THERE are a small number of terrible disasters which have afflicted humanity over the millennia which will always be remembered as long as humans exist and these include the ‘Holocaust’ or the murder of the Jewish People by the Nazis and the four centuries of African Slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas.

Defenceless Africans were snatched away from their homes, their wives and husbands and children and dumped into slave ships and taken across the Atlantic Ocean in the “Middle Passage”, a journey of indescribable horror and suffering where a large percentage of the enslaved died before they could reach the Caribbean.  Those who reached the Caribbean islands were then subjected to the worst mental and physical cruelties ever devised by human beings.

In addition to wringing their labour out of the plantation slaves, the slavery system was designed to destroy the slaves’ humanity and to weaken them physically with poor rations and a daily regime of work, which allowed them only time to sleep. The slaves, somehow, were able to defy the slavery system, and most of them retained their physical strength and preserved their humanity, as attested by their refusal to accept slavery as a norm and their regular strikes and protests, which culminated in occurrences such as the Berbice Slave Rebellion of 1763 and the Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1825.

By the turn of the 19th century, Western European countries, which owned most of the Caribbean plantations, were becoming more humanitarian with the influence of the Christian religion and the Philosophe Movement, and there grew anti-slavery lobbies, especially in England and France.  These anti-slavery lobbies were further strengthened by the realisation that slavery was fast becoming an uneconomic mode of production in the growing world of Industrialisation.  England was the first country to react by banning the slave trade in 1807, and the British navy, which was the most powerful in the world at the time, took off slaves in any slave ship they encountered. These freed slaves were resettled in parts of West Africa mostly in Liberia.  It was now only a matter of time before the British would abolish slavery, which Parliament legislated in 1833 to take effect from 1st August 1834.

Full freedom, however, did not take effect immediately on 1st August 1834 since the freedmen had to continue to serve a period of “Apprenticeship” for six to eight years during which time they received a small wage.  The idea behind the apprenticeship scheme was to allow both the former slave masters and slaves to adjust to the new conditions.  The Apprenticeship scheme failed since the slaves felt they were short-changed and wanted full freedom immediately, while the majority of sugar planters were handsomely compensated for the loss of their slaves, and many abandoned their sugar estates.

The 1st August was celebrated as Emancipation Day in 1834, and it was a time of quiet joyousness.  From 5 o’clock in the morning, young people went from door to door calling “wake up, Emancipation Day.”  Housewives began preparing  African dishes such as metem-g, cookup, fried ground provisions such as yams, sweet potatoes, ripe plantains and fish cakes, konkie, cassava, and pumpkin pones.  There was always ginger beer, swank and pine drink.   Attending early church services with the singing of the beautiful Victorian hymns was a custom, and during the day, many, especially the youth, would play a species of cricket known as ‘Batum-ball’ with coconut branch bats and softballs and dominoes, various card games and draughts.  In the evening, there would be dances or “soirees” where the main musical instrument would be African drums.

The sugar planters who remained in business employed their freedmen and, at the same time, frantically sought indentured labour from many parts of the world, finally settling on India.  The planters underpaid their freedmen workers, who were forced to strike. There were two major strikes in the 1840’s;  the first was successful and the workers won slightly better conditions but the second failed, resulting in an exodus from the plantations.

Some of the freedmen settled on any crown land they found available, cultivating small farms.  The others bought abandoned plantations where they established villages in all three counties. Several of these plantations were renamed with names reminiscent of the Emancipation struggle, such as Buxton, who, with Clarkson and Wilberforce, successfully agitated both in Parliament and at public meetings for the ending of slavery, while Queenstown in Essequibo and Victoria in Demerara were named in honour of  Queen Victoria in whose reign slavery was abolished.

The purchase of these abandoned plantations and the establishment of villages by the freedmen remains one of the proudest moments in Guyana’s social and economic history. During the last years of slavery, the slaves were permitted to hold ‘Sunday Market’ where they earned small sums of money, which they carefully saved.  They also saved the small pay they received during Apprenticeship.

With their savings, they took the risk of purchasing abandoned sugar estates in joint ownership, marked out their house lots and built houses and other infrastructure, becoming landed proprietors.  Their erstwhile masters felt disgusted and envious that people whom they regarded with such contempt could, in so short a time, transform themselves into entrepreneurs and landed proprietors and were determined that they should fail.  They neglected the drainage systems and directed surplus water during the rainy season to flood the villages and hamper agriculture.  Despite their hostility, the villages managed to survive and produced a large number of talented men and women who staffed the various government offices, developed the gold industry of the colony and distinguished themselves in various fields in Britain and America.

Accepting the challenges of saving and investment, of risk and entrepreneurship, of educational achievement and creativity and of persistence in overcoming all difficulties and winning success are traditions which our African forebears have bequeathed to the Guyanese nation –  the example and spinoff of the post-Emancipation Village Movement  – so that the new oil-rich Guyana could emerge into one of the best and happiest countries in the world.