Emancipation Day – Reflections

​Emancipation Day – Reflections

​Alaafia. E ku aaro (Handle the morning).
It’s Emancipation Day! 180 years since the end of chattel slavery in this land.
Time for Celebration; Kamboulay! Freedom!
Emancipation is, for me, a time of Reflection. Somehow, even more so this year.
Perhaps it’s just the sentimentality that comes with the passage of the years.
Or, it is the times and the troubles in the world demanding attention.
Last evening, I spent some time looking once more at the last 3 hours of Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s series - AFRICA'S GREAT CIVILIZATIONS.
In these 3 hours one is taken on a journey from the Swahili Coast to the West Coast and across Africa and over 4 centuries in an examination of history and the evolution of Africa and its encounter with other continents.  
It is a journey from the beginnings of the Portuguese slave trade for its sugar plantations on Sao Tome and Principe and later across the Atlantic to Brazil. The Portuguese occupied those islands in 1493, just about the same time that Spain ‘discovered’ the West Indies. The trans-Atlantic slave trade deprived Africa of 12.5 million of its most precious resource – its young men and women - as the European powers demanded labour for the plantations.
Forward to 1884-5 and the infamous Berlin Conference, where 13 colonial powers of Europe and the United States (having freed itself of British rule 108 years earlier and abolished slavery just 18 years before) decided how they would carve up Africa.
The discovery of gold in the South, the huge mineral wealth, palm oil for lubricating the machines of their industries and rubber for tyres drove the imperial powers to chop up Africa for colonization and annexation without wars among themselves (at least until 1914).
Only Ethiopia (which drove the Italians out) and Liberia remained independent of the colonizers’ control at the start of World War I (a new redivision of the world among the imperialists).
This journey in history was a powerful reminder of how chattel slavery and the plunder of Africa resourced the industrial and military might of the colonizing powers of Europe and the US.
The current contention for global hegemony among the present-day imperial superpowers and the danger of new re-divisions of the globe, including by war is also put in perspective by this recounting of the experience of Africa and the imperial powers just over 100 years ago.
Reflection became a lesson for the present on this Emancipation eve.
If we fail to learn from history, we will surely repeat its disasters, it is said.
Emancipation, the end of chattel slavery, provides the opportunity for all people to examine that history which must not be allowed to be repeated.
It calls on all who love and cherish freedom, to examine the causes of chattel slavery, of the carving up of Africa by oppressing powers and to learn how to prevent it from ever happening again.
Emancipation is a time to look again at Ethiopia, not with romanticism, but clinically to understand how the people of that part of Africa and the globe were able to repel and resist the yoke of colonial conquest.
On this Emancipation Day, let us reflect and prepare for the coming storms to safeguard and strengthen the freedom we celebrate.
Let us all Handle/Control our day and determine our future.
Emancipation is not just a day. It is our future.
 
Clyde Weatherhead
August 1, 2018
 

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