Edward Seaga

The sins of slavery did not end with emancipation. Some have endured from that time. These are postscripts of slavery.

On August 1, 1838, Jamaica woke up to find that, as of that day, all the able-bodied men among the 310,000 freed men, women and children were suddenly unemployed. This was a devastating blow for a small country with no experience in dealing with unemployment and no resources to tackle the problem.

The impossibility of gainful employment being found immediately by a country without resources, would be daunting to even the best of the post-war leaders who had to re-build their bombed-out countries in a few short years.

SOLUTIONS

Two solutions presented possibilities as the only recourse to these conditions of desperation. A great many of the former slaves took to the hills to plant the food products they learned to grow in their spare time as slaves. They sold the produce mostly to each other. But as they all grew the same products, the market was relatively small and the scope of small farming was too limited to absorb all the unemployed former slaves. Some returned to the plantations to work for starvation wages and the provision of substandard housing. These two solutions, however, were still inadequate to absorb all the surplus of unemployed labour.

A third option became available - migrating to neighbouring countries where there were openings available for unskilled labour. This option materialised just in time. With unemployment and increased prices causing great unrest, a native Baptist deacon, Paul Bogle, and a few of his flock walked 26 miles to see the Governor, Sir Edward Eyre. They sought his assistance to relieve the suffering of the people. Eyre rejected the complaint. The people were told that, in answer to another petition, Queen Victoria had stated that it was "from their own efforts and wisdom that they must look for an improvement in their conditions". But what 'efforts' were possible if there were few jobs and little land? What wisdom was available for thousands who suddenly found themselves in this plight if they were deliberately kept ignorant for 300 years? This rejection led to the Morant Bay Rebellion, which was brutally put down. But the people got the message - there was no assistance to be expected in their own land.

Much of the surplus labour migrated to Central America, where jobs did exist for them to "use their own effort and wisdom" working in the banana plantations and the building of the Panama Canal. Despite the thousands who went, a surplus of thousands of unemployed still remained.

Over the past 150 years, many thousands of Jamaicans have migrated to find opportunities which did not exist in their own country. They continued to leave behind, even today, thousands who are unemployed because they lacked opportunities to employ their own efforts and wisdom to improve their conditions. The post-emancipation economy could not provide enough jobs to supplement the dwindling capacity of a dying sugar industry, nor did the post-emancipation society provide the educational base to convert the ignorant and unskilled to men of wisdom.

The enduring sin of slavery is that both these conditions still exist today. There continues to be a huge reservoir of unskilled workers who cannot find work to apply "their own efforts for the improvement of their conditions". The same enormous problem still exists with 75 per cent of all graduates from secondary school leaving without any skill or a single pass in school leaving exams. They have no 'wisdom' to which "they must look for an improvement in their conditions". So it was in the past; so it is in the present:

GREATEST SIN SLAVERY

One of the greatest sins of slavery was the destruction of the family unit. Enslaved men in Jamaica did not arrive here from family backgrounds in which they were itinerant 'baby fathers'. They came from settled family structures of different types in which the father was an ever-present conjugal figure. It was here, under the conditions of slavery, that they were induced by slave owners to be promiscuous breeders in order to increase their progeny to multiply the number of slaves in the financial accounts of the plantation or in the fields of their masters. They learned their lesson well, breeding females and leaving them to be the burden-bearers who raised the family.

The enduring sin of slavery is that 40 per cent of all households today have no father in residence. So it was in the past; so it is in the present.

The necessity of migration as an outlet for employment solved an economic problem. But, it created a social problem by removing the father-figure from the household. Worse yet, migrant mothers must now be added to the list of absentees from their families. Even more so than absentee fathers, their absence is felt in the household.

The pool of surplus unskilled labour, which has been a characteristic from emancipation, continues to endure, forcing thousands to leave their homes and families to seek work abroad or to languish as unemployed. So it was in the past; so it is in the present:

But there is no greater sin of slavery than the systematic brain washing that occurred for over 300 years that instilled a belief in the second class character of the people of African descent who, in the words of Marcus Garvey, were depicted as: "A cheaper model made by God, a second-rate product devised from inferior materials and, therefore, not expected to give first-class performance; a less carefully designed instrument specifically created for menial work requiring little thought or skills."

And because every agency of education and communication in the new world tended to be tainted by this belief in inequality, the people of African descent themselves received a distorted image of their own humanity, directly or implied in books, pictures, lectures, seminars and on social occasions, whether in school, at home, at the workplace, or in places of recreation and worship.

This "distorted image received by people of African descent" continues to haunt their psyche until today as an enduring sin of slavery.

But Garvey also said: "You will be victims as long as you believe that you are less than others. No matter how respected the fount of information may be, if it tells you that you are less, it is lying to you. Cast it out, flush out every vestige, suggestion or insinuation that your colour is a badge of inferiority. Take the beam out of your eyes, rid your system of it and purge it from the mother's milk upon which your children are fed."

GARVEY'S CHALLENGE

Garvey went further. He issued a challenge: "Why hammer at gates where you are not wanted? Build your own mansions, enterprises, nations and governments. Build them so powerfully that the world will have no choice, but to take them seriously."

Each succeeding generation of Jamaicans has responded more zealously to Garvey's challenge. In music and athletics, the world has come to our gates to take notice. Race, colour and class relations are no longer the embittered social battlefield of the past. Boundaries have shifted, and even if not as fully as is necessary, new boundaries are continually being defined.

But there still remain the stigmas of a hardened core of unemployables made so by an equally hardened core of the illiterate, unlearned and ignorant.

These are the residues of slavery, nearly 170 years after emancipation. They seem destined to linger on because the focus is on the ills of the past rather than on performance for the future.

Nowhere in present plans or performance is there realistically a genuine hope that the dungeons of the education system will be opened to free the minds of captive youths so that "by their own wisdom and effort they can look for improvement in their conditions".

Garvey pointed the way in his powerful message which has taken root and grown in strength, overpowering some of the legacies of slavery which dehumanised people of African descent.

Ignorance is dehumanising too; so is unemployment. But there is no powerful mission capable of overpowering them.

Two hundred years ago, the first step was taken to snap the chains of slavery through cessation of the slave trade in British territories, in 1807. REVERSING THE LEGACY

If 14 days of cricket is worth the expenditure of US$100 million how much more should be invested in reversing the legacy of slavery from ignorance to knowledge and unemployment to employment. Every effort should be devoted to the singular task of mobilising whatever is necessary to blot out the remaining intractable sins of slavery which continue to dehumanise the people.

This should be the focus and the theme of the recognition planned for the year 2007.

The perceptions of Dr. Frederick Duhaney, Member of Parliament, who, in 1963, summarised in Parliament the shameful postscripts of the sins of slavery, must not be allowed to continue:

"One out of every 10 Jamaicans is living in England.

Two out of every 10 do not know their mother.

Three out of every 10 do not know their right name.

Four out of every 10 do not know their birth date.

Five out of every 10 cannot read or write.

Six out of every 10 are illegitimate.

Seven out of every 10 do not know their father.

Eight out of every 10 do not know how they are governed, and

Nine out of every 10 do not know the Ten Commandments."

So it was in the past; so it is in the present; and so it will be if we still continue to bemoan the pain of the past instead of promoting the potentials of the future.

Edward Seaga is a former Prime Minister. He is now a Distinguished Fellow at the UWI. E-mail: odf@uwimona.edu.jm.