Opposition Leader Bruce Golding
The following are excerpts from Emancipation Day message from the Leader of the Opposition.
"Securing our future cannot lie in blaming the past. We must no longer depend on others to come to our rescue. There are no more Granville Sharpes or William Wilberforces. But within us there is the tenacity of Tacky who for six months engaged the British Forces in intense combat, the defiance of Sam Sharpe who declared, "I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live in slavery."
"But emancipation did not mean changing the
complexion of our slave masters. It meant becoming our own masters. It did not mean ridding ourselves of the brutality of the white slave owners so that we could turn around and brutalise each other.
"As we celebrate Emancipation Day let us recognise that the emancipation process is not yet complete. Too many of us aspire to be the new slave masters, to exert control over others through the abuse of political power, to exploit others through the control of economic power. And for too many of us, freedom seems to mean the right to deny others their rights.
"A people who are free and proud are a people who stand on their own feet, eat bread by the sweat of their own brow and transform the sweaty cane fields of oppression into a garden of hope.
"Only when Jamaica becomes a land in which the rights of every individual are respected and protected, a land in which opportunities are open to all and not just the few, a land in which wealth is shared by all because all are given the opportunity to share in the creation of that wealth - only then will the process of emancipation be final and complete and only then will the sacrifices of those who gave their lives in the
battlefield and on the gallows be truly vindicated."
