Dear Editor
Emancipation, and the accretion and extension of the ideas and practice of human rights that it helped release, must be placed in its global historical context. It is the single event that, in modern times, could be said indisputably to have:
-freed millions of people of all races across all continents from varying forms of human bondage, either immediately, and then over the last almost two centuries, in a process that continues until today;
-served as an important foundational event on which a multitude of discourse on all kinds of rights would be set. It would deny the oppressors a certain economic arrangement with labour. And later, with ‘race as a concept,’ it would help set in motion, serving as precedent, the language and later the mode of agitation for suffragism/feminism, idigenism native rights, and the entire vocabulary of ‘rights’‘ now fixed in UN conventions and charters.
-facilitated, specifically in the New World and in our own geo-historical location, a major transfer of creativity and art forms, and one of the most significant infusions of intellect and talent into the international cultural spheres. To the extent that the oligarchies allowed the expression and penetration of African forms their cultures were enriched and gained commercial advantage, superstars, innovation. And this in an ever-widening variety of fields.
Abolitionism had been, because of the influence of the Quakers and other movements, given a religious dimension. It was a theme of the revivals in American spirituality for the First Great Awakening. It benefited from the European Enlightenment. Abolition was possible in a religious and cultural context not replicated in other civilisations, including some African, that also had servitude or caste distinction. But more than anything else it was a triumph of the resistance of the enslaved populations, over the centuries, and their steadfast refusal to submit to a certain definition of themselves.
The anniversaries of the abolition of human slavery in the British Empire should, if truth be told, become cause for a general celebration by its beneficiaries world-wide, whatever their race, their sex, or their social condition.
Abolition, was a victory soon to be claimed, or declared inevitable in their scheme of things, by some powers of religious faiths, some secular humanists, believers in absolute economic determinism then latterly, proponents of an almost mystical subalternist evolutionism. In contradistinction to earlier Spanish efforts at abolition or a defeated impulse of the French revolution, and, because of the growing power and reach of the British Empire from the middle of the nineteenth century English abolitionism and its train of ideas became ineluctable, everywhere. France and Spain and Portugal, the other major European slave-owning powers, would be driven out of business by the British Navy harrassment of slave ships in Atlantic waters, and would allow themselves to be converted to the new ideas by sympathetic pro-abolitionist groups and individuals on the British model. Indian gypsy slaves on European soil would be legally declared free in the immediate decades after and all across the Americas abolition took hold.
In the ‘snowball’ effect that follows emancipation, concepts of human rights would grow beyond the conditionalities imposed upon them by culture or epoch, and the acts of abolition would serve as precedent for all the ‘liberations’ in which the universe is now plunged.
Any review of the history of ideas of the past two centuries show, then, that one of the most significant cultural events of the 19th century and in the global construction of ‘modernity’ (and this is in distinction to its economic and political import) was Emancipation. Or more precisely, the, initially only partial, disavowal by the principal political and cultural power of the age, the ‘British Empire’ of the ideological sub-structure that had grown to support servitude and the racism or bilogical evolutionism justifying it. For whatever the scholars say, the public anti-slavery discourse was constructed on moral pillars and stressed the humanity of the African, as in the “Uncle Tom” stories and the few autobiographies of blacks in circulation. The economism that would later, with CLR James and Dr Eric Williams reveal other aspects of the emancipation dynamics, were then mostly hidden from public view. As later the needs for female engagement in the industrial production in the post-war West would be obscured in righteous talk of women‘s right to work, control births and provide sex and companionship outside the constraints of the abstinence of an idealised nuclear family model.
What emancipation, as a category of event, would bring in its train is the primacy of the idea that the rights and dignities of the human being are inalienable from the human condition itself.
And therefore, there had to have been a reform of women’s rights, rights of the child, the handicapped, the foreign born in some places, the sexually ‘othered,’ the caste, religious minority, etc. In short, after the justifications for limiting human rights that ranged from the pious to the pseudo-scientific to the simply preposterous, we now live the marxian anti-thesis of a proliferation of rights, sometimes to their reductio ad absurdum; a phase in human history where the ethical bases for our civilisation have to be re-conceptualised and re-fixed. And this in the absence of the economic determinants felt to have been persuasive or decisive in 1838.
In fact, while the economics of the slave trade and of the primary commodities cultivated in the New World, would play a role in the movement to abolition, as so ably explained by Dr Williams and others, and while the Industrial Revolution would so change the relationship between capital and labour that Karl Marx’s pro-proletarianism could be rooted in contemporary facts of a semi-mechanised mode of production, the primary emotional and moral motors that changed the discourse about Blacks and human rights, were of a different order and located in a different sphere of human thought and reflection.
Emanicaption would be a denial of the racism, with its thesis of inherent incapacity, that could so easily emerge from the feudal mindset and the decaying moral order. The fact is that abolition would represent one end of a bi-polar moral universe in which humanity oscillated.
