Bajans in London host Commemorative service
On Friday, 1st August, Anglophone Caribbean nations commemorate Emancipation Day, marking the 1834 abolition of slavery in the British Empire and the 1838 abolition of apprenticeship. This system forced formerly enslaved people to continue to work uncompensated for their former masters.
This was celebrated throughout the British Caribbean at chapels, churches and government-sanctioned festivals, some of which were held under the watchful eyes of hundreds of extra troops.
Emancipation was not a gift. The Slavery Abolition Act, which banned slavery in the British colonies, followed a shift in the British Empire’s economic interests and sustained resistance by enslaved people through massive slave revolts, like Bussa’s Rebellion in Barbados, and guerilla warfare, as in the case of Jamaica’s Maroons, including a significant uprising in Demerara in 1823. These instances helped to turn public opinion against slavery.
The planters were appeased by the compensation offer of £20 million (nearly £1 billion in today’s money), not to the formerly enslaved people who had built up the wealth of Britain and its colonies through centuries of unpaid labour, but to their former owners.
Taylor quotes calculations that the compensation offered to some 40,000 slaveholders was worth £350 billion at 2020 values and took 170 years to be completely paid off (being completed in February 2018) by generations of British tax-payers.
This lavish compensation paid to the latter failed to find its way back into developing West Indian island economies. Rather than using these funds to facilitate an effective transition from slavery to free labour, the planters invested them in the British bond and property markets.
A new raft of law-and-order measures had been introduced. Under the new ‘apprenticeships’, newly ‘freed’ people were still expected to remain on the plantations and put in 10-hour days. Absenteeism would result in imprisonment in one of the many new jails (equipped with treadmills) built to contain recalcitrant workers. Additional tiers of ‘special officers’ and stipendiary magistrates were created to police the changes. ‘Apprentices’ could still be flogged without redress, including females.
The apprenticeship scheme would end only in 1838, after the Anti-Slavery Society, following an inspection tour of the West Indian colonies in 1836, produced another barrage of pamphlets and petitions.
Barbados Overseas Communities Friends Association will be hosting a commemorative service at St John the Divine Kennington 92 Vassal Road London SW9 6JAat 3 pm on Thursday, 1st August 2024
