Happy Freedom Day Everybody!
It's a good thing to remember a time when the world sort of came to its senses. Why 'sort of''? Well you may or may not know that when slavery was abolished in Britain it was done so at the convenience of the slave owners who were compensated for their loss of 'assets'. The enslaved people went from being slaves to 'apprentices' and, as we all know, freedom itself came many many years later as being let go didn't quite mean one was free to enjoy the 'pursuit of happiness' given the circumstances.
The jagged and uneven ending of slavery will always leave a slightly bad taste, getting less so the farther away it becomes, being that the injustice has never been punished - indeed the perpetrators were rewarded and the victims remained well, victims. But in these modern times we have moved on a long way from being chattel to being a sovereign nation, governing our own affairs (which might also mean presiding over our own demise), creating a culture of our very own and slowly turning mud into bricks though sometimes we get the process a little mixed up.
We could easily get cynical but we can't argue with the fact that the descendants of enslaved people in the New World are indeed free. That's a very good thing. Not only are we free but some of us have become exceptionally important historical figures for various reasons (think Garvey, Bolt and Marley for example). That's a great thing.
Of course the emancipation has continued to this day, and necessarily so. At one point We were the victims and products of someone else's imagining and perception of the world. Now we are the victims and beneficiaries of our own vision of the world - such is the stuff of liberty. To be sure, our people have particularly vivid imaginations which we employ in astonishing ways on a daily basis with both hurtful and helpful results - known and little known outcomes.
It was my privilege to discover several years ago, that my Grandfather, Arthur HW Williams I, was the first person to conduct a correspondence education course in Jamaica. This he did by regular snail mail, as we call it today. At the ceremony held to mark the accomplishment, an elderly man insisted he say something - quite unscheduled - and he informed the curious gathering that he had benefited from my Grandfather's courses decades before and thanked him face to face for the opportunity afforded him via this education by post. Amazing. Grandpa's son has gone on to become a successful lawyer and followed his father into the political arena (now a Minister of Government) not to mention his other son who is a plastic surgeon working with his sister, an OBGYN, operating a thriving private practice. Grandpa's eldest daughter is a successful and highly placed administrator at the University of the West Indies.
Grandpa is 96 now and still going strong. I can't help but surmise that a few generations before him would take us into slavery, and that he has lived at least half his life under colonial rule and the other half in an independent Jamaica - a country still a few decades younger than himself. I don't know what Grandpa's inner motivations, goals and visions were, but he excelled as a teacher, MP, Speaker of the House and representative of Jamaica at a time when much of what we were to become was still only a figment of our collective imagination. If he could have imagined his own accomplishments into reality, and in some way passed that vision on to his children - then sweet dreams everybody. Sweet dreams.
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