The other end would be the persistence of modes of thought that lead to Hitler’s Aryan superiority, forced labour and mutilation in the Belgian colonies, and the resistance to change that would cause revolts from India to the Mau Mau in Africa. Emancipation would signify that the people projected as living under the curse of Ham, an idea repudiated by writers from the time of Ibn Khaldun, would be freed from the malediction of perpetual slavery. The Quranic injunction to free the slave would be applied and the effects of the emanicaption of the human spirit would begin to be felt.
Some of history is about why economic growth starts here or there and why social or moral revolutions would spring up in specific parts.
There were elements in British culture that facilitated the acceptance of anti-slavery ideas in cultivated, influential circles. Their influence has to be measured in light of the unrelieved pressure that African slaves and their descendants had been exerting to make many of the colonies tense or ungovernable, and of the fact that the granting of emancipation did not restrain the Afrikaners under the British from creating the morally repugnant apartheid order in a South Africa under their control, or the French from massacreing millions in Algeria in a fight for decolonisation. Abolition would also have helped, serving as example, to bring an end to certain embarrassments in Africa and the Middle East. The Emperor Haile Selassie, a major historical figure and modernising leader, would witness himself greeted and divinised during a visit to Jamaica, while his attempts to abolish slavery at home were, until the nineteen sixties, usually fruitless. Middle Eastern potentates carved into being by British concern for oil and influence would hear themselves reminded of the Quranic injunction to free (not abandon) slaves as they drifted (some as long as the nineteen eighties), into the twenty-first century with social relations that often were not legally ‘slavery‘ (and generally had nothing to do in status or practice with the forms that had developed in the New World), but were not full social equality either.
So, one thing to be remembered is that while emancipation brought to the fore certain ideas, in practical terms freed slaves were abandoned to penury in most colonies, often denied education and voting rights, subject to economic sabotage in Guyana and elsewhere, and, post-independence, often obliged to live reduced to an underpaid labour force. In short, the struggle had to continue. And in this way, in the twentieth century, a Civil Rights revolution, this time fixed on the application of ideas of human rights, would occur in the New World, and would have as important an effect on global human rights ideas as had emancipation a century previously. The civil rights movement in the United States, and agitation in London and Paris, by the mostly West Indian population settled there, would be followed and supported by Caribbean peoples at home, many of whom had already achieved independence, and hence, full human rights as they chose to define them.
In the sixties, when Dr Martin Luther King and Malcolm X of a Grenadian mother, or the Trinidadian Stokely Kwame Toure Carmichael were marching and demonstrating, Burnham and Jagan had already assured for us universal suffrage, and later, equal rights to Main Street and the corporate boardroom. When Cleaver sought a place of refuge, Algeria had already been gained from the French and could, like Guyana, accept battle-worn warriors from the US civil rights movement. It would seem then, that even as Britain would lead most of the rest of Europe in banning first the triangular slave trade and then slavery, the British colonies would generally be among the first to gain independence and to enter into a new relationship with European powers. America, later to become a leader in the propagation of extremist ideas of rights and freedoms, was living a different pace and relationship with a world in which it wished to keep its shores racially white. Or non-Asian at best.
The anti-colonial struggle in India and the entire epic of Gandhian action has been another major factor in the development of ideas of rights in the world. Gandhi inspired Tolstoy and Martin Luther King and thousands of political activists all over the world. India was among the first of the colonies to have gained independence.
It was an example of human will. Of the force of the ‘chan’ that emission of thought and word and gesture that sets in motion the waves of change.
That generates civil disobedience. In terms of the Indian example, not applicable all over the world nor to the South African expression of British racism, Indian anti-colonial activism created a particularly potent method of effecting social change. “Civil resistance/disobedience,” was unleashed upon the world, and it would influence the fashioning of social revolution in many places and human rights activism that marks the refusal to accept the role of the sub-human.
Gandhi’s sayings and writings on many of these questions have been a major intellectual current in the development of universal ideas of rights. And the anti-colonial actions of figures like Nehru and Mohammed Ali Jinnah would influence the tone and direction of pro-independence movements in many places. The World, in the twentieth century, is yet to see the likes of a Cesaire or Derek Walcott, and the examples of pioneering scholarship from all the peoples transported in slavery or indentureship, are numerous.
Each stage of emancipation has brought its benefits. Independence has been followed by a burst of energy, especially in the Caribbean, that despite the frustrations, has helped define us as people. There is the persistence of the little clots of backwardness, indissoluble in their intransigence, all over the world andespecially for us, in Guyana, that have become guardian of racism against this or that people. The world is inexorably headed to the death of old paganisms and the final triumph of revealed truth. During this month of Ramadan let us honour those who fought and suffered and died to give us the right to live standing as free men.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
