Tomorrow, August 1st, we commemorate Emancipation Day – as we have done since the occasion was performatively given meaning on August 1, 1838. It was the day on which – after two hundred years of being shipped across the Atlantic and enslaved to work on the cotton, coffee, and sugar plantations of first the Dutch and then the English – African Guyanese were finally free. It is important, therefore, that we appreciate what is meant by “commemoration” in general, and emancipation in particular.
The dictionary informs us that to commemorate is to “call to remembrance”; to mark an event or a person or a group by a ceremony or an observance or a monument of some kind. The most salient feature of commemorations is that they attempt to prod our collective memory in some noteworthy way. A decade ago, the Irish who have had a very conflicted past as we have, decided to examine the commemoration process as they launched a “decade of commemorations”. Their findings may be useful to us.
They stated that “Commemoration marks out the special from the ordinary, or the extraordinary, from the everyday and acts of commemoration, is about retaining in the memory or committing to the memory, events, developments, and people from the past. When we mark anniversaries or other important historical or cultural movements, we assign meaning to an event, occurrence, or lives of individuals or groups that we deem to be important to who we are as a society.”
They announced several “principles for commemoration” which should be viewed in the context of developing an ‘inclusive and accepting society’. They advise that we 1) Start from the historical facts; 2) Recognise the implications and consequences of what happened; 3) Understand that different perceptions and interpretations exist and show how events and activities can deepen understanding of the period.
They suggested, however, that “commemoration can be a mixed bag. On one hand, commemoration can be an enjoyable experience that opens up historical events in a way that makes a personal impact. Commemoration can also promote acknowledgment by pointing to a legacy of the past that still has importance today and can be beneficial to a society, because it has the potential to help develop or renew relationships between opposing groups by working together to bring conflicting views of history together for a shared purpose.
On the other hand, commemoration can also be difficult, divisive, or painful. Many times, commemoration is used to ritualise and harden the boundaries between groups who have been in conflict, which causes further division. Sometimes competing groups try to control the meaning of particular commemorations, and some can feel that the story about certain historical events gets taken over by other groups for their own purposes. Also, commemoration can lead to the forgetting of other dimensions of historical fact that contradict or complicate the agreed story.”
With that advice on commemorations in general, maybe we can apply it to our commemoration of Emancipation in particular. We start with the need for Guyanese to be apprised of the historical facts about Emancipation Day. Do we have a credible accounting of the number of Africans who were shipped into what was then the three colonies of Berbice, Essequibo, and Demerara and enslaved? Do we know the number who died during the Middle Passage across the Atlantic; or the conditions under which they laboured without recompense or the punishment inflicted on them? What is the distinction between earlier forms of slavery and “chattel slavery” that Africans were subjected to? And so on and so forth.
Then there is the recognition of “the implications and consequences of what happened”. The pernicious notion of “race” was invented to justify the enslavement of Africans. For the first time in the history of mankind, it was declared that physical features like skin colour and hair texture determined the intellectual, spiritual, moral, and cultural capabilities of humans.
And lastly, examine how extensively such beliefs may still persist in Guyana and elsewhere. Then we may understand what we are commemorating tomorrow.
