-GPL: British, Irish, Scandinavian, Jamaican
If my regular readers discover that these comments are recycled from 2013 and last February (2017), they are absolutely accurate. But it is not an example of my occasional journalistic laziness. The fact is that these thoughts are always relevant to our Republic anniversary celebration in this month of February.
First of all, our youth must be educated about the fact that the 1763 Berbice year-long rebellion led by house slave Kofi against the Dutch colonisers and slave masters in the colony of Berbice preceded the successful Haitian slave uprising and the American War of Independence which was won in 1776.
Isn’t that something of significance? To be proud about? That it is in our portion of the Americas and the Caribbean that the struggle for liberty and human dignity was initiated? I again respectfully submit that it was the same thirst, the same Spirit which drove both our Kofi and America’s Thomas Jefferson to pursue freedom from bondage, imposed (curiously) by Europeans – the Dutch and the British.
It was Jefferson – who