The echoes of en­slaved African peo­ple in the New World by the traders, those who sold their broth­ers and sis­ters to the Eu­ro­pean slavers, the ship own­ers, the plan­ta­tion over­lords, the in­dus­tri­al­ists in Liv­er­pool, Bris­tol, Lon­don – the heart of com­merce of the Tri­an­gu­lar Trade –, must res­onate in this pe­ri­od of African Eman­ci­pa­tion Day com­mem­o­ra­tions.

The events must al­ways be con­sid­ered as be­ing of cur­rent sig­nif­i­cance. Sim­ply put, it must nev­er hap­pen again that hu­man be­ings are traf­ficked and en­slaved like cat­tle, the prop­er­ty of oth­er hu­man be­ings. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, how­ev­er, while the phys­i­cal eman­ci­pa­tion of Africans has tak­en place, there re­mains a jour­ney not yet fin­ished in the minds, gov­er­nance and eco­nom­ic sys­tems in which groups of African peo­ple re­main bound.

“None but our­selves can free our minds,” reg­gae icon Bob Mar­ley alert­ed to what is re­quired. In this re­spect, the jour­ney to the recog­ni­tion of free­dom, start­ed a few decades ago by the Eman­ci­pa­tion Sup­port Com­mit­tee, which was a fall­out from the ef­forts of the Na­tion­al Joint Ac­tion Com­mit­tee’s po­si­tion­ing of “the strug­gle” more than 50 years ago, is recog­nised.

It’s quite of­ten a fea­ture of his­to­ry and his­tor­i­cal de­vel­op­ment that what seemed like rad­i­cal, rev­o­lu­tion­ary ac­tion when first ini­ti­at­ed, be­comes the ob­vi­ous ac­tion to have been tak­en to cure the ills and to move to the ob­vi­ous changes need­ed.

Not on­ly that African Eman­ci­pa­tion Day cel­e­bra­tions have be­come the re­al­is­tic ac­tions on the his­toric day to re­mem­ber the in­hu­mane treat­ment of the Africans trans­port­ed to the Caribbean, North and South Amer­i­ca and in­deed to Britain, but al­so a note to the de­scen­dants of the en­slavers, that hu­man­i­ty is uni­ver­sal and equal.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, the lessons have not been learnt by many na­tions and their peo­ple, and ha­tred and in­equal­i­ty still reign in their so­cial, hu­man and eco­nom­ic or­ders. In­creas­ing­ly, there are voic­es be­ing raised right here in the Caribbean for forms of com­pen­sa­tion through repa­ra­tions for not mere­ly the evils of slav­ery, but the un­der­de­vel­op­ment and in­equal­i­ty that were left in the wake of the evils of the in­iq­ui­tous trade in hu­mans.

In the con­tem­po­rary pe­ri­od, spe­cial­ly dri­ven from the Caribbean by his­to­ri­an Pro­fes­sor Hi­lary Beck­les, not on­ly has le­git­i­ma­cy in the ap­peal for repa­ra­tions from Britain and oth­er coun­tries which en­gaged in the slave trade and slav­ery, but in the fact that repa­ra­tions have been and con­tin­ue to be award­ed to oth­er peo­ple and coun­tries who have suf­fered be­cause of the greed and in­hu­man­i­ty of oth­ers.

Ger­many was re­quired to pay repa­ra­tions for its WWII de­struc­tion and mur­der of six mil­lion Jews, the Unit­ed States joined the restora­tion ef­fort con­tribut­ing tens of mil­lions through the Mar­shall Plan to re­store Eu­rope; the Amer­i­cans even recog­nised and made good for the harm in­flict­ed on Japan­ese-Amer­i­cans for the Pearl Har­bour at­tack by Japan. To­day, the con­tin­u­ing pay­back to the Jews for Hitler’s slaugh­ter of six mil­lion of that na­tion’s peo­ple sur­pass­es all that can be con­sid­ered as just repa­ra­tions, more so when the re­pay­ment bur­den is be­ing in­flict­ed on the na­tion of Pales­tine, which had noth­ing to do with Hitler’s evil.

The re­al­i­ty there­fore and so the con­tin­u­ing need for a vig­il against evil, is that slav­ery con­tin­ues in dif­fer­ent forms. The traf­fick­ing in hu­man be­ings, women and young girls for the evil plea­sures of men ex­ists to­day. World civil­i­sa­tion has to eman­ci­pate it­self from con­tin­u­ing forms of slav­ery.