what we should really observe on August and whether it should be a celebration.

August 1, 1834 is an important date in the calendar of Britain’s role in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the holiday is/was meant to celebrate Emancipation of Slaves on that day.
August 23, 1791 observes the date of the start of the Haitian Revolution that led to independence in 1804 and made Haiti – a Caribbean nation — the first in the world to outlaw slavery and guarantee that any enslaved person who lands on its shores will be free.

British West Indians and now Caribbean people have, for 88 years, been made to believe August 1 was the date Slavery ended in the British Empire.
But freedom was conditional for the enslaved, who had to still slave for another four years for their same masters, on the same plantations, through apprenticeship, which was more of a ruse to find time and ways to replace slave labour with Indian labour through Indentureship.

Generations of Caribbean people’s interpretations of transatlantic slavery have been framed from school days by British colonial history books like ‘Nelson’s West Indian History’ and ‘New Worlds To Conquer’ that made British colonialism look and sound good.

On the other hand, nothing was ever taught in colonial history books about the significance of August 23 to Caribbean, African and world history as the date of the start of the end of Trans Atlantic Slavery, which, through Chattel Slavery, legally reduced African humans to private property after kidnap/capture in their own homeland, insured for the risky passage across the Atlantic, sold by auction on arrival and forced to slave on estates for the rest of their short lives.

It is because of the particularly brutal nature of TransAtlantic Slavery that the colonial historians painted it as a Great Triangle with a Middle Passage that Europe invented instead of the triangular trade of death it really was – and why Emancipation Day was sold as a day the enslaved automatically became free thanks to the mercies of the British monarch.
Successive Caribbean governments, over the past six decades of independence, have traditionally ‘celebrated’ August 1, if only for tradition’s sake, most citizens in CARICOM nations using the holiday for reasons other than finding out what the holiday really represents.

But August 23 ought to be explained in Caribbean history texts today as the date that not only started the process that led to the establishment of the world’s first Black Republic, but also legally and institutionally ended the TransAtlantic slave trade and showed enslaved people and the enslavers – worldwide – that freedom is possible and slavery can be outlawed.
The Europeans combined to kill the Haitian revolution, after which France punished Haiti by demanding 150 million French Gold Francs (US $21 Billion today) as reparations for losses of property (land and slaves) by the French planters, which Haiti started paying in 1825 and only ended in 1947.

Haiti’s history is part of CARICOM’s and its historical achievements also belong to the region and should therefore be shared and highlighted, promoted and defended with regional pride.
But alas, that’s just not so.

Governments have had a very long time – 24 years since the UN’s call — to (at least) observe August 23, to correct the historical anomaly of still paying blind tribute to a purely colonial holiday – and for all the wrong reasons.

More needs to be done to better explain what Emancipation, Apprenticeship, Abolition and Indentureship really meant to Britain and Europe, vis-à-vis the eternal contribution of what started in 1791 in Haiti (two years after the French Revolution of 1789) to the eventual abolition of slavery worldwide.
The process of rewriting the Caribbean’s true history is ongoing one, but must not only be left to historians and publishers.

Thirst for knowledge is eternal and never quenched, so those who know more must share more with Caribbean people, who are now — more than ever – waking up to the fact that we know less of what we should know more about us.

Our long slumber was not our fault. But it is entirely our responsibility to learn, teach and share more about who we really are as Caribbean people, because, as has been said and sang, taught and reminded by so many, none but ourselves can free our minds from the mental slavery inherited and sustained over generations.

In this time when the UN is encouraging the world to learn more about people of African and Indian descent, governments must start thinking of treating and explaining Emancipation and Indian Arrival Days for what they really were, while giving appropriate regional recognition to August 23.