Brian London Performs at the Emancipation 2008 Launch
By Tracy Wilson
Emancipation Support Committee
Event Date: May 25, 2008
Welcome one and all to the launch of Emancipation 2008. Every year around this time, May 25, the Emancipation Support Committee launches its Commemoration of Emancipation in order to inform the public of its program of activities and the theme that will guide it. This year, our theme is "Crossing New Frontiers to Conquer Today's Challenges". The challenges we face as a race today are indeed daunting and if we were a less resilient people or a people less committed to survival, we would long have perished.
We are the descendants of those who chose to survive and our accomplishments over the years truly belie our past and present conditions of physical and psychic battering, cultural imperialism and pseudo universalism.
We have survived in many areas of the world and indeed, some members of our global tribe have strived. We have been engaged in all aspects of the growth of Europe and America as both involuntary participants and willing actors. We provided the civilizational base on which Europe stands. We were and are the source and the sinews through which Western Europe and North America accumulated wealth. And we are among the major players in the North American technological revolution.
We have done these things with little material returns to this global tribe of which we are a part. Indeed, we have done these things at great expense to our psychic health and in the process some of us have become strangers to our selves and aliens to our people's interest. Because we have not profited from our efforts, both physical and intellectual, either as minority groups in the developed nations of Western Europe and North America, or as independent nations in Africa and the Caribbean, our people and the societies in which they live are in disarray. We are now confronted by the new problems of climate change, food scarcity, increases in oil prices, policies of the World Trade Organization and the like. And these have been coupled with the old ones of racism, self hate, migration/brain drain, primary resources exploitation and exportation, poor infrastructure and the like. Thus we need to cross the new frontiers to conquer these problems.
Finding and implementing new solutions will not be easy. Our efforts to control our own destiny have not moved along without intense struggle or tremendous casualities. As independent nations, we have been challenged at every turn with coups and counter-coups, secessionist movements and civil wars, economic dislocation and national destabilization, ethnic and civil violence, and institutional banditry. But there is no shirking our responsibility. Our ancestors, who chose to survive, expect us to push ahead and create the next African Civilization. We dare not disappoint them.
Today, May 25th, is African Liberation Day and it is a day that we celebrate. It was first organized in 1958 as African Freedom Day on the occasion of the First Conference of Independent States held in Ghana and was attended by the then 8 independent countries: Liberia and Ghana, Ethopia, Egypt and Sudan, and Lybia, Tunisia and Morocco. Thus this year marks the 50th anniversary of that historic Conference.
African Freedom Day was celebrated on the 15th of April from 1958 to 1963, and during this period the number of independent states almost quadrupled. Thus when on May 25th 1963, these independent states came together to form the Organization of African Unity, political independence had come to 31 nations in a mere 5 years.
The OAU was formed to focus on the role which States on the African Continent could play to speedily bring an end to colonialism and racialism. Today all the 53 states in Africa are independent but freedom from want, from war, from disease, from famine, from material poverty, from economic dependence and under-development, has not yet been achieved.
In 2001, the OAU was replaced by the African Union and some very positive actions have been taking place including the working out of modalities to give effect to the desire to have the Diaspora as the 6th Region of Africa. Just as the OAU concentrated on the political sphere, the African Union is now concentrating on the economic sphere to give effect to freedom.
Many organizations in the Caribbean and North America celebrated African Liberation Day for many years, however, with the independence of many former colonial territories, the celebrations diminished in participation and content. Several organizations in Trinidad and Tobago continue to observe African Liberation Day and the Emancipation Support Committee is numbered among them.
This year also marks the 170th anniversary of emancipation from chattel slavery by Africans in Trinidad and Tobago, the English speaking Caribbean and elsewhere in the world where Britain had instituted African slavery. You will recall the Proclamation of 1834 which set enslaved Africans free but kept them as unfree apprentices. Our people walked off the plantations in 1838 and that is why we in the Emancipation Support Committee date Emancipation from 1838.
We will celebrate this year's emancipation with all the pomp and pageantry that we can muster and we will of course spend much of our time in the dissemination of information about Africa and Africans, this global tribe whose travails are well known but whose successes are obscured by its inability to tell its own story to itself and the rest of the world.
The Emancipation Support Committee commends you on coming out this evening to mind your business, particularly when at this time there is so much fear for one's personal safety. We welcome all our guests to this new space and particularly those who have journeyed from abroad. We greet you in the languages of our ancestors, Hotep, Habari Gani, Alafia.
Emancipation 2008 Launch in pictures:
www.triniview.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=243535
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