Several countries across the globe have agreed to dedicate the year 2007 to an extended series of events, programmes and projects designed to observe the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the infamous institution known as the slave trade. This understanding was reached among Caricom Permanent Representatives who then caused a resolution to be put to the General Assembly of the United Nations where it won support. Member countries have therefore undertaken to plan activities around the declaration of 2007 as the year of the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Trade in Captive Africans.
Since not only Caricom, but the UN and the UK have placed great importance on this bicentenary, the following needs to be stressed, and it is still surprising that this is necessary. There is a persistently nagging tendency in Guyana to regard this occasion, as well as another such as emancipation, as an internal matter among Black people; that it is the concern only of the African community. This approach diminishes the reach and importance of abolition. While the enslaved Africans were at its core and it is of vital importance to their descendants today, it cannot be relegated to a limited in-house affair. Its international impact and wide historical implications have been too great, and it has had meaning for what has happened to the world and what has happened to many other ethnic groups to be thus downgraded. Such relegation has never been the practice where the notorious Holocaust and the Jews are concerned.
In keeping with the United Nations accord, simultaneous events have been arranged in several countries on the dates March 25 (today) and 26 (tomorrow) to commemorate the passage of the act in the British Parliament in 1807 which gave effect to the abolition of the trade in British territories. This brought an end to the treacherous Middle Passage and more than two centuries of English involvement in it which began with Sir John Hawkins’ voyage in 1562. Of course, this trans-Atlantic trade in captive Africans neither began nor ended on those dates. The Portuguese and others had already been engaged in this ‘triangular trade’ for a whole century before the British joined, and other European powers continued to give it legitimacy for many years after 1807. Some accounts date the beginning of this traffic in captive Africans at 1440, and even after abolition there was continued illegal activity.
For the bicentennial programme Guyana has adopted as its theme The Middle Passage to Nationhood in an attempt to capture the idea that the official abolition was a stage in the long march of human/political development up to the present time. Jamaica has planned a lengthy and extremely exhaustive list of activities that does not end until January 2008, while some projects in the UK have been planned around the image of the slave ship The Windrush, and tributes to William Wilberforce.
Even as publicity of the various bicentennial activities gained ground it occasionally becomes necessary to explain the difference between abolition in 1807 and emancipation in 1834/1838. The present focus is on the 200th year since the English abolished the trans-Atlantic trade, but slavery itself continued to be ‘legal’ until 1834 when the enslaved became ‘apprentices,’ allowing a period of adjustment before full emancipation came in 1838.
The enslaved Africans had a number of difficulties with these differences among the three events. This arose from both a misunderstanding and a strong moral position. There is very interesting evidence of this to be found in verses, poems and songs composed by them between 1793 and 1807.
First of all, when they heard about the plans to end the dreaded trade across the Middle Passage, they mistook it for total freedom. When they discovered that it was not, they could not understand why not, and felt that rather than just the trade, the whole of slavery should have been abolished. It is believed that this gave greater push to rebellion. Similarly, when apprenticeship was announced in 1834 they thought it was the real end and protested the idea of waiting four more years till 1838. It went even further because they suspected that the authorities in England had indeed ended slavery, but the local authorities and the planters in the Caribbean were refusing to set them free. Historical researcher John Cowley records dramatic scenes in Trinidad in which the workers argued in 1834 that they cannot accept being “half free.” The King in England was a rich man who could afford to “buy” their freedom, so he could not have given them only “half free.”
Paula Burnett includes a number of the poetic compositions of the Africans in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse. They are not all revolutionary, and some of them resemble the corpus of erotic songs and verses in which enslaved women celebrate love affairs with members of the plantocracy, composed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, two of those which reflect resistance are reproduced here.
Freedom A Come Oh! is a work song composed circa 1807, speculatively, when the trade was about to be abolished and they expected full freedom.
Talla ly li oh!
Freedom a come oh!
Talla ly li oh
Here we dig, here we hoe.
Talla ly li oh!
Slavery a gone oh !
Talla ly li oh
Here we dig here we hoe.
Talla ly li oh
King George me a go
Talla ly li oh
Here we dig here we hoe.
Talla ly li oh
We no wuk no more!
Talla ly li oh
Here we dig, here we hoe.
Talla ly li oh
Massa he a go
Talla ly li oh
Here we dig, here we hoe.
Talla ly li oh !
Freedom a come oh !
Talla ly li oh
Here we dig, here we sow.
The other, Song of the King of the Eboes makes reference to a revolt led by a man who was said to be an Ibo king. Note the way it praises Wilberforce in England, just as King George is invoked in the first song, and blames the local masters – “Buckra in this country” presenting a case for rebellion.
Oh me good friend, Mr Wilberforce, make we free!
God Almighty thank ye! God Almighty thank ye!
God Almighty, make we free!
Buckra in this country no make we free:
What Negro for to do? What Negro for to do?
Take force by force! Take force by force!
Chorus
To be sure! to be sure! to be sure!